Samuele Scalet, good-bye to the alpinist who loved the Pale di San Martino, Dolomites

"Sooner or later I'm always taken in by the desire to return to a great rock face and consume the skin of my hands or spend the night in a bivvy, waiting for dawn." This is what Samuele Scalet said to me a couple of years ago in a interview. Perhaps it was this call into the wild which, Friday morning, made him leave his home in Trento for Rifugio Bindesi di Cima Marzola. He knew this walk well on the mountain which rises just a stone's throw from Trento. But Samuele Scalet never returned from this walk. Two days ago a Mountain Rescue team discovered his body in the forest.

Samuele Scalet never ceased to think about the mountains, not even during these long years of illness. Born in 1940 in Italy's Trentino region, Scalet earned a degree in mathematics, was a teacher, alpinist and extremely talented rock climber (as well Academic of the Italian Alpine Club since 1968) with many beautiful routes in the Pale di San Martino, Dolomites, to his name. Those very mountains which captured his imagination as a young boy "leaving an indelible mark for the rest of my life."

"Without the mountains and my love for them, I wouldn't be here anymore" he told me during that interview, remembering the moment it all began. It was during that summer when, as a 13 year old, he set off in search of his sheep which had got lost on the plateau of the Pale di San Martino. He found them after days of solitary searching. But in the meantime the spark had set the flame: he had caught sight of the inner Pale, falling deeply in love for ever.

Scalet's first new route dates back to August 1959, when he carried out a first ascent on Cima Principale di Manstorna together with another great expert of the Martino area, Aldo Bettega, and Don Sesto Bonetti. This was followed by what he defines as his first mountaineering period, which culminated in 1964 with the first ascent of Via Biasin on the rock face of all rock faces in the Pale, the SE Face of Sass Maor. For many years this beautiful and difficult route was the testing ground for the best climbers in the Dolomites and further afield.

Via Biasin represented the realisation of a long and yearned for dream, but also the loss of his climbing partner, Giancarlo Biasin, who fell to his death during the (easy) descent. That tragedy left deep marks. So deep that Scalet almost gave up climbing altogether.

But his love for those mountains was simply too strong. His second mountaineering spring began in 1993. This season was so beautiful that, in 2001, together with Marco Canteri and Davide Depaoli he carried out the first ascent of the stupendous Masada, a super route, 1260m high, considered by many as one of the most beautiful in the Dolomites. It comes as no surprise that Masada takes a line up the immense SE Face of Saas Maor, the rock face which will for ever remain in his soul and which will talk about Samuele Scalet forever.