As one of the towering peaks making Cortina d’Ampezzo feel like a mountain amphitheater, Tofana di Mezzo is a natural objective. A casual cable car descent and a long via ferrata route to the top make it even more enticing. With one full day to get out together sans kiddos, Eric, Owen, and I quickly chose it as our objective.

We parked at Piè Tofana and took one of the first chairlifts that morning at about 8:45am up to Duca d’Aosta. With the next chairlift section closed, we hiked up the steep gravel road to the Pomedes Hut, where we stopped for a brief moment to take in the views. We could see a bunch of other parties heading for the route and assumed it would be a day spent enjoying the route more than pushing the pace.

The route starts out with fun moves right away and maintains a surprising ratio of actual climbing and scrambling to walking throughout. The more we ignored the cable and stemples for our hands and feet, the more fun we had.

We gained the summit at 1:15pm and took in the views before hiking down to the cable car. We rode down to the Ra Valles midstation and stopped for lunch with views here before descending to Col Druscié and hiking a brief ways over to our car at Piè Tofana, making it back in time to relieve our babysitters!