It was really special to have good friends and their young kids join us for a week during the period of our parental leave trip in Cortina d’Ampezzo. We planned ahead and arranged babysitters for a full day to enable all of the adults to get outside together once. We wanted to do a via ferrata with some real climbing to it but not so committing or long that we’d be pushing our luck with our babysitter window, so the Michielli Strobel sifted to the top of the list.
We met up at the parking lot and started hiking at about 9:15am. It’s a bit of a grunt up to the start of the cable but it went quickly chatting with each other. We were clipped in and moving up the rock just after 10am. The guidebook described the route as being disjointed and we soon came to understand why—it had nice sections of climbing, punctuated by traverses and lower-angle trails connecting them. But there was enough steeper climbing and it was long enough overall to be engaging and fun.
We topped out at noon after stopping along the way at a nice viewpoint for lunch. The initial descent and high traverse to the saddle was enjoyable and then the scree gully was not. It wasn’t quite consistent enough to scree ski and so it felt reasonably painstaking even with poles. But it went and we eventually reached the lower trails that circled back to our starting point.
With enough time, we drove a bit up the road to have lunch at Ristorante Rifugio Ospitale, which was quite delightful and served a stellar pappardelle deer ragù. We enjoyed a few moments of calm with no children before heading back into the fray in Cortina.