The day after our successful afternoon speed mission on the Marino Bianchi route, Colin and I set our sights on the Cesco Tomaselli route up Punta Fanes. We were intrigued by the position of the route in the heart of the Tofana area and also its relatively high difficulty grade. We had originally considered doing the Col Dei Bos via ferrata as our way to access the high plateau near Lagazoui, but the weather looked like it was going to roll in pretty early in the afternoon, so we decided to focus on just the Tomaselli.
We rode the cable car up to the Lagazoui Hut, setting off from there down the busy trail at 10am. The approach wove steeply up towards the route with a switchback just before the saddle where the trail cuts through and the route splits off. We were at the plaque, geared up and starting to move just before 11am.
The very beginning of the route is reasonably steep as it traverses leftwards with a few fun moves before turning up the face and easing off pretty quickly. We enjoyed this bit and hoped that it wouldn’t be the only technical challenge of the route. The next sections were still fun even if easier and eventually brought us to a ledge where our route stayed right. From a prow, the final section of the route steepened back up nicely and we had a lot of fun from here through the summit, climbing as much as we could on the rock and ignoring the cable other than for clipping ourselves in. There’s an especially fun dihedral near the top and then an exposed slab making up the last section of the route.
We topped out at noon, having passed a few parties along the way. There were a couple of other parties enjoying the ambiance up there and we chatted them up for a bit before heading down the descent via ferrata. This route was reasonably steep in places and expeditiously brought us down to a trail on the East side of the peak. From here, it was a bit of loose gully descending until we were back on a well-worn trail. We decided to make a loop of it rather than going back up and over the saddle at the base of the route. This didn’t seem much longer and gave us some new views.
We decided to hike back up to the Lagazoui Hut at the end to enjoy lunch up there and ride the cable car back down. We made it there by 1:30pm, so about 3.5-hours hut to hut. A nice, warm meal with views was a perfect way to cap off the day and we were right to have not pushed our weather window since it started to rain just as we got back to the car.