Punta Anna and Tofana di Mezzo Via Ferrata

July 10, 2025

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!

Via Ferrata Michielli Strobel

July 9, 2025

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.

Tridentina al Pisciadù Via Ferrata

July 3, 2025

After some searching for top via ferrata routes near Ortisei, the Tridentina al Pisciadù quickly surfaced as a relatively accessible, technical, and fun route to take on. Logistics during our parental leave trip were a bit tricky to juggle two young kiddos, so my wife and I hatched a plan where, on our travel day from Ortisei to Cortina, after getting the car packed and ready, I’d take a bus to the trailhead, do the route, and get picked up by her on the way. This required me to make sure I was done and ready to roll at about 2pm and it also set my starting time with the only direct bus reaching the trailhead at about 9am. Game on.

I jogged the access trail to the first section, quickly ascending this reasonably steep initial ramp. From here, I ran the trail to the base of the proper route, passing a number of parties on their way. I had a moment of confusion when I reached the wall given that the guidebook said the route started just left of the waterfall, but that beta was wrong and sent me down a short, loose gully for a moment before I realized my error. Back on the main route, I had a lot of fun moving fast with relatively few parties ahead of me for a good ways.

After cresting this long middle section, I came up on a guided party who let me pass but then hit a big traffic jam of parties going up the final, steepest section. It didn’t make sense to try to pass, so I just settled in and chatted up a family from Colorado who were climbing with their three teenagers—pretty cool! This steep section was some of the more sustained and technical via ferrata climbing I’d done but the existence of the cable and stemples made it feel very casual.

At the bridge marking the end of the route and spanning a really cool sharp chasm, I checked the time at 10:40am, which seemed like I should be able to press on to the Cima Pisciadù and still make it back to the trailhead by 2pm. I jogged up to the hut and then up the trail to the high pass. I’d been expecting a bit more via ferrata to the summit but only found 3rd class scrambling—perhaps I missed the more technical option. It was reasonably fun regardless and I was on the top just shy of 11:30am.

The descent was pretty straightforward, with only a moment of pause when I ran into a sign suggesting that the standard descent route was closed, but there were parties ascending it who had made it from the bottom, so I was confident enough to head down. After a lot of loose descending and increasingly tired knees, I made it back to the trailhead at 1pm—enough time to lay down in the grass and have a snack before my wife drove by and picked me up. Really fun route and great feeling to move so fast on technical terrain in the gorgeous Dolomites!