Dolomites Adventure

What follows is the Alta Via 1 without the hut nights. Three stages of the classic Dolomites high route, walked self-guided and end to end, with a hotel at the bottom of each one instead of a bunk room. That is the decision everything else runs on.

Cortina d'Ampezzo holds the first two nights, close enough to Corso Italia to walk it before breakfast. The first day out is a rest day with ten kilometres in the middle of it, up from Passo Tre Croci to Lago di Sorapis, to water a color that looks imagined rather than natural. It does as much work as an acclimatization day as it does as a hike.

Then the route proper. Stage one starts at Lago di Braies and climbs nine hundred and seventy metres through forest until the Sennes plateau opens above the treeline. Stage two runs fifteen kilometres of high pasture inside the Fanes-Sennes-Braies reserve, the limestone amphitheatre widening the whole way, and ends at Capanna Alpina.

Stage three is what the week has been building toward. Eleven kilometres and twelve hundred and eighty metres of climbing, past Rifugio Scotoni and the alpine lake hidden just beyond it, then straight up a scree gully that is loose the whole way. Rifugio Lagazuoi holds the top, and the descent drops through tunnels soldiers cut into the mountain in the First World War. Day six is a circuit past the Cinque Torri to Nuvolau and around by Passo Giau, five pale columns going amber and then rust as the afternoon runs out. Seceda closes it. Nine kilometres along the spine, four hundred metres up and four hundred back down, with the valleys a long way beneath.

The rifugi are still in it, just at lunch rather than lights out. Biella or Sennes on the plateau, Fanes or Lavarella inside the reserve, Scoiattoli after Lagazuoi. You eat where the route eats. Then you come down to Cortina, to San Vigilio, to San Cassiano, to Val Gardena, and sleep at the Ancora, the AMA, the Rosa Alpina, the Gardena Grödnerhof.