The Dolomites

Delagokante (III, 5.6),Winkler Crack (5.7) — Vajolet Towers, The Dolomites, Italy

The Dolomites is a magical land of big mountains, steep faces, and exposed climbing. Textured grey and tan limestone yields climbing of an unmistakable European variety, facey and delicate, protected by pitons or small cams or not at all, and completely without hand cracks. Add in a network of huts dotting the remote alpine valleys to keep approaches civilized and meals full-service, and you get the picture: a veritable paradise of alpine rock climbing.

In early July, my wife Elaine and I visited this paradise, to experience the magic firsthand. Our goal was the Vajolet Towers, a trifecta of spires reminiscent of desert towers, except more jagged in construction and transplanted above tree line. During our trip we climbed classic, historic routes, reaching two iconic summits.

The first route we climbed was called the Delagokante, a striking line up the arete of the left-most tower as viewed from the hut. We climbed the tower in four or five pitches, with the middle part of the route being the most memorable; perched on those pitches, situated exactly on the arete, we could lean left and stare down at the greater massif dropping away five hundred vertical meters to the valley bottom.

Also memorable was the museum-quality piton assortment we encountered – to me it was like a puzzle of climbing anthropology: who placed, when, and how much (or how little) force would rip it out?

The summit felt like a desert tower, scenic and exposed, and with just enough room to sit down for our cheese and salami picnic. A handful of single-rope raps deposited us at the base where we collected our approach shoes and sauntered a short thirty minutes back to the hut.

That night, we stayed up late chatting with the hut guardians who shared life stories and homemade brandy flavored with a local variety of wild anise. Our hosts at the Rifugio Alberto (which I highly recommend!), were Ladin, they explained, a people that for centuries have lived in the surrounding alpine valleys bordering Italy and Austria, speaking a dialect limited to their isolated geography. Learning about the local culture and climbing history made me feel like we were traveling – climbing – through time, clipping those same pitons and making those same moves as climbers from decades past.

Storms saturated the night, dropping enough rain to fill the hut’s depleted backyard reservoir, and I was certain we wouldn’t be able to climb the next day due to wet rock and ice. But after a leisurely breakfast in the hut Elaine and I packed our bags intent on checking out conditions. Our lazy morning start paid off: by late morning the mountain wind had dried the rock so we could climb.

The Winkler Crack was our route, a five-pitch affair beginning in the chimney between the middle and right-most towers before traversing out right onto the namesake Winkler Tower and finishing on its coffee table-sized summit. The route was first climbed in 1887 by a daring local sixteen-year-old in stiff leather boots, on-sight and free-solo (who, to get off after reaching the summit simply reversed the entire route sans rope) –  a thought that went through my head more than once as I was leading up vertical 5.7 more than happily equipped with sticky rubber and a belay.

The views from the summit, when we could get them between lasting storm clouds, were of valley after valley after valley, highlighting the expanse of the climbing the Dolomites contain. When I visit an area new to me – and especially one that lives up to my internal hype, like the Dolomites did  – I’m helpless against thinking of future, generally bigger climbs I want to do; as I was belaying Elaine up, head literally in the clouds, I was content with our success and dreaming of future trips to the range . After rapping off and spending one last night at the hut, we bid adieu to our hut guardians-turned-friends and walked down in a light drizzle into the valley below.