Having survived my first Via Ferrata a couple of days previous but all of us keen to avoid having the mega long walk in we’d had on the Sorapiss, we decided to pick a route which had a short walk in for our next route.
The Col dei Bos route is east out of Cortina on the Falzarego pass and has only a 20 minute walk in from the road. It is grade 3b making it trickier than the previous route we’d done. Before we reached the rock face however, we arrived at the old Italian military hospital, our first indication on our trip that this whole area was on the front line of the Italian and Austrian battles in the First World War. The whole area is an impressive memorial to its history and its amazing how much is still standing.
I have to be honest I did struggle to get up the first section of the via ferrata, let’s face it I’m not good at climbing and while I was struggling to pull myself up the crack on the rock, the via ferrata lanyard I had felt just a bit too short when clipped to the wire which was behind me. So as I climbed upwards the lanyard was pulling me back away from the rock; it was very unnerving.
Beyond this initial section, the route was more straightforward, and while there were sections of climbing there were enough breaks in between to make it manageable. Even for me! It’s a great route with enough tricky bits to be entertaining and fantastic views.
You can take a man out of Yorkshire ….
The via ferrata takes you to the col, the top of the mountain pass, where if the weather was clear we would have had an amazing view of the mountain range. As it was, it was cloudy, so we had a bite to eat and headed back down the horribly long scree slope next to the crag.
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