The Iron Roads of the Dolomites: Climbing WWI Military Routes That Are Still Bolted Into the Mountain

Okay so via ferrata is a thing I keep trying to explain to people and failing. This is because the explanation sounds either terrifying or boring depending on the person, and it is actually neither.

Via ferrata translates from Italian as “iron road.” It describes a climbing route where fixed steel cables, iron rungs, ladders, and bridges are permanently bolted into the rock face. This system allows you to clip in with a harness and move up vertical terrain that would otherwise require serious technical climbing experience. It is not hiking, and it is not rock climbing exactly. Instead, it is somewhere in between: exposed, physically demanding, and genuinely exhilarating in a way that photographs cannot fully communicate.

The via ferrata routes in the Dolomites of northern Italy are something additional. Most of them were built by soldiers during World War I. Some of the iron rungs still bolted into the rock are from 1916. You clip into a cable installed over a hundred years ago. Then, you pull yourself up the same wall that troops moved across to establish mountain positions while the enemy did the same from the other side.

The White War

Italy declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire in May 1915. The border between them ran directly through the Dolomites. Both sides immediately moved to take the high ground, because in mountain warfare, whoever holds the peaks controls everything below them.

The problem was the terrain. The Dolomites are not gentle mountains. They rise vertically in towers and walls of pale limestone and dolomite rock, some faces nearly sheer, many ending in narrow ridges or summits with no natural path to them. Moving troops and supplies up these routes required infrastructure. As a result, both sides drilled into the rock, installed iron rungs and cables, carved tunnels through entire mountainsides, and built supply routes up terrain that would have been impassable otherwise.

The Italians called this front il fronte verticale. The vertical front. It became known as the White War for the snow and ice that defined the conditions. About 150,000 men died in these mountains between 1915 and 1917, when the Austro-Hungarian forces abandoned their Dolomite positions. Some died in combat. Many died in avalanches, exposure, and accidents on the vertical terrain. The bodies of soldiers are still being found today as glaciers recede.

What You Are Actually Climbing

On some routes in the Dolomites, roughly 75 percent of the iron steps are original to the wartime construction. The safety cables have been replaced and the routes are maintained, but the rungs under your hands were hammered in by Italian Alpini or Austro-Hungarian mountain troops during a war that ended over a century ago.

The Marmolada routes follow the Austrian front line along ridges with bunkers, observation posts, and artillery emplacements still intact in the rock. The Lagazuoi tunnel system, carved entirely through the inside of the mountain by Italian forces, is accessible to hikers. It gives you a direct physical sense of what the construction project actually required. In addition, the Via Ferrata delle Trincee, the Trench Route, runs along the original front line and passes through the remains of positions occupied by troops on both sides.

None of this is reconstructed. It is simply what remained when the fighting stopped and the mountains were left to themselves for a few decades before the climbing community found the routes and began maintaining them.