Passo San Pellegrino → Rifugio Mulaz

You begin the day on the broad green saddle of Passo San Pellegrino, at roughly 1,918 metres, a working ski pass that carries the road between Moena in the Val di Fassa and Falcade in the Veneto. It is one of the great frontier passes of the Dolomites: it marks the boundary between the autonomous province of Trentino and the province of Belluno, with the long crest of the Costabella rising to the south and the gentler dome of Col Margherita to the north. The name carries real history. It comes from the Pellegrini, the religious order who, in the second half of the 1300s, established a hospice here to shelter pilgrims and travellers crossing the high col in bad weather; that hospice eventually became a hotel, and the tradition of feeding and sheltering strangers on this windswept saddle has, in a sense, never stopped.

Geologically you are standing in a soft, grassy gap between two very different worlds. Behind and around the pass the slopes are largely volcanic and sedimentary, cloaked in pasture and larch, but ahead lie the pale dolomite walls that give the whole range its name. That pale rock is the fossilised remains of Triassic coral reefs and lagoons that grew in a warm, shallow tropical sea called the Tethys some 250 million years ago, later buried, chemically altered into dolomite, and finally heaved skyward when the African and European plates collided. The Dolomites' nine mountain systems were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009 for exactly this geological storytelling, and over the coming hours you will walk straight toward one of the most spectacular chapters of it.

After climbing through forest past the little tarn of Lago di Cavia and over the grassy Forcella di Pradazzo, you cross the road at Passo Valles, where Rifugio Passo Valles sits squarely on the saddle at about 2,032 metres. The pass is a true watershed and a true border: it separates the great dolomite bulk of the Pala Group to the south from the dark, porphyritic (volcanic) range of Cima Bocche to the north, and it links the Val di Fassa side with the Biois and Primiero valleys of the Veneto. The contrast underfoot is striking, the reddish volcanic rock and rolling pasture of Cima Bocche on one hand, the pale vertical limestone of the Pale beginning to loom on the other.

This is the recognised lunch stop of the day, and a well-earned one. The hut is a sturdy, friendly, road-accessible refuge, the natural place to refuel and gather yourself before the rougher, longer, and much more committing second half of the stage toward the Mulaz shelf. After Passo Valles there is no further shelter and no easy escape until you reach the high terrace at Rifugio Volpi al Mulaz, so this is the moment to eat properly, top up every water bottle, and check the weather, because the afternoon traverse runs across exposed, high ground where an electrical storm would be no joke.

Beyond Passo Valles the route swings onto the high traverse (trail 751) and onto open ground, and the panorama that will define the rest of your trek finally opens all at once. Across the green trough of Val Venegia rises the entire northern rampart of the Pale di San Martino, and it is worth pausing to grasp the scale of what you are seeing. The Pala Group is the largest mountain group in all of the Dolomites, covering some 240 square kilometres between eastern Trentino and the Belluno Veneto. At its heart, hidden behind these peaks, lies one of the most extraordinary landscapes in the Alps: a high rock plateau of roughly 50 square kilometres, an almost lunar desert of bare, pale dolomite undulating between about 2,500 and 2,800 metres, ringed by the spires you are now looking at.

The wall in front of you is built from the pale dolomite rock that gives the whole range its name and its luminous, ghostly colour at dawn and dusk, hence the old local name for these mountains, the Monti Pallidi, the Pale Mountains. That rock began as a Triassic coral reef and carbonate platform in the warm, shallow Tethys Sea some 240 million years ago; buried, chemically transformed into dolomite through the circulation of magnesium-rich waters (a process geologists call dolomitization), and finally thrust thousands of metres into the sky by the collision of the African and European plates. Its sheer hardness is exactly why it erodes into these vertical walls and jagged towers rather than smooth slopes, and why UNESCO inscribed the Dolomites as a World Heritage Site in 2009.

The high route now traverses the grassy crests on the western flank of Val Venegia, crossing the gentle notches of Forcella Venegia at around 2,212 metres and Forcella Venegiotta (Passo di Venegiòta) at about 2,299 metres. The walking here is still kind, climbing along the slopes beneath the pyramidal Cima Valles on open alpine pasture, with the great dolomite wall as a constant companion to your right. These soft, rolling forcelle are the last easy, pastoral ground of the day before the trail tips into the stonier, steeper approach to the Mulaz shelf.

Below to the right the famous green sweep of Val Venegia falls away, and it is one of the most beloved corners of the Dolomites. This is a glacial valley, carved and smoothed by ancient ice, and its broad meadows and grazing cattle run straight toward the foot of the Pale, giving the head of the valley its picture-perfect contrast of emerald grass against pale vertical rock. Through it threads the infant Travignolo stream, fed by the small Travignolo glacier glinting in its cirque between Cimon della Pala and Vezzana high above. The malghe (working dairy huts) of Venegia and Venegiota below still graze cattle and make cheese here through the short alpine summer.

Dominating the traverse is Cimon della Pala, the slender 3,184-metre fang long celebrated as the Matterhorn of the Dolomites, il Cervino delle Dolomiti, a comparison popularised by the pioneering English alpinist and writer John Ball for its sharp, isolated, instantly recognisable profile. It is by far the best-known summit of the Pale di San Martino group, and the postcard symbol of the entire range. Curiously, it is not actually the highest peak of the group; its near neighbour Cima Vezzana edges it out at 3,192 metres. But Vezzana is a broad-shouldered bulk, while Cimon della Pala tapers to a needle, and from almost every angle the slimmer Cimon looks the taller and grander of the two. From the ridge above Val Venegia it stands very nearly alone against the sky, a clean pale spire that the eye returns to again and again.

The peak's first ascent is a classic of Dolomite mountaineering. On 3 June 1870 the Englishman Edward Robson Whitwell, with the guides Santo Siorpaes of Cortina d'Ampezzo and Christian Lauener of Lauterbrunnen in the Swiss Bernese Oberland, reached the summit. Earlier attempts had been turned back by a sheer wall on the southern side; Whitwell's insight was to swing around and attack from the north, climbing the steep ice of the Travignolo glacier, the same cirque of remnant ice you can see tucked between Cimon della Pala and Vezzana. The modern normal route is a serious mountaineering objective for experienced climbers, reached via the Bolver-Lugli via ferrata to the Fiamme Gialle bivouac at around 3,005 metres and then up cabled and laddered rock to the top, well beyond the line of the Alta Via.

The final pull is the genuine work of the day. From the high traverse the trail (signpost 751) climbs toward Passo del Mulàz, and the last stretch onto the Mulaz shelf is a steeper, stonier, sometimes loose scramble protected in places by fixed cables, the short Ferrata del Canalino al Mulaz, threaded up a gully through the more exposed rock just below the pass. This is not a full, sustained via ferrata, the wires are intermittent and a harness is not strictly required, but they are genuinely welcome on tired legs and useful handholds where the ground is steep and the rock can be greasy. Take it steadily, mind loose stone underfoot and any walkers below you, and you will top out at Passo del Mulàz (about 2,619 m) with the hut just a few minutes' descent beyond.

The reward is Rifugio Giuseppe Volpi al Mulaz, perched at about 2,571 metres on a high open terrace at the head of the wild Val Focobon, directly beneath the dark pyramid of Monte Mulaz and ringed by the pale spires of the northern Pale. It is a historic refuge with real pedigree. It was built in 1907 on the initiative of the Venice section of the Italian Alpine Club (CAI Venezia), constructed by the local builder Emanuele Murer with land and timber granted by the municipality of Falcade, and inaugurated on 10 September 1907; for the occasion neighbouring Trentino villagers built the approach path from Passo Rolle. The hut is dedicated to Giuseppe Volpi (1877-1947), Count of Misurata, the Venetian industrialist and statesman who founded the Adriatic electricity company SADE and the great industrial port of Marghera; his family funded the hut's enlargement and renovation in 1959-1960.