Rifugio Boz → Croce d'Aune

After leaving Rifugio Boz and climbing to the Passo della Finestra (1,776 m) — the "Window Pass," so named because it frames a clean notch through the ridge — the trail tightens against the limestone flank of the Sasso di Scarnia. This is the single most exposed passage of the entire Alta Via 2, and many walkers remember it as the crux of the whole thirteen-stage crossing. The name belongs to the rocky tooth ("sasso" simply means stone or rock in Italian) that the path is forced to traverse rather than go around, on a route that has followed CAI trail 801 all the way from the Pale di San Martino.

The difficult ground comes in two named acts. First is the "Scarnion," the point where the path swings onto the steep eastern slopes of the peak and the trail narrows to a ledge cut into the rock, with the valley dropping away beneath your boots. Then comes the "Scalette" — "the little stairs" — a brief aerial rib, overhanging on both sides, finished by a set of roughly ten steps that were hewn straight into the stone with a pickaxe by the trail's builders. Short stretches of fixed steel cable are bolted to the rock to steady you across the most awkward slabs.

Below the rock teeth of the Sasso di Scarnia the route relents, easing onto the broad grassy shoulders beneath Monte Ramezza (around 2,250 m). Here the trail picks up the line of an old military road — one of many engineered into these mountains in the era of the First World War, when the front ran through the eastern Dolomites and the army needed mule tracks to move men and supplies across high, broken ground. The gentler gradient is the first chance in hours to lift your eyes from your feet and simply walk, taking in the sweep of the range as the limestone gives way to flowered turf.

These slopes sit inside the Parco Nazionale delle Dolomiti Bellunesi, the national park established in 1990 that protects the southernmost ramparts of the Dolomites, and they are one of the botanical glories of the whole UNESCO World Heritage massif. The numbers are genuinely extraordinary: surveys of the Vette Feltrine have recorded well over a thousand vascular plant species within a single small quadrant, and the wider park flora runs to roughly 1,400 species — on the order of a quarter of the entire flora of Italy, packed into one compact mountain group.

Beyond the Passo di Pietena the trail crosses the Busa delle Vette, a vast grassy hollow ringed by the summits of the western Vette Feltrine. "Busa" is the local word for a basin or hollow, and this one is so rich in life that it has earned a second, lovelier name: the Busa delle Meraviglie, the "Basin of Wonders." Stand in the middle of it and you are inside a natural amphitheatre, the high peaks curving around you and the floor rolling away in waves of turf — a place that rewards an unhurried crossing and, in the early morning, often a sighting of chamois or mouflon moving across the grass.

The shape of the place is written by ice and water. During the last glaciation, small glaciers gouged a series of suspended cirques into the upper Vette, leaving rounded, over-deepened basins hanging high above the valleys. After the ice retreated, rain and snowmelt went to work on the soluble limestone, dissolving and sculpting the rock from within — a process geologists call karst. The Busa is a textbook "glacial-karst basin," its floor over-excavated by this chemical corrosion and pocked with the dolines and limestone pavements typical of karst country.

Out of the Busa and over the Passo delle Vette Grandi, the broad grassy saddle that gives onto the southern edge of the range, the last hut of the Alta Via 2 finally comes into view: Rifugio Giorgio Dal Piaz, sitting at 1,993 m in the locality of Cesta with the whole crossing of the Vette Feltrine laid out behind it. After the strain of the Scarnia traverse, its sunny terrace is the natural place to stop, drop the pack, and order a strong espresso or a cappuccino with the Veneto foothills shimmering far below.

The hut carries the name of Giorgio Dal Piaz (1872–1962), a geologist and palaeontologist born in Feltre, the town visible down in the plain. Dal Piaz became professor of geology at the University of Padua, where he made his name studying the stratigraphy of the Feltrine Alps — these very mountains — and the slow isostatic uplift of the Venetian Prealps; his fossil collections are still held at Padua. It was his idea, back in the 1930s, that there should one day be a refuge up here in the range he had spent a career reading like a book.

The Dal Piaz is the classic lunch halt before the final plunge to the valley — the natural place to linger and mark the moment, because once you leave this terrace the high route is effectively over and only the long descent to the road remains. After eleven days and the airy crux of the Scarnia, it is a fitting last alpine table at which to celebrate having crossed the Dolomites from north to south.

Expect honest, hearty mountain-hut fare of the kind these refuges do so well. Polenta is the cornerstone of cooking in the Belluno Dolomites — the slow-cooked cornmeal that for centuries was the staple food of these valleys — and it turns up here alongside warming soups, local cheeses, cured meats, and the simple plates of pasta that fuel walkers back onto the trail. It is filling, regional, and exactly what a body wants after a hard morning on rock.

From Rifugio Dal Piaz the Alta Via 2 makes its final descent, dropping off the high grassy slopes onto a beautifully preserved old military mule road that switchbacks down the limestone flank in wide, panoramic curves. Built for the army to haul supplies up to the high ground, the track threads through steep terrain and into thick beech forest as it loses altitude, the open alpine world giving way to dappled woodland. These slopes are so rich in plant life that the descent has earned the nickname of "an authentic garden," a last botanical flourish to send you off the mountain.

The path delivers you to the Passo Croce d'Aune, a small saddle at just over 1,000 m between Monte Avena to the south and the Vette Feltrine behind you, where a hamlet of only a few dozen residents serves walkers and skiers. This is the southern terminus of the Alta Via 2: after roughly 160 km and thirteen demanding stages from Bressanone (Brixen) in South Tyrol, crossing the Puez-Odle, the Pale di San Martino and the Vette Feltrine, the great "High Route of Legends" comes to its quiet end here, a short ride above the walled Renaissance town of Feltre.