A Ski Safari Across Italy's Dolomites

26.12.2024 - 15:03 / cntraveler.com / Val Gardena

It's not often that Marika Favé, our impish, fast-talking mountain guide, falls silent. It's a spring morning on the packed, sun-streaked gondola to the peak of the Marmolada glacier, the highest point in the Dolomites. A former national skier for Italy whose family has lived in the Fassa Valley for generations, Favé has been telling Jack, the photographer I'm traveling with, and me about the grimly determined Austro-Hungarian soldiers who dug a small city into the ice up here during the Great War. But as the gondola passes another rocky bluff and great blankets of untouched shadow-draped powder come into view, the war stories cease and a grin spreads across her face. We don't know exactly what the plan is when the gondola clanks to a halt at the Punta Rocca, a viewing platform at 10,700 feet that looks out over all of the Dolomites. But the mountain air seems charged with the palpable sense that, on this exact Thursday morning, something very good is about to happen.

Marika Favé, a former ski racer who now guides and mountain-climbs

Snow dusts the chic exterior of Como Alpina Dolomites, on the Alpe di Siusi plateau in the Val Gardena

It's the fourth morning of a seven-day ski safari across the mountain range, which involves us snowboarding to a new lodging each night—our bags appearing, as if by magic, at a mix of crisp modern hotels with glassy spas and family-run mountain rifugi, or cozy inns, the latter often with a son or a partner overseeing an improbably good locavore kitchen. The trip has been organized by Dolomite Mountains, an innovative and impressive company founded by Argentine Agustina Lagos Marmol and run mainly by a group of warm, no-nonsense women. And I've already fallen hard for the Dolomites, just as everyone who's ever been here promised I would.

I've fallen for the Tolkien-worthy visual drama of its snaggletoothed peaks, crafted over millennia, mostly from the eponymous rock that's lighter in color than the granite and gneiss of so much of the Alps. I have fallen for the mind-boggling spectrum of skiing across the almost 750 miles of slopes in the Dolomiti Superski. But most of all I've fallen for the civilized patchwork of cultures across what is often referred to as the Pale Mountains—from the Italian film stars and glamour of Cortina d'Ampezzo in the east, which is waiting for its Winter Olympic close-up in 2026, to the autonomous western province of South Tyrol, where German is the most spoken language and areas such as Val Gardena, with its woodcarving tradition, feel more Austrian than Italian. It is a region where traditional Italian food and hospitality culture meets Teutonic design and wellness, and agrarian-provenance worship aligns with an increasingly urgent