Dolomites – North Italy

🏃‍♀️ The starting point of our trekking –  Palaronda Trek – was in San Martino di Castrozza. This is a very known village to start a hike in the dolomites for one, two, three or multiple days. As we had a tight schedule – we had 3 full days to do a trek. I searched before hand on the internet information about the treks in the dolomites this for three days. In general no trek was only 3 days but we decided to do the 4 days trek in 3 days as it looked possible to do in terms of distance and altimeters. As we are medium experienced hikers and go for a hike now and then we didn´t saw any big problems coming up here. Next to deciding which trek to hike, I also made a reservation for the Refugio´s. I really advice to do that because you don´t have many options in the mountains to have an overnight stay ( only the Refugio´s) and in the high season they are very occupied so make sure to make a reservation there upfront. I made the reservations in april – our roadtrip was in july. You can just search the Refugio´s name on google and you will land on their website. There you have the contact information in order to send them an e-mail and make the reservation. If you don´t receive an answer – call them in order to be sure that you have an overnight stay. 

⛺️ When we arrived in San Martino di Castrozza we decided to search a camping close the starting point. As there are not that many camping it can be a help to book one in front but we didn´t and were able to stay at a camping 10 minutes drive from our starting point. Camping Calavise is definitely a good camping but very basic. You get the typical image of a camping there – old, with trailers and old (nice) people living there – but in general no big remarks. The camping also consist of a great restaurants where you can drink aperol´s, order some food and also have breakfast if you want. Because we drove from Belgium to the Dolomites without any overnight stay we arrived at the camping in the afternoon and got some sleep in order to be fit and full of energy to start hiking the day after. We woke up early in the morning (5 am) as the predicted weather circumstances were not ideal. We wanted to start earlier in order to arrive at our first Refugio before it would start raining in the afternoon. 

🏃‍♀️ Eventually we started hiking at 6AM, we parked our car at a cable car point where there was surveilance during the day and night and were able to park there for free. ( just go inside and aks if they can keep an eye on the car + give your nummer plate license and telephone nummer in case of emergency – but in general a very safe area with just tourist traffic to do the hikes. The first part of the hike was fairly tough and steep. Since at that point we couldn’t quite estimate how fast we would step & we were forced to arrive best before the rain we stepped well ahead. ( you can also chose to take the cable cars for the first part as it is quit tough but than you also need to wait until 9 am when they open ). By 10AM we had already ascended nicely and took some time to get the drone out and take some nice images of the viewpoint.