Rifugio Prato Piazza to Rifugio Biella (Croda del Becco), Day 15, July 16, 2026, Thursday
We had a delicious breakfast with some Greek yogurt and muesli, which had not been available the day before. Rifugio Locatelli seemed to be the most hard-core of the Refugios we stayed in. Their breakfast consisted of white bread, sliced cheese and ham, and butter and jam. I had four small pieces of baguette slices with butter and jamā¦ I donāt know why they think thatās sufficient fuel for all of the rock climbing that goes on there. However, they are way more limited in their supplies than other huts because there is no road nearby. They had one of those little off road, all-terrain golf carts, but they also had a helipad in the front yard, which is probably how they got most of their deliveries. After we left Locatelli every time we saw a helicopter, we joked that it was delivering cheese to rifugio Locatelli.
Anyway, all of that to say the breakfast was much better at Prato Piazza. We fueled up and began another ascent. There was an initial road block, but we were able to navigate it deftly.
This was an interesting hike, a lot of ups and downs, the landscape was a little bit more open, but not totally rocky. It was beautiful. One of the highlights was this orange area of landslide that apparently used to be the mountain until a massive chunk of the mountain broke off and fell, which resulted in this orange, Mars-looking like situation.
We stopped at a very funky little hut for lunch, Rossalm, and ended up sitting with our friends the German girls, because there were no tables and they offered to share. After lots of cheese and bread, we continued on a pretty steep ascent up the backside of Croda Del Becco or Seekoftel. The dolomites is in an autonomous region of Italy called South Tyrol. Tyrol predates the current borders between Germany, Italy, and Austria, established in the 1100s. Itās interesting because everything has a German name and an Italian name. Itās one of the few places in Europe where the second language is not English. If a sign is written in 3 languages, the third is English, but in many places, things are written only in Italian and German.
After an extremely steep climb through a ton of scree, we ended up at Rifugio Biella. This was a very tiny and very old square stone house that was pretty spare. There was an entire eighth grade tour from America staying there as well, which was kind of funny. Listening to 15 high schoolers hyped up on travel is enough to break your brain. I spent the afternoon outside reading in the sun, but also sort of listening to them because they were pretty funny trying to play Imposter.
We chatted with a couple of the girls in our room there, one who lived in Madrid and was hiking the Alta Via 1 on her own, and the other who lives in French Canada and was RUNNING the Alta Via in four days. FOUR DAYS. 30 km per day, probably 6000 feet of ascent/descent. Wow.
This was the last night and we were feeling appropriately tired, smelly, and sad. At this point, I was kind of ready to be done, but kinda never wanted to leave those mountains.
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