Lagazuoi Tunnels and Kaiserjäger Trail

Inside the mountain

The cable car from Passo Falzarego lifts you to 2,752 metres in four minutes. The terrace at the top has one of the widest views in the Dolomites, and most visitors go no further. The interesting part is the tunnel entrance a short walk below the hut.

From there the galleries drop through the mountain in a series of switchbacks cut into solid rock, with openings that were once observation and gun positions and now serve as unnervingly good viewpoints.

Cable car up, tunnels down

The descent through the tunnels loses around six hundred metres and takes an hour to ninety minutes, depending on how much you stop to read. The Kaiserjäger trail outside, on the Austrian supply route, adds another hour and a half if you take that line instead.

The gallery descent, and the Kaiserjäger path

Head down from the hut to the signed gallery entrance and put the torch on before you go in — the transition from bright snow-glare to complete dark is immediate. There are fixed cables in places and the steps are uneven; a helmet is genuinely sensible, and the guides' offices in Cortina rent both.

The tunnels emerge near the base of the wall, and from there a path leads back to the pass. The Kaiserjäger alternative climbs the outside of the same mountain on the old supply track, with cables in the exposed sections and a lot of open air below you.

Windows in the rock

The gun-position openings partway down are the thing. You look out through a hole in the rock at the Tofane and the Marmolada, standing where an Austrian gunner stood, and the view and the history land at the same time. There's a bench at the exit where I've sat longer than I meant to more than once.

Cold, dark, wet underfoot

It's around 4°C in the tunnels all summer, and water drips through in places, so the rock is wet. Ice can persist inside into July. Outside, the Kaiserjäger route is fully exposed and closed by snow well into June some years.

A working headtorch and a spare set of batteries are not optional. Phone torches die fast in the cold and leave you with no light and no map.

What stays with you

What gets me every time isn't the engineering, impressive as it is. It's the small stuff — the chisel marks, the niches cut for lamps, the graffiti. Somebody spent a winter down here doing that by hand at altitude while being shot at. You come out into the light slightly quieter than you went in.

Shooting in the dark

Inside, forget handheld. Brace against the wall, shoot the tunnel mouths as silhouettes against the bright outside and let the interior go black — fighting that contrast never works. Outside, the terrace at the top station is best at the end of the day when the Marmolada catches the last light.

Staying outside

Not everyone wants to be inside a mountain. The ridge walks from the top station, and the path down to Rifugio Scotoni and the Lagazuoi lake, keep you outdoors with almost as much history in the landscape around you.

A mountain mined from both sides

Lagazuoi was fought over for the length of the First World War, with Austro-Hungarian and Italian sappers digging competing tunnel systems and detonating mines beneath each other's positions between 1915 and 1917; the galleries open to walkers today follow the Austrian side of that excavation.

Descend, don't ascend

Walking the tunnels downhill keeps the 700-metre descent manageable even for unfit knees, while the uphill direction is a genuine lung-buster in poorly ventilated dark — nearly every local guide routes clients top to bottom for this reason alone.