The war abruptly interrupted the first chapter in the story of the Scoiattoli, founded in Cortina only in 1939, but it did not put an end to their passion for climbing. Those wartime experiences would play an important part in the development of post-war mountaineering in Cortina.
Many of them were little more than boys when they were called up for military service. The familiar walls around Cortina inevitably receded into the background, yet the war also took some of them far beyond the Dolomites and, paradoxically, gave them opportunities to discover new mountains and unfamiliar terrain.
Several Scoiattoli were sent to military alpine schools and found themselves climbing in the Western Alps, in an environment very different from Cortina. Alongside rock faces there were now great glaciers, snow, ice and mixed terrain. In 1943 some of them completed significant climbs outside the Dolomites: Romano Apollonio on the Gran Zebrù, Luigi Ghedina with Ettore Castiglioni in the Gran Paradiso group, Carlo Alverà on the Dent d’Hérens, and Silvio Alverà, Giuseppe Ghedina and Siro Dandrea on the Grandes Murailles. These experiences would prove important in their development as mountaineers.
Meanwhile, the effects of the war were being felt ever more directly in Cortina. After 8 September 1943, the border of the Reich was moved to Dogana Vecchia, between Cortina and San Vito, and some young men from the Ampezzo valley were forced to wear German uniform. Some managed to escape, while others fled to Switzerland. Albino Alverà “Boni”, setting out from a military school in Limone Piemonte, took twelve days to make his way back to Cortina; other Scoiattoli managed to cross from Cervinia to Zermatt, where they were interned.
Yet even during those years climbing never stopped completely. Between one call-up and the next, whenever an opportunity arose, someone would return to the walls. It was against this almost surreal background that one of the routes destined to become a symbol of Dolomite mountaineering was born.
The Pilastro
The South Pillar of the Tofana di Rozes rises like a huge independent structure leaning against the mountain. Its face is about six hundred metres high, grey and compact in the lower section, yellow and much steeper in the centre. A line of cracks seemed to suggest a possible route, but several previous attempts had already been turned back.
Among those who continued to think about it was Ettore Costantini “Vecio”, one of the founders of the Scoiattoli. In 1943 he had already made a first attempt with Igi Menardi on the first sixty metres of the face. He later returned with Ugo Samaja “Suplein” and Armando Apollonio, climbing the gully to the right of the Pilastro to study the possibility of tackling its upper section. A violent thunderstorm forced them to retreat.
During the war it was difficult even to find an available climbing partner: many of his friends were serving in the armed forces, while Costantini, exempted from military service because of the consequences of an accident he had suffered as a child, was one of the few able to continue climbing with some regularity.
In July 1944 Romano Apollonio “Nano” returned to Cortina on leave. Costantini persuaded him to attempt the Pilastro, and at dawn on 13 July the two set off with heavy packs and the equipment of the time: hemp ropes, pitons, carabiners and aid ladders. They could not have known that the next two days would become part of the history of Dolomite climbing.
The lower part of the face offered fairly sound rock and elegant climbing. Beyond the first ledge, however, came the decisive section between the two ledges, where two roofs barred the way. Costantini led the entire route. Beneath the first roof he advanced slowly, searching the rock for placements where his pitons might provide at least a reasonable degree of security. The roof projected for about two metres and demanded climbing of extraordinary difficulty given the equipment and knowledge of the time. After hours of work he managed to overcome it and reach the second roof, which proved somewhat easier.
Night caught them still on the face. They prepared a precarious bivouac and waited for dawn. The difficulties continued the following day, while their equipment began to run short. At one point Costantini could find no crack in which to place a piton. Instead, he wedged a stone into the rock, looped a sling around it and hung an aid ladder from the sling.
Beyond the second ledge came another passage that would become famous, the Schiena di Mulo. This was not the section with the two roofs, but a chimney, initially deep, that gradually became steeper and more strenuous. Protection was extremely scarce here too. Costantini later recalled using stones wedged into the crack and secured with slings because he could find nowhere to place pitons.
At two o’clock in the afternoon on 14 July, the two finally reached the top of the Pilastro.
Costantini had led the entire route. Many years later, when asked what he remembered most vividly from those two days, he did not speak about individual moves, the roofs or the achievement itself. His answer was simply: “The commitment. The continuous commitment.”
He also said that he had lost five kilos during the two days on the face and still could not understand how he had managed to overcome some of the passages. At times, he recalled, the concentration and exhaustion had left him almost beside himself.
The Costantini-Apollonio would become one of the great classic routes of the Dolomites. Many years later, with the revival of free climbing and improvements in technique and equipment, climbers discovered that the entire route could be climbed free, with difficulties reaching upper UIAA VII. This helped reveal just how modern the approach of the first ascensionists had been: although they used pitons and aid ladders where the limits of their time seemed impossible to overcome, they continually sought to climb the rock itself rather than construct an artificial sequence of points from which to progress.
Costantini never resented seeing later generations free-climb passages that he had overcome using aid. On the contrary, he said he was happy whenever someone repeated his route. He knew that there was little point in comparing different eras: in the meantime the route had been cleared of unstable rock, equipped, thoroughly documented and climbed by hundreds of mountaineers.
I have a particular connection with this route myself: on 4 August 1982, at the age of twenty-one, I climbed it solo. I described that experience in the article The call of the Pilastro.
That ascent, completed in the midst of the war, seems almost to bring the first chapter in the history of the Scoiattoli to a close. A few months later the conflict would finally end, and a completely new era would begin in the Dolomites.
The post-war revival
The end of the war brought the Scoiattoli back to their mountains, and mountaineering in post-war Cortina revived with remarkable speed. As early as 1946, while the return to mountaineering was still slow and uncertain in many parts of the Alps, Cortina entered a particularly active period. Albino Alverà “Boni” and Ugo Pompanin “Baa” opened the Primo and Terzo Spigolo on the Tofana di Rozes, two routes whose appeal lay not in extreme difficulty but above all in the quality of the climbing, the line and the setting. In the same year Ettore Costantini and Luigi Ghedina made the first repeat of the Comici-Mazzorana on the Cima Piccola di Lavaredo and, at the end of September, opened a new route on the edge of the Pilastro di Rozes.
During these same years a younger generation began to emerge. Among the new Scoiattoli was Lino Lacedelli, who quickly became one of the strongest members of the group and formed a particularly effective partnership with Luigi Ghedina. In 1950 they climbed the Costantini-Apollonio on the Pilastro di Rozes in a single day and, a few weeks later, made the first repeat without a bivouac of the Soldà-Conforto on the south face of the Marmolada. Repeating the great routes of the day was not simply a prestigious achievement: it was also a way of measuring themselves against the hardest climbs of the period and discovering the limits of their own ability.
From the Dolomites to the Western Alps
In the mountaineering world of those years there was still a fairly clear distinction between the rock climbers of the Dolomites and the mountaineers of the Western Alps. The former had grown up on relatively small mountains, almost entirely without glaciers, where rock climbing had reached an extremely high technical level. On Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa and the other great western massifs, however, high altitude, large glaciers, snow, ice and mixed terrain all came into play. There was even a certain condescension towards the Dolomite climbers, whom some dismissively described as “climbers of roadside bollards”.
The reality, of course, was far less simple. Almost forty years earlier, a guide from Cortina had already demonstrated how little such labels meant. In the summer of 1913 Angelo Dibona, together with Guido Mayer, spent more than two months in the Dauphiné and the Mont Blanc massif, tackling major climbs on rock, snow, ice and high-mountain terrain. During that season he made the first ascent of the Pain de Sucre of the Aiguilles du Soreiller, the elegant spire that would later become known as the Aiguille Dibona, and opened new routes in the Mont Blanc massif as well. I have written in more detail about that extraordinary season in the article Angelo Dibona and the age of modern climbing.
Dibona, however, still belonged to the great era of the professional mountain guides.
After the war, it was young men who had grown up climbing on the walls around Cortina who renewed that encounter with the mountains of the west.
For them, this meant leaving familiar terrain and entering an environment very different from the Dolomites. This is why the Scoiattoli’s experience on ice and mixed ground is also particularly significant: it showed that they were far more than specialists on rock.
In 1951 Lacedelli and Ghedina took this challenge directly onto the granite of Mont Blanc.
The east face of the Grand Capucin had been climbed only a few weeks earlier by Walter Bonatti and Luciano Ghigo and was one of the outstanding mountaineering achievements of the time. The two climbers from Cortina had very little experience on granite.
Ghedina later recalled that until then they had known practically nothing about that kind of rock; nevertheless, they decided to attempt the first repeat.
On 18 August they started up the face and climbed rapidly. After 18 hours of climbing they reached a point about 30 metres below the summit, where they bivouacked before completing the ascent the following day. It was the first repeat of the Bonatti-Ghigo route. In Ghedina’s personal album, the climb is recorded in just a few words that also say a great deal about the way the partnership worked: “Lino – Bibi, alternating the lead.” The two took turns at the front of the rope rather than having a fixed leader.
Scoiattoli di Cortina Archive
For two men who had grown up climbing on dolomite, this was an important confirmation. Not because they needed to prove that they were finally “complete” mountaineers, but because they had succeeded in transferring to completely different terrain the technical ability, speed and familiarity with extreme difficulty that they had developed on their home walls.
The limits of aid climbing
Soon afterwards their attention returned to the Dolomites. The great face of Cima Scotoni, in the Fanes group, had fascinated Ghedina for years. On 15 July 1951 he and Lacedelli attempted the face, but were forced to retreat when they reached a huge slab that seemed to offer no natural means of progress.
There was, in fact, a technical solution: the use of pressure pitons, forerunners of modern bolts. Unlike ordinary rock pitons, which were driven into existing cracks, pressure pitons required a hole to be drilled into the rock. For Lacedelli and Ghedina this distinction was fundamental. In theory, once this method was adopted, almost any difficulty could be overcome: drill a hole, insert the piton, hang an aid ladder from it, move up and repeat the process a little higher. It remained slow, exhausting and far from straightforward, but the limit was no longer imposed by the need to find a way through the natural features of the rock. To them, this meant changing the rules of the game, and they chose to retreat.
The following year Ghedina and Lacedelli returned with Guido Lorenzi. Faced with the same slab, they devised an almost unbelievable solution: they formed a human pyramid, climbing onto one another’s shoulders until they could reach a small crack where a piton could finally be placed. After 38 hours of climbing and two bivouacs, they reached the summit.
Beyond the extraordinary nature of the episode itself, their decision says a great deal about their approach to mountaineering. They did not reject aid climbing: pitons and aid ladders were routinely used on the hardest routes. For them, the line was crossed when a climber deliberately drilled into the rock to create a point of progression where the rock itself offered none.
The human pyramid was an almost paradoxical solution, but one entirely consistent with that way of thinking.
In only a few years, the world of the Scoiattoli had changed profoundly. The group founded in 1939 by a circle of young friends who climbed for the sheer pleasure of it on the walls around Cortina had produced mountaineers capable of tackling the greatest difficulties in the Dolomites and performing at the highest level on the great mountains of the Western Alps as well.
Among them, Lino Lacedelli had by now established himself as one of the strongest Italian mountaineers of his generation.
In 1954, that story would suddenly move onto an entirely different scale.
K2
In 1954 Italian mountaineering was preparing to face a challenge on an entirely different scale from anything encountered in the Alps. The objective was K2, at 8,611 metres the second-highest mountain on Earth. Everest had been climbed the previous year by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, but K2 remained unclimbed. Although lower than Everest, it presented greater technical mountaineering difficulties, which continued even at extreme altitude. The attempts of previous decades had shown just how difficult it was to bring together technical ability, acclimatisation, organisation and favourable conditions.
The Italian expedition, led by Ardito Desio, was meticulously prepared and had considerable resources by the standards of the time. Among the climbers selected was Lino Lacedelli. For the twenty-eight-year-old member of the Scoiattoli di Cortina, it was an enormous step, but his record in the preceding years explains why he had been chosen: the great routes of the Dolomites, his speed on some of the hardest repeats, Cima Scotoni and his experience in the Western Alps had made him one of the strongest and most versatile Italian mountaineers of his generation.
Luigi Ghedina had also been selected for the expedition. Shortly before departure, however, he broke a leg while skiing and was forced to withdraw. It was an enormous disappointment: after years spent climbing with Lacedelli on the great walls of the Dolomites and the Western Alps, K2 would have been the natural continuation of their partnership.
On K2, however, individual ability alone would not be enough. The ascent required weeks of work to establish the route and carry equipment and supplies progressively higher along the Abruzzi Spur. Success was the result of the efforts of the entire expedition, something Lacedelli himself continued to emphasise many years later:
“Because it was everyone’s sacrifice that allowed us to reach the summit.”
During the final days of July, the action moved to the upper part of the mountain. On 30 July Walter Bonatti and Amir Mahdi carried the oxygen cylinders needed for the final summit attempt towards the highest camp. They were unable to reach Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni’s tent, however, and were forced to spend the night in the open, without a tent or sleeping bags, at close to 8,000 metres. Their contribution was crucial to the success of the following day. Conflicting accounts of what happened that night and during the final part of the ascent would lead to a controversy lasting more than half a century, known in Italy as the Caso K2. I have written in greater detail about the expedition and the events that followed in the article K2, the mountain of the Italians.
On 31 July 1954, Lacedelli and Compagnoni set out for the summit. Progress at that altitude was desperately slow and exhausting. At 6:30 pm they finally reached the 8,611-metre summit of K2. They were the first people ever to stand on its summit.
News of the ascent reached Italy on 3 August and sparked a wave of enthusiasm that is difficult to imagine today. The country was still emerging from the hardships of the post-war years, and the ascent was celebrated as a symbol of an Italy capable of recovering and once again achieving something extraordinary. From then on, K2 would become known in the Italian collective imagination as “the mountain of the Italians”.
In Cortina, however, the story also had a much more intimate dimension. While Lino was making his way up K2, thousands of kilometres away Elda Dimai, his fiancée and future wife, was writing to him. In one of her letters she described going to the Cinque Torri and almost instinctively looking around her, imagining for a moment that she might see him appear among the rocks. The letters exchanged between Lino, Elda, family and friends reveal another side of the expedition: not only the mountaineering achievement, but also the waiting endured by those who remained at home. I have told this story in the article Letters from K2.
For the Scoiattoli, and for Ampezzo mountaineering more generally, K2 represented an extraordinary culmination. Only fifteen years had passed since 1 July 1939, when ten young men from Cortina had decided to give a name to their shared passion for climbing. They had learned their craft on the Cinque Torri and the walls of the Dolomites, often with the most basic equipment; the war had interrupted that first period, but after the conflict a new generation had taken up the story, moving from their great home walls to the Western Alps.
Now one of those young Scoiattoli had stood on the summit of K2.
From the Cinque Torri to 8,611 metres in the Karakoram, in the space of a single generation: it is difficult to imagine a more powerful image of how profoundly mountaineering in Cortina had changed.
Bibliography
Giovanni Cenacchi, Gli Scoiattoli di Cortina – Storia e memoria di 50 anni d’alpinismo ampezzano.
Photo credits
The historical photographs published in this article come from the Scoiattoli di Cortina archive.
In the next article
From tradition to modern mountaineering
K2 marked one of the high points of Ampezzo mountaineering, but the story naturally continued. In the decades that followed, techniques, equipment and the very idea of climbing began to change, while new generations of mountaineers continued to seek new routes on the walls of the Dolomites.
In the final chapter we will follow this evolution from the second half of the twentieth century to the present day, through a period that I was fortunate enough, at least in part, to experience myself.
