A climb on a little-desired route: the Casara Chimney on Torre Toblin.
A true story by Ernesto Majoni – It happened on August 14, 1977
We went to climb the Casara Chimney, first ascended by the young climber from Vicenza together with Meneghello, Baldi and Rosenberg on August 5, 1923, on the Torre Toblin.
The tower rises near the Locatelli–Innerkofler Hut and, during the war, served as a strategic observation point firmly held by the Austrians; today it is a well-known hiking destination, offering wide views of the Tre Cime and many surrounding peaks.
At the time, the two of us together had only thirty-six years of age and were just beginning our mountaineering journey. By the end of the month, the guide Giorgio Peretti had promised to take us up the famous Miriam route on the Torre Grande d’Averau (which we actually climbed on August 26 — and for both of us it was a true baptism of fire), and the Torre Toblin seemed like a perfect “appetizer.”
I have a special memory of the day before Ferragosto in 1977, naturally tied to the mountains. That day, inspired by a suggestion from Severino Casara — the poet of the Dolomites, whom we had met exactly one year earlier at the Lavaredo Hut — Enrico and I thought we’d give him a gift.
I have often asked myself why we chose the Casara Chimney (Dohlenkloake — “jackdaw’s latrine” — as Richard Goedeke described it with biting irony in his guide Sextener Dolomiten, 1983). I remember, though now in fragments, a tall and dark slot, mostly made of brittle rock where even the backpack barely squeezed through, and where at one point the joy of climbing was almost overwhelmed by the urge to get out of there quickly and without damage.
I suppose the rope teams who climbed it more than half a century earlier must have considered that “vertical black chimney” to have some value — perhaps because it was one of the first new routes in the Dolomites after the war, or because it reached a summit made heroic by wartime stories and only recently annexed within the borders of the Kingdom of Italy.
For us, the Toblin offered rather modest sensations: the most entertaining moment was the airy abseil down the huge war-era iron stakes, which disappeared two years later beneath the ladders and cables of the via ferrata that — drawing on the memory of the battles — transformed the tower into a modern destination for hikers.
I lost some of the photographs we took and later sent to the elderly Casara in Vicenza, moved by the idea that two young friends had retraced his footsteps. In those pictures I see again the two of us — red sweaters, knickerbockers, helmet and rope — on a summit certainly more meaningful during wartime than in the broader history of the Dolomites, posing as “veterans” of who-knows-what grand achievement.
Many years later, at a time when such adventures are now practically unthinkable, it would be difficult to invite anyone to repeat the Casara Chimney — although it once enjoyed a bit of fame, counting among its visitors Dino Buzzati with the guide Giuseppe Quinz, probably the second party to climb it on June 25, 1930.
The via ferrata that reaches the summit from the opposite side — the “Sentiero delle Scalette” — although certainly not a haven of solitude and silence in high season due to its proximity to the Locatelli Hut, is undoubtedly more enjoyable and much safer.
But if some old-school alpinist decided to repeat the chimney, I would be curious to know whether the first of the two pitons I ever placed in my life is still there — the one I hammered in to avoid putting our twenty-year-old selves at risk inside that dark, gravelly, damp, and claustrophobic slot.
For me, the chimney of the Torre Toblin and that of the nearby Torre Comici (which I climbed in September 1982) remain two cherished memories tied to Severino Casara, poet of the Mountains.