Monte Civetta
Peak · 3220 m · Dolomites
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The north-west face drops a thousand metres in one sweep, and the 1925 line up it was long counted as the first sixth grade on Willo Welzenbach's six-tier scale, which the UIAA built its own grading system on thirty years later. In 2013 a tower 400 metres high, 100 wide and 50 deep broke off Cima Su Alto on that same side, with nobody in the wall or on the path below at the time.
A paved loop of about 76 km circles the massif from Alleghe, climbing the Passo Duran and the Forcella Staulanza, where Civetta fills the view on one side and the Pelmo, nicknamed the Lord's Throne for its chair-like shape, rises on the other. The peak is thought to have first been climbed in 1855 by Simeone di Silvestro. If accurate, it would be the earliest of the great Dolomite summits to fall. Emil Solleder and Gustl Lettenbauer, whose partnership formed by chance days earlier at the Rifugio Coldai, climbed the wall in a single day using about a dozen pitons; Solleder later left extreme climbing behind for a career in orthopedics. The Georgian climber Mikhail Khergiani, seven times his country's champion and known as the Tiger of the Cliffs, died on the wall in 1969 when a rockslide cut his rope and he fell 600 metres.
What you see
The mountain's north-west wall is visible across the Taibon Agordino valley, one of the signature mountain profiles of the Dolomites.
Practical
The paved loop around the massif takes in the Passo Duran (12 km, up to 15%) and the Forcella Staulanza (14 km, up to 9%), with a marked viewpoint, the Belvedere, along the way.
dolomitesbig wall climbingalpinism historycivetta group