Vajolet Towers

The Vajolet Towers are a cluster of slender rock spires standing shoulder to shoulder in the heart of the Rosengarten group (Catinaccio in Italian) in the Dolomites. Seen from below, they rise like the fingers of a raised hand, bare pale rock above the scree, so close together that from some angles they merge into a single jagged crown. The tallest, the Main Tower, reaches 2,821 metres; its neighbours, the East and North towers, the Stabeler, Winkler and Delago towers, are only a few metres lower, with the Piaz Tower standing apart at 2,670 metres.

The towers lie on the border between South Tyrol and Trentino, between the Fassa Valley and the Tiers Valley, within the Schlern-Rosengarten Nature Park. Their history is a compressed chronicle of early Alpine climbing. The Main Tower was first climbed in August 1882 by G. Bernard and G. Merzbacher. In 1887 Georg Winkler made a solo first ascent of the tower now named after him, a bold climb for its time. Hermann Stabeler and H. Helversen reached the East and North towers on a single day in July 1892, and the Stabeler Tower followed days later. In September 1895 Hermann Delago climbed alone to the top of the thinnest spire, and in 1899 the guide Tita Piaz climbed the lowest tower, which also bears his name.

The arête on the Delago Tower, first climbed in 1911, became one of the most frequently climbed routes in the Alps, an exposed line along the sharp edge of the needle with the drop of the cirque beneath. The Rosengarten as a whole is tied to the South Tyrolean legend of King Laurin: local tradition holds that the mountain was once the dwarf king's rose garden, turned to stone by his curse. Few places in the Alps let so many historic summits be seen at once, each one named after the climber who first stood on it.

Getting there

The towers stand in the centre of the Rosengarten group; the Gartl hut (Rifugio Re Alberto) lies about a quarter of an hour's walk below the Delago Tower. The approach is made on foot from the Fassa Valley on the Trentino side or from the Tiers Valley in South Tyrol. Bressanone (Brixen) is about 28 km away in a straight line, and the nearest airport is Bolzano Airport (BZO), about 23 km away.