Six days on Alta Via 1 in Italy and a word of caution PSA about Zyppy
Just finished my Alta Via 1 (with an emergency exit) and would like to share my experience with the community.
I'm in my early thirties and have done a fair number of trails: the Torres del Paine O circuit, the Lost Coast Trail, the Pinhoti down in Alabama, and a couple others. So, I went into Alta Via 1 super confident that it would be easy for six days (the classic Lago di Braies to Pisa bus stop route). Welp... it felt more intense than I expected.
I usually do 15+ miles easy, but a 13-mile day here came with 4k-5.5k feet of elevation gain that I did not take into account when planning. A rough rule I learnt during the trail is that every 750~1000 feet of elevation gain feels like adding another mile of flat hiking. So a day that reads "13 miles" on paper walks a lot closer to twenty.
My stops
Everything below is straight off my AllTrails custom routes:
- Day 1 — Lago di Braies to Rifugio Lavarella: 13.4 mi, 5,518 ft gain, 6.5h moving.
- Day 2 — Rifugio Lavarella to Rifugio Lagazuoi: 8.4 mi, 3,835 ft gain, 4h30m. Short, but it climbs a pass and on the other side, you will see the entire way up to Rifugio Lagazuoi. The view that you see (one picture attached) is very memorable.
- Day 3 — Rifugio Lagazuoi to Rifugio Staulanza: 13.4 mi, 3,301 ft gain, 6h. I took the cable car down from Lagazuoi (starting at 9am, so I had a chill morning there).
- Day 4 — Rifugio Staulanza to Rifugio Vazzoler: 11.4 mi, 3,363 ft gain, 5h27m.
- Day 5 — Rifugio Vazzoler to Rifugio Pramperet: 15.4 mi, 4,688 ft gain, 7h.
- Day 6 — emergency exit off the trail (the part I wish I didn't have to write, more story below): 6.3 mi, 115 ft gain, 2h20m.
Six days is achievable if you're fit and experienced. But the scenery is good enough that, looking back, racing through it feels like a mistake. Many refugios require you to check in before 6pm, so some days, I felt like I was more focused on the clock than the actual trail. If you're fit and you think of yourself as an experienced hiker, eight days is the sweet spot I think.
A word of caution about Zyppy
Okay... the emergency exit thing...
I booked a luggage transfer with a company called Zyppy. They are supposed to pick up my REI duffle bag from the trailhead hotel (Hotel Lago di Braies) on Day 2 of my hike and deliver it to my hotel in Belluno at the end, a day or two later. I paid about 75 euros. They sent me a FedEx label, I stuck it on my bag, and I left it at the Hotel Lago di Braies at the trailhead where I spent the night in their Hiker room.
On Day 2, mid-hike, they emailed me a brand-new label and told me to print it and put it on my luggage. I replied immediately when I saw the email, saying that I've already left my bag at the hotel and already in the mountains. They literally told me to attach a new label the same day they are supposed to pick up my luggage - -... Their rep, Veronica, replied a day later and said no problem and they would collect it that day.
They did not. By Day 5, my AirTag still showed the bag sitting in the hotel. Nobody had come. I called the hotel to confirm, and no courier had ever shown up. Across the whole week, Veronica kept replying to my emails, promising the pickup was happening, but it simply never did. Throughout the whole trek, I had to stop hiking whenever I caught some signal to refresh my email, and at a couple of rifugios, I paid for wifi just to keep checking my AirTag and checking emails. Honestly, it really messed up my whole trip.
My flight out of Venice to Geneva only runs direct on Sundays and Wednesdays, so missing it meant waiting three or four days. And if Zyppy had finally grabbed my bag on Day 6, which is the last day of my hike, who knows how many days FedEx would take to deliver it to Belluno. So I called the hotel that under no circumstances should anyone be allowed to take my bag, and they made sure of it.
In the end, I had to cut the trek short. After Rifugio Pramperet, I took an emergency exit rather than finishing the route, in order to physically go reclaim my own luggage (shoutout to Pramperet staff who helped me plan things around). I woke up at 5 am, hiked down to Forno di Zoldo, then rode three or four local buses back to the Hotel Lago di Braies to collect the bag myself, then another three or four buses southbound to Belluno.
When I picked up my luggage at Hotel Lago di Braies, the hotel manager saw me and apologized (he is really nice though, I recommend this hotel, easy setup for hikers!). He explained that the label only shows FedEx, never Zyppy, so he had no way to warn me. Because apparently I'm not the first guest this has happened to, or the second, or the fifth. The staff already know this company from past experiences: bags left for pickup that never get picked up. I somehow missed this in my research, lesson learnt...
Anyway, Alta Via 1 is a great trail, give it eight days at least. And handle your own luggage (maybe starting and ending your trip at the same hotel), or at least handle it with a company other than Zyppy.