Italian Ice

When Pilar Guzman and her family swapped their annual ski trip in the American West for the Dolomite Mountains, they discovered a newfound love for Italy in winter.

THE ONLY WAY to get to the hut is by foot, which will take about 20 minutes,” a friend had written in a text, accompanied by a map. There will be crampons waiting for you.” Aside from these two sentences, she had told us little about the remote Rifugio Nambino nambino.com; doubles from 245; entrées 10-$23), but I knew that it was her favorite forest hut”— one of the traditional restaurants and inns characteristic of this mountainous region of northern Italy.

A taxi delivered me and my husband, Chris, and our two teenage sons to the foot of a snow-covered vertical face, where the property has a cable lift for sending up luggage. There we found a box with only three sets of crampons for the four of us. It was pitch-dark, and we were in the middle of the Adamello Brenta Nature Park—a 240-square-mile stretch of protected forest with dozens of lakes, waterfalls, a glacier, and a population of brown bears, all ringed by the craggy Brenta Dolomites on one side and the eastern Alps on the other.

We were one pair of crampons short, but Chris assured us that he’d be fine in his rubber-soled boots. A couple of steps up—and a couple of slips down the icy incline—told a different story. I hit Rifugio Nambino’s call button beside the lift and explained the situation over the static-laced intercom, certain that someone would come retrieve us and lead us up the unmarked path to the lodge.

Finally, a woman answered and apologized for the miscalculation, yelling over the cheerful din at the lodge, before sending down the fourth pair via the cable’s glacially slow pulley system. As we huffed and puffed our way up the final switchbacks, with only our iPhone flashlights to guide us, Chris cautioned our boys to hold on to the branches in a papabear voice I'd never heard him use before.