A quick search through wikipedia shows that these things actually exist in quite a number of countries including right here at home in Canada. The first ones were built in Italy though and those are the ones that I'm really interested in.
It does look like a lot of the trips are guided, and therefore expensive (prices I've found range from 70 to 100 Euros per day trip), but I did manage to find one book that looks like it caters to those that want to get out there on their own. Via Ferratas of the Italian Dolomites: North, Central and East Dolomites v. 1 (Cicerone Guides) has an excellent introductory section that is available online at amazon.ca and can be ordered there for $17.55 CDN. I also found a cool site with a map of several Vie Ferrate in Italy (http://alavigne.net/Outdoors/FeatureReports/ViaFerrata/index.jsp). The cool part about this is that by looking at the map, I'm able to try and pick out a couple locations where I may be able to pull a couple of the routes together in a week or so. The early leaders are an area around Lago Di Molveno and another near Cortina D'Ampezzo.
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| Cortina D'Ampezzo |
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| Lago Di Molveno |
Over the past couple of days, I've been looking through my Year of Adventures book and I'm finding that a lot of the hiking type activities look really appealing to me including Climbing Munros In Scotland, Hiking Mount Olympus, and Hill-Tribe Trekking in Thailand. Its a good thing I work at atmosphere and have access to some very nice equipment, because knowing myself (I like to go stupid things for no reason) I'll probably end up in some sort of trouble at some point.
Still no luck putting together a plan to get visas... I'm scared to look at how much its going to cost.
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