West of the Adige and detached from the rest of the range, the Brenta group gives the Dolomites their most vertical face: sheer grey towers laced together by the Via delle Bocchette, a network of ledges and iron rungs bolted into the rock starting in 1935.
Madonna di Campiglio sits at its base, a ski resort each winter and the trailhead for hut-to-hut treks the rest of the year. The peaks anchor the Adamello Brenta Nature Park, a 650-square-kilometer reserve established in 1967, where brown bears, once nearly gone from the area, were reintroduced from Slovenia in a project that began in the late 1990s and now roam the beech forests below the rock. UNESCO folded the Brenta into its Dolomites World Heritage listing in 2009, the only group west of the Adige to make the cut.
