high life

Italy's unfussy Dolomites are a place of cheerful communities, where simple chalets and good food can almost outshine the skiing

- Toby Skinner

It's not often that Marika Favé, our impish, fast-talking mountain guide, falls silent. It's a spring morning on the packed, sun-streaked gondola to the peak of the Marmolada glacier, the highest point in the Dolomites. A former national skier for Italy whose family has lived in the Fassa Valley for generations, Favé has been telling Jack, the photographer I'm traveling with, and me about the grimly determined Austro-Hungarian soldiers who dug a small city into the ice up here during the Great War.

But as the gondola passes another rocky bluff and great blankets of untouched shadow-draped powder come into view, the war stories cease and a grin spreads across her face. We don't know exactly what the plan is when the gondola clanks to a halt at the Punta Rocca, a viewing platform at 10,700 feet that looks out over all of the Dolomites. But the mountain air seems charged with the palpable sense that, on this exact Thursday morning, something very good is about to happen.

Snow dusts the chic exterior of Como Alpina Dolomites, on the Alpe di Siusi plateau in the Val Gardena; Marika Favé, a former ski racer who now guides and mountain-climbs; the author on a snowboard dropping down the back of the Marmolada glacier; a berry-topped dessert at the cozy. Rifugio Fuciade

It's the fourth morning of a seven-day ski safari across the mountain range, which involves us snowboarding to a new lodging each night-our bags appearing, as if by magic, at a mix of crisp modern hotels with glassy spas and family-run mountain rifugi, or cozy inns, the latter often with a son or a partner overseeing an improbably good locavore kitchen. The trip has been organized by Dolomite Mountains, an innovative and impressive company founded by Argentine Agustina Lagos Marmol and run mainly by a group of warm, no-nonsense women. And I've already fallen hard for the Dolomites, just as everyone who's ever been here promised I would.