Via Ferrata for Beginners: 8 Easy Routes and How to Start

What is a via ferrata, and is it for you

Via ferrata is Italian for iron path: a route up a rock face fitted with a continuous steel cable that you clip into, usually plus ladders, footpegs and handholds bolted into the rock. The whole point is to let people who are not climbers move safely through terrain that would otherwise need a rope and a partner.

A via ferrata is for you if:

• You are not terrified of heights. Healthy respect is fine. Full blown panic halfway up a face is a problem for everyone in the group, not just for you.
• You have basic fitness and can hold your own body weight on your arms for at least a short while.
• You can follow a procedure. Ferratas are not about strength. They are about clipping correctly, and clipping every single time.
• You can handle a long day. Getting to the bottom of the route and walking off the top are part of the outing, not an afterthought.

It is not a good idea for anyone with a serious heart condition, with vertigo or dizzy spells, with a fresh hand or shoulder injury, or for anyone who is only there because a friend talked them into it.

Via ferrata grades explained: where to start

Nearly every bad first ferrata story starts the same way. Someone tags along with more experienced friends, is told it will be fine, and then spends the day fighting a route two grades above their level, with a long approach, not enough food and water, and a descent that drags on until dark. The route itself is rarely the problem. Choosing it badly is. Grades exist precisely so you do not have to guess, so read them before you commit.

Via ferrata kit for beginners: what is compulsory and what helps

Whether you are a beginner heading for an easy line or an old hand on a grade D, the hardware is the same. There is no lightweight beginner version of a via ferrata set, because the forces in a fall do not care how new you are.

The compulsory three

• A via ferrata set with an energy absorber. Two arms with carabiners and, between them, an absorber that soaks up the energy of a fall. In Europe it is covered by the EN 958 standard, revised in 2017 after older systems failed in testing. Never improvise with slings and bits of rope. Without an absorber, a fall onto a steel cable will kill or badly injure you.
• A sit harness. For children and light adults, combine it with a chest harness, or use a full body harness, so that nobody flips upside down in a fall.
• A climbing helmet. The commonest injury on a ferrata is not caused by falling. It is caused by a stone knocked loose by the person above you.

Nice to have

• Fingerless gloves. Steel cable grows broken strands that cut. Thirty metres of hauling on bare hands and they are bleeding.
• Boots with a stiff sole, ideally over the ankle. Sandals and running shoes have no place on a ferrata: you need to stand on a peg a centimetre wide.
• A rucksack worn on your back, not slung over one shoulder. On vertical ground you need both hands, and a shoulder bag pulls you off balance.
• Water and a head torch, scaled to the length of the route.

Hire or buy

For a first via ferrata, hire, without hesitation. A full set for the day costs a few hundred Czech crowns, roughly 10 to 20 € (about 9 to 17 £), and hire points sit right at the bigger ferrata areas as well as in outdoor shops in the nearest towns. Buying makes sense once you know you enjoy it: your own set, harness and helmet run to several thousand crowns, so a couple of hundred euros (a couple of hundred pounds), but they last for years.

Whether you hire or buy, ask about the weight range of the set. Absorbers are built for a specified range of climber weight including kit, and outside that range they may not perform as intended. That applies at both ends of the scale, to children and very light adults as much as to heavier climbers.

How to move on a via ferrata

Looking up easy via ferrata routes is the fun part, but wherever you end up going, the technique is identical. Learn it once and it works on every cable in Europe.

Clipping

• Both carabiners on the cable at all times, except for the moment you move them past an anchor.
• Move them one at a time. First one carabiner past the anchor, then the other. Never both at once.
• Check that the gate has snapped shut. Listen for it and look at it, every single time.
• Let the absorber hang free. Do not knot it, do not shorten it, do not clip it back to your harness. It needs room to work when it is needed.

Climbing

• Climb with your legs, not your arms. This is the single most important sentence in this guide. Your legs are many times stronger and will keep going all day. Your arms will be finished ten metres in if you haul yourself up on them.
• Do not treat the cable as a handrail if you can avoid it. The cable is there to catch you, and you should be climbing on the rock and the footpegs. On harder ground there is no choice, but on easy routes there is.
• Keep your body close to the rock, though not glued to it. Leaning out drains your strength and hides the footholds under your feet.
• Look ahead. Before you start a section, work out where it goes and where the feet are.

Moving as a group

• Only one person between two anchors. If there are several of you and the top one falls, they sweep everyone below them off the rock and the load on the anchor becomes enormous.
• Keep your distance, so you are not raining stones onto the head of whoever is below you.
• Put the weakest member in the middle, with experienced people front and back.
• Do not overtake unless it is safe and everyone has agreed to it.

5 mistakes beginners make most often

1. Picking a route that is too hard. “It looked good in the photos” is not a criterion. Start on grade A even if it sounds too easy.
2. Hauling on your arms. It empties the tank in the first third of the route, and running out of arms in the middle of a vertical wall is a serious situation.
3. Unclipping both carabiners at once. One lapse of attention at an anchor and you are attached to nothing at all.
4. Setting off in unsettled weather. You cannot leave a ferrata quickly, and storms arrive faster than you expect.
5. Underestimating the way down. Most people plan the climb and forget that topping out is followed by an hour of walking down a marked path, tired, late in the afternoon.

8 easy via ferrata routes for beginners

If you are picking a first route, central Europe is a friendlier place to learn than the high Alps. The routes below sit in Czechia, Slovakia and Austria, they are short, low and mostly built into old quarries and small isolated hills rather than big mountains, and hire kit is easy to find nearby. There are no glaciers, no all day approaches and no altitude to deal with, and as the grading note above explains, Czech routes tend to be graded a touch more gently than Alpine ones. The nearest airports are Prague for the Czech routes, Bratislava or Vienna for Slovakia and Salzburg for the Austrian one. A hire car makes all of them a comfortable day out, since most sit outside the reach of city public transport.

Czechia

1. Ferrata Hluboká. A protected route in a disused quarry below Hluboká nad Vltavou chateau in southern Bohemia, a couple of hours’ drive south of Prague. Short, easy to read from the ground and with proper facilities at the bottom. The rest of the family can tour the chateau while you climb.

2. Slánská hora. The closest ferrata to Prague, on a basalt dome above the town of Slaný, well within a day trip from the capital. It is short, but for a first taste of moving on a cable it is entirely enough.

3. Pastýřská stěna, Děčín, the easy lines. The largest ferrata area in Czechia, with sixteen routes side by side on a sandstone cliff above the Elbe in the north of the country, close to the German border. The advantage for a beginner is that you can add or drop difficulty on the spot instead of committing to a grade in advance.

4. Velká Dohoda, Moravian Karst. A ferrata on the walls of a former limestone quarry north of Brno, with several variants and good facilities. The best choice if you are based in Moravia or arriving from the Vienna side.

5. Ferrata Tábor. A route inside the town of Tábor in southern Bohemia, which makes it an afternoon rather than a whole day of planning. Useful as a warm up or as a plan B if the weather closes in elsewhere.

Slovakia

6. HZS Martinské hole. Sensible difficulty, a straightforward approach and a view over the Turiec basin, on the hills above Martin in northern Slovakia. The classic pick for a first Slovak ferrata.

7. Zobor above Nitra. The most accessible Slovak ferrata if you are coming from the west, an easy drive from Bratislava or across the border from Vienna, with several difficulty variants on the same hill.

Austria

8. Cable car routes in the Salzkammergut. If you want a first Alpine ferrata, choose a route served by a cable car, for example the Katrin Klettersteig above Bad Ischl, easily reached from Salzburg. You save an hour of climbing on the approach and keep your strength for the part where you need it. And remember to drop one grade compared with what you have done in Czechia.

Is a course with an instructor worth it?

If you plan to do ferratas regularly, or you are heading to the Alps, then yes, without question. On a course you learn to clip properly, to manage your strength over a long route and, most valuably, you get feedback on what you are doing wrong, which is precisely the thing you cannot spot on your own. Courses are run by mountain guides and outdoor agencies and usually last a single day.

For one easy grade A route you do not need a course. Read the rules, go with somebody who has done a ferrata before, and pick a short line where you can back off if it is not for you.

Insurance and mountain rescue

Check what your policy actually covers. Standard travel insurance frequently files via ferrata under hazardous sports and excludes it, so you need an add on. That matters most in Slovakia and Austria:

• In Slovakia, a law in force since 1 July 2006 makes the person in the mountain area liable for the cost of the rescue operation. The mountain rescue emergency number is 18 300.
• In Austria, a mountain rescue callout is also charged for, and the sums run into tens of thousands of Czech crowns, so from roughly 800 € upwards (about 700 £). The emergency number is 140.
• The European 112 works everywhere.