The Rifugio Friedrich August, perched at about 2,300 meters between Col Rodella and Passo Sella in Val di Fassa, has served krapfen for decades. The round pastry, filled with vanilla cream or apricot jam and sold for around $4, is a routine item at most Alpine huts in Italy. For the past week and a half, though, getting one has meant lining up at dawn.
It started with a handful of TikTok videos posted in mid-August, hikers filming their first bite of krapfen against the Dolomites skyline. The clips spread, food bloggers picked them up, and a small ritual at one mountain hut turned into a checkpoint. Hundreds of visitors now climb up each morning, and some camp nearby the night before to make sure they get one before the batch runs out.
Staff at the refuge, quoted by CNN, describe an unusual scene for a spot that mostly saw hikers passing through. The dough sometimes runs out before noon, forcing the kitchen to scale up production in the middle of the season, even though access is still limited to the trail and the cable car. A hiker who made the climb for the view can now leave empty-handed for lack of a pastry, which, in the Dolomites, is almost a joke in itself.
It isn’t an isolated case. For two summers running, one Dolomites spot after another has gone viral, and local mountain guides are starting to worry about traffic piling up on a handful of locations instead of spreading across the range. An apricot-jam donut, unremarkable on its own, has been enough to redirect hiking patterns across an entire stretch of the Italian Alps for a summer.