Tuesday became an official rest day after the effort expended on the Allalinhorn. Most of the day was spent relaxing around the campsite eating and drinking coffee. Late afternoon we went to check out the sport climbing in the gorge behind the campsite. First stop the lower gorge which had lots of impressive looking routes in the 7's but only a couple of easier ones which we quickly dispatched. The routes were pretty uninspiring and the rock both loose and polished so we decamped and wandered up to the upper gorge near Saas Fee. Here there were a couple of really easy slabby routes on solid rock but we continued along to the harder ones. The bolting was bizarre - seemingly thrown at the rock at random and the bolts forming lines almost by chance. James set off on something graded V+ according to the writing on the wall. It looked pretty cool: stepped overhangs covered in jugs. Unfortunately someone hadn't extended the bolting past bolt two; or more likely the rock above had all fallen down as James had to gingerly retreat sideways from a completely detached block the size of a fridge.
We wandered along in search of more solid rock and I got on something graded VI with a cool looking overhang. The overhand turned out to be only possible by turning it on the right and meandering into the adjacent route - James had to do that after I wore myself out trying to climb tue overhang direct without any holds. Grateful for avoiding death through rockfall and heartily reminded that low grade sport climbing is generally shit, we went and had a barbecue instead.
Wednesday morning we got the first cablecar up to Housass at 3200m, 2hrs 50min later we were stood on the summit of the Weismeiss, our second 4000m peak. That's well under the guidebook time of 3-4hrs so we were going really well - we overtook half a dozen continental teams on the way up! Unfortunately the weather came in after an hour or so on the mountain and we spent the rest of the day in thick cloud. No nice views from the summit, just a general understanding that where we were stood was slightly higher than everywhere else. The climb itself was fairly mundane but we had to travel through some pretty complex glaciated terrain to get there and that was the highlight for me - lots of dangerous seracs, crevasses and snow bridges to negotiate. We went super light with the gear - I just took a 20l Alpkit Gourdon rucksack, which definitely helped up race up the thing. Light is right!
We got back to the cablecar station in 2hrs and were back at the campsite having lunch by 1300 and spent the afternoon lazing in the sun (Alpine weather changes fast, it was snowing when we got off the glacier) eating biscuits and enjoying a celebrationary beer. It felt almost too easy climbing that mountain, we're definitely ready for something bigger and harder at the end of the week. Tomorrow I think we're going up the Jaggerhorn with a few of our friends here - we're going to do a rock route to the summit while they do the via ferrata. Fri/Sat we'll hopefully do our final, as yet undecided, 4000m peak.
Didn't take any phone pics today but got some amazing shots on the camera. =o)
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
No comments:
Post a Comment