« watching | Main | Muschelgasse »
December 27, 2008
Watching and waiting
My winter in the Swiss Alps had two purposes, as well as spending as much time as possible with the aforementioned planks on my feet schussing about the schnee, I wanted to climb to the top of some of the tall pointy bits.
The mountain closest to hand was the Mittaghorn, a hunsey little peak, topping out at 3143m. Now sadly it has succumbed to a via ferrata which, in more brutal terms, means a series of steel cables and chopped re-enforcing bars have been hammered into the rock to form an iron ladder, complete with safety cable, all the way to the top. It also now sports a fifteen foot cross on the summit and a visitor’s book into the same bargain.
morning sun hitting the summit of the Mittaghorn, Switzerland
Back in the 80s I was planning a solo winter ascent so I needed to know as much as I could about the mountain. As I didn’t have any guide books I watched where the winds came from, how the sun fell across the slopes and what the weather patterns were. I watched and waited. The days fell into weeks as I sat on the lifts and stared at the mountain or sipped my coffee and studied its slopes.
I went up the North West ridge [the route now splattered by iron rungs] which in summer was mostly a good grab and scramble but in winter the scrambled bits lay under deep snow which heightened the excitement somewhat as I groped armpit deep through the white stuff. When the scrambled bits got steeper and before the snow sloughed off I had to tunnel my way through.
The summit was a pile of stones with a stick in the top, no visitor’s book.
On the way back, glissading down, I hit a bit of ice and careered out of control several hundred feet down the eastern side of the ridge. It took all of those several hundred feet to get my bearings, turn on my front and use my ice axe to arrest my somewhat spectacular descent.
At first I thought I’d fallen into Italy, and not having my passport with me, I climbed up back onto the ridge. Turns out it wasn’t Italy and I was in fact only a few of miles from the village. Ha ha.
Everything looked a bit Google Earth from the top.
Posted by john at December 27, 2008 05:05 PM
Comments
Wow. Wonderful.
Posted by: Daphne at December 28, 2008 11:52 PM