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| Page Type: Trip Report Location: Valais, Switzerland, Europe Lat/Lon: 46.02370°N / 7.88560°E Date Climbed/Hiked: Aug 15, 2002 | Page By: sfeller Created/Edited: Aug 30, 2002 / Object ID: 168667 Hits: 736 Loading... Page Score: 0% - 0 Votes Loading... Vote: Log in to vote |
Alton and woke up to an alarm and the moving around of fellow climbers around 3:00ish on Thursday August 15. Many of you reading these reports think I am crazy because I spend my vacation waking up at 3:00a.m. daily only to torture myself for the next 8-10 hours in cold conditions, minimal air, and the occasional smell of flagilitis swelling up through my goretex bibs. I agree with you.
We head off following the trail from the Flualp Hut and this time Alton and I are determined to not go astray of the climbing trail by following others for a few minutes. We follow the others and then they make a left hand turn at a point where I know I would have missed. They let us go ahead and at this exact point Alton and I are then left all alone and in front again until the final summit block.
We continue following the trail and then we come to a boulder field in complete darkness-not to worry, this is Switzerland. There are cairns and white marking everywhere and it is difficult to get off route of this boulder strewn field, but we are quite happy going in this area in the dark because boulder hopping is painful on the knees, and we don’t want to know how much further we have to go. We continue on and soon hit snow and the previously laid snow track from the past couple of days. The going is uneventful from here to base of the first ridge and is mainly an easy snow traverse but I continue looking back to see if headlamps are behind us to make sure we are on track. Yep. There are the bobbing lights.
We came to the ridgeline where the terrain steepens and dropped our trekking poles at this point opting for ice axes. The ridge becomes semi rock and semi snow but is not difficult and we soon find ourselves at the top of the ridge where a little snow ramp leads to the base of the summit pinnacle with about another 1000 feet of climbing.
Here is where we put on crampons and the climbing begins. The route goes up a steep snow colouir and then goes left over rock benches and more steep snow chutes. The route is not difficult to find at all because all you have to do is follow the footsteps and glassy rock-by this time it is early morning and we can see people from various routes heading up to this peak and other peaks. The route is exciting to me because of its steepness involved with snow, wind is absent, and temperature hovers around the “only polypropylene” and gore-tex less requirement.
Alton and I finally reach a point where we have to do some rock climbing so we put on harnesses and get ready with the rope. At this point in time a guide and his Japanese client pass us moving in tandem and speed like a man trying to fly his kite in windless conditions. The guide climbs the rock without effort and barks some bad English to the Japanese client to come up, but the Japanese client doesn’t know English or German and barks in Japanese. Finally the Japanese client understands or “just does the move” when the rope becomes very tight him. They soon disappear and Alton and I repeat the rock moves which turn out to be class 4 glassy rock from all the thousands of people up this route.
Several minutes later I reach the top of the false summit and sit down to hip belay Alton up. As I sit down I watch the guide and the Japanese client reach the true summit, take one picture, and then immediately head down. They are at the summit less than I spend time on summits in the Cascades! This Japanese dude is in shape but it doesn’t appear as if they are ever going to take a break-I think there must be some type of financial incentive for having a short climb to this guide. They pass us going down and Alton and I continue on to the easy but somewhat exposed traverse over to the summit and spend about 20 minutes on top enjoying the fantastic views.
Alton and I came down and started moving around people near the base of the climb where the difficulty began and came down easily to where our trekking poles lay sitting as with almost everybody else’s. However, Alton had one pole missing. The pole was obviously taken. Alton had just purchased these poles in Zermatt and now one was missing! Argh!!! Anyway we head down the snow slopes and through the painful boulder field bashing the knees in anger.
Soon we were back at the Flualp hut and the throngs of people enjoying the view of the Matterhorn and their buffet. We try to minimize our distance from the people because we know we smell of sweaty propylene and we don’t want to ruin their view…. Alton then saw his trekking pole next to the Japanese client we saw earlier that morning. Alton said “Hey, that’s my pole.” The Japanese man replied saying, “I saw it high. I take it.” Alton then took picked up his pole and said a few slang words that I knew the Japanese man would never have known. We thought Japanese weren’t the stealing type?
We then returned to Zermatt through a lift and the Sunegga train which is this weird train that you got to try out!
Stefan FellerImages
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Pennine Alps
