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The annual mountaineering dose

When travelling to the Alps it's always difficult for me to decide if I want to climb multi pitches or mountains so usually it's both. This of course means that I need to carry a pretty decent amount of gear with me, which is a pain when it comes to organizing and transporting it all. Finally after a brief rainy period it seemed as if we could have some better weather in southern Switzerland, which meant that mountaineering would be a possibility. We hadn't agreed beforehand with Jiri which mountain we would like to climb, if any, so we had to plan a bit before heading out. In the end we opted to try to climb Zinalrothorn, a mountain that I have wanted to climb ever since I first visited Switzerland in 2012.

As always, I didn't want to stay in the huts so we had a proper wilderness hiking setup with us. We decided to try to climb Zinalrothorn along its north ridge, which meant that our starting point would be Zinal instead of Zermatt. I much preferred this as I had done the hike up from Zermatt to Rothornhütte with Harri the year before. We stuffed ourselves with a lot of food we bought in a supermarket on the way and headed up towards the Mountet hut, next to which we planned to spend the following night.

The hike up takes about 4-5 hours and after the rather boring start on a dirt road offers delightful views on either side of the Zinal valley. Roughly 45 minutes before reaching the hut we lost cell phone signals and knew that our families might be a bit worried for the next couple of days. Inna is pretty used to this and I didn't worry about it much because I knew that there probably would be signal at the top of Zinalrothorn the next day anyway.

We reached the hut without any hick ups and found a magnificent place to pitch our tent just a couple of hundred of meters further. The view was breath-taking in every direction and changed constantly as clouds moved in and out and as colors changed with the setting sun. It felt quite surreal to see the snowy ridge between Wellenkuppe and Ober Gabelhorn that we had climbed with Harri just a year earlier. The ridge looked like something only a proper mountaineer should attempt :). Spending the few hours there, marveling at the scenery before going to sleep was one of the highlights of the trip.

Everything good comes to an end eventually. Our alarm clocks started beeping at 3am and less than an hour later we were all geared up and hiking up towards the glacier that would eventually lead us to the rocky north ridge of Zinalrothorn. Our acclimatization had been rather...optimistic: I had flown in from basically sea level a few days earlier and the highest I had been was at the top of Brüggler a couple of times at 1777m and driving through Furka pass once. Miraculously I felt really strong and didn't have any problems charging up the initial rocky sections and up the glacier. It was clear that Jiri wasn't as lucky as I was, because he was clearly struggling already on the rocky section but even more so as we reached the last part of the glacier before moving on to the final ridge.

Jiri showed some proper fighting spirit and made it to the base of the long rocky ridge that eventually leads to the top of Zinalrothorn. The good thing is that the nature of the climb changes at that point quite dramatically and isn't as taxing for one's respiratory system and the altitude doesn't feel as bad as movement slows down naturally. Rock climbing on the north ridge isn't exactly difficult but consequences of a fall would be dramatic so rushing is not a good idea. We found the ridge to be in prime condition with almost no snow or ice to be found so we took our crampons off right away after reaching the end of the glacier. In addition the rock quality was solid if a bit polished, so we didn't have to worry about possible rock fall because of the the extreme heat wave the Alps had faced in the summer.

To say the way up and down was uneventful would be a lie. The climbing required one's full attention and there are a few so-called gendarmes on the way to make things even more interesting. In addition my stomach wasn't feeling great so I had to take an emergency toilet break on the ridge. Not an easy feat with murderous drops on either side, wearing a harness and a lot of other climbing gear. In the end we weren't nearly as fast as the guide book told us to be, but we did make it to the top.

There was a local, I assume, group that had climbed from the Zermatt side already at the top when we got there and another group joined us a bit later. Watching and listening to that local group made me realize how stressed I am when I climb mountains like this. I wasn't feeling extremely shaken but compared to the locals, who were cracking jokes and behaved as if it was just another day at the office made me feel like a nerve-wreck. The pounding headache that had appeared over the last couple of hundred vertical meters didn't exactly help either.

Jiri and I knew we were slow and that it would be a long way down. Our moods weren't lifted by the fact that we had to cross the glacier after it receiving the whole day's worth of direct sunlight. A slow but rather steady series of downclimbing, rappels and traverses commenced. Meter by meter we made it closer to the glacier and eventually reached it. What is described as nice and short ridge climb by many sources sure didn't feel like it. Navigating down the rather steep and narrow snow ridge wasn't very comfortable and to get back down to a bergschrund we had crossed on the way up we used a couple of Jiri's titanium ice screws. I was able to lower Jiri with our rope and the ice screw anchor but then had to downclimb the same section. I don't usually like to attend courses but at that time I was very happy that I had attended an ice climbing course when we lived in Romania. Stepping down that steep ice slope required pretty solid crampon technique.

Now the final hurdle was crossing the melting glacier safely. We roped up and headed down, because there wasn't anything else we could have really done. Navigating around and over crevasses and down some steeper sections finally led us to the very last section of the glacier. The glacier at that point seemed to be pretty thin already so a crevasse fall wasn't very likely. However during the day the glacier had turned into a slope of small parallel rivers running down the mountain. There didn't seem to be any danger there but it demonstrated very well how much melting was taking place and how unstable the glaciers most likely are.

After reaching dry land we packed our crampons and took a break for at least half an hour before continuing our way back down. I quite often don't take breaks while hiking and especially not on the way down or towards the end of the days. This often leads to long, painful and boring "death marches", which isn't quite what I want to do with my free time. Of course sometimes these death marches are necessary because of lack of time but I definitely should learn to take more breaks when I can afford to. The break we took there after being done with the glacier definitely lifted our spirits and made the last hour or so of the hike almost pleasant. Roughly fifteen hours after leaving our tent we made it back, quite tired but happy.

We certainly didn't hurry the next morning as our only goal was to make it back to the car and perhaps drive to our next climbing destination before the evening. Our serene morning was abruptly disturbed by a guy yelling at us from a nearby rock ridge. It took me a second or two to gather my wits as he was asking for our names. I thought that it was someone from the hut asking for our names to report us to the police because of our illegal camping (not requiring as much mental acrobatics as you might think, because this has happened before). For a brief moment I thought about giving him fake names but decided against it. It turned out to be the right thing to do because it quickly we found out that Jiri's wife had panicked a bit and had called rescue on us because she hadn't heard from us.

Jiri had told his wife that she should call the rescue service if she didn't hear from us on Wednesday. The instructions hadn't apparently been quite as clear as everyone would have hoped so she called the rescue service way earlier than we would have anticipated. The staff at the hut took Jiri with them to make a call back to his wife and the rescue was thankfully called off before anyone started looking for us further. We packed our things and walked back down to the car, calling our wives on the way to make sure everyone was on the same page!

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