People have been complaining a lot about this summer...was there one?? But actually the end of August and the whole of September have offered quite good conditions and rather sunny weekends. And even now in October the weather is still good enough to keep going high in the mountains.
Weather forecast however is not that good for Sunday, and rain is predicted for the afternoon...therefore we try to choose a rather short tour that would be doable also in not perfect conditions. And therefore we choose the Allalinhorn, from the Hohlaubgrat.
Starting point for the tour is the Britannia hut, which is now closed. Hence we need to take a few extra stuff like gas cooker, stove and food for dinner and breakfast. Also, we decide to walk up to the hut all the way from Saas-Fee, passing via Plattjen...no way we are going to take the cable car up! The walk to the hut is actually rather nice, and the colours of autumn on the trees and in the air are always nice to look at.
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| On the way up |
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| The hut |
As expected at the hut we find nobody, and the winter room is all for us. Evening goes by with melting lots and lots of snow, cooking and having lots of tea...hoping for the weather to be acceptable in the morning.
...and the reality seems to be worse than the forecast. We leave the hut at 5:00am and we realize that a dusting of new snow came overnight plus it is quite foggy. Well, at least the path to the glacier is well marked so we can get until there. On the glacier we put crampons on, rope up and off we go. We can't see any star in the sky and not even the contour of the mountains against the sky...which means cloud are quite low. Orientation is rather difficult as we only see white (the ice) and black (all the rest). We can only now if we are goign up or down. At some point we start crossing same relatively large crevasse and see a light on the top of the ridge...that's strange, we should not be crossing large crevasses to get to the Hohlaubgrat....and what the hell is that light up there?
Then we realize that light is the Mittelallalin station and that we were going too much to the right on the glacier (having the hut in the back). So we go back a little bit and start traversing to the left. At this point the sky clears up a bit and we can see contours of mountains around so orientation becomes much easier.
There is not really a defined route to approach the ridge so we just pick up the shortest line (that means steepest...) to make sure we reach the ridge before the cloud come in again. Getting lost on a ridge is much more difficult than on a glacier without tracks. The ridge is longer than we expected and there seem to be a decent amount of new snow which makes things a little bit more tiring. However, going up this ridge presents no technical problem whatsoever, except for a couple of places where it might get a little bit steeper or a bit more risky in case of a fall.
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| The whole ridge...well almost |
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| The sun starts to shine on the Mischabel group |
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| Morning has gold in its mouth |
Then finally the last part of the ridge comes where we have to climb a little bit. According to the guidebook it's only 3om of climbing. We decide to move together with running belay. There are in total 5 bolts, well actually two are just long metal rods bent by time and snow. It's a little bit more tricky than I expected because there is ice all over the place and one section of the climb is actually a steep white ice slope. Well at least we get to have some fun :). And at the end of this short climb we easily reach the summit! And this is now the 7th 4000m summit of the season (even though for most of them I still did not write a post...). Views are amazing. We can see the Rimpfischhorn, Strahlhorn, Liskamm, Monte Rosa, Matterhorn...and I could go on for a few another lines. Forecasts said it would have been cloudy since the morning, and in fact there were clouds, but actually very few. And in any case we were higher than them. With absolutely no wind it's a real pleasure to sit up here and contemplate this wonderful view.
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| Rule number one... |
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| First mountain is the Rimpfischhorn...from now on it's in my to do list!! |
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| View towards north |
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| Looking back on the last part of the ridge |
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| Anyone knows what that spiky thing in the centre is??? |
In less then one hour we walk down to Mittelallalin station via the normal route, where we see two other groups that are attempting the summit, one of them even with skis...and seeing all the people skiing on the always open Saas-Fee ski resort makes me start thinking about the coming ski-touring season!
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