“Gently, carefully, just not too fast” I admonish myself as I carefully balance from one rocky peak to the next across a passage of bare ice, if possible without losing contact with the saving rock or wasting too much thought on the bottomless abyss below me. What would I give for a pair of crampons?
How is it that I am striving towards a summit on a 3000-metre high rocky ridge in the onset of winter, far away from everything that is called civilization, and having to weigh up the danger of every step? The last day and a half unfold before my eyes like a movie.
A bus takes me from the Rhineland to Zurich overnight, I don’t sleep a wink and am plagued by coughing fits from a cold that won’t go away, causing the other passengers to give me unnerved looks. But what wouldn’t I give to get to the mountains before the endless European winter? A lot, that’s for sure. I get on my bike in Zurich, with almost 80 km and 1400 meters of altitude ahead of me. Actually not that much… Four hours later, my rear tire is flat, of course I don’t have a repair kit with me and I still have half the distance to go. Some time and even more Swiss Francs are lost…
It’s getting late before I leave the main road and finally find myself in an area that can be called mountainous. There are still hundreds of meters of ascent ahead of me, so it’s little consolation that the majority of the kilometers are done. Riding is out of the question, even when pushing my heavily laden bike I’m slipping backwards more than forwards on a 40 percent slope. I set up my tent in the pitch dark, discouraged, knowing that my destination is a long way off, exhausted as I’ve rarely ever been before.
At dawn I’m on my feet again, wanting to do anything but cycle. It’s a comfort that I can park my bike in the late morning and continue on foot. The gorge at the bottom of the 1500-metre-high cliff is deeply indented and my onward route leads through it. Although I cycled steadily uphill yesterday, the mountain peaks glistening in their snowy dress in the midday sun are still impalpably far above me, which even the clear autumn air is unable to disguise. The snowy slopes that I encounter from 2700 meters upwards are softened and the long traverse to the mountain hut drags on immensely, as I often collapse up to my hips in the snow. Everything from my thighs down is soaked when I get there. I am greeted by a shivering wind high up on the ridge just below 3000 meters and a view of a magnificent, wildly rugged glacier plateau. Wispy clouds are whipped across the glacier by the wind. When the sun breaks through them, it illuminates the landscape as if it were a fiery mirror of the sky above.
By the time I have melted enough snow for drinking water and prepared my rather meagre dinner, the evening is well advanced and I long for a restful night’s sleep. But I hardly get any sleep that night either, I’m too worried about tomorrow’s summit ascent. If the snow slopes freeze over, I’m stuck up here without my ice gear like in a mousetrap, unable to move forwards or backwards.
I set off long before sunrise, out into the moonlit night. The vast glacier surfaces at my feet glow eerily. The snow cover is still soft enough for me to climb up without any problems. I quickly reach the pre-summit. In the distance, the highest peaks of the Bernese Alps take on a delicate pink hue, while the lowlands below are veiled by a billowing blanket of mist. The ridge in front of me becomes narrower and rises much more steeply to the highest point. The upper part is icy, snow fields of considerable steepness end abruptly in the vertical north face. The other side is overgrown and hardly more inviting. The next section will be difficult, perhaps forcing me to turn back if I don’t want to take any irresponsible risks.
Without crampons, the following ice flank can only be overcome if I cut a step into the hard surface for every upward move. I hack steps into the ice for an hour, with the drops of the north face below incessantly remembering me of the exposure, but my gaze remains fixed on the snowy peak, which is no longer far away. And then I finally reach it, too narrow to stand on, but pleasantly warmed by the morning sun and a fantastic view of the surrounding mountain landscape.
12 hours of walking and 140 kilometers on my bike later, I am in Basel, once again on a bus, only this time going in the opposite direction, but this fourth night too I can only doze, shivering from the fierce cold that streams out of my clothes wet from the snow.
Mountaineering is beautiful. And exhausting.