19/04/2019
Here's a story about Monday:
The alarm went off at 1:30 after I had seen the hands strike 1. Must have been nervous. Skinning at 2:40 into a light horizontal snow fall, we arrived at the bergschrund having glimpsed 4 head torches in the couloir but rarely seeing their tracks. I thought I saw someone fall down the couloir, their light plummeting quickly 400m or so, followed by a frantic scanning from party members shining their torches back down. Whether a dropped torch or a trick of the eye due to staring into the driving snow for two hours I don't know, but we were spooked for some time that we may be party to a different kind of mission this morning.
As the sun rose our comfort increased, and the first third climbed in good neve. The central 300-400m that followed was unstable, dangerously sugary snow. Our pace slowed, we pitched the last three lengths as confidence in the snow had waned, although these were in fact better than the ones before.
The wind gusted some at the col. Pretty exhausted, stressed and cold we walked along the arete towards the summit before a few more gusts made us think otherwise.
I dropped my water bottle-all our remaining water- at the col. That leads to quite a drop in performance it turns out.
We did two rapps over the chunky stuff, and where the sun had been bathing stepped into our skis. Nothing like 47-50 deg to snap you out of a dehydrated daze! The snow was perfect for this, grippy and consistent. We skied 350m before having to transfer to the other couloir. This had funky snow so we resumed the faffing of trying to reach abseil anchors on skis and make transitions on this ridiculous slope. Finally down to a point we could ski out and relief washed over us. Even better once we got some water at the couvercle refuge. New lesson might be to have two small bottles on the mountain as it's not the first time I've dropped one!
- Martin GB thanks for realizing this line 🙏🏻
- sorry for being late
- thanks for the lessons in steep skiing over the years!
#60%ofthelineallthetime
