Fresh snow in the mountains on a weekend in September. A perfect weather forecast for Sunday. So where does one go? Gallerie Amden is the easy to reach, go-to crag for folks from Zürich. So this where Björn and I headed. And what felt like half of the rest of the city as well. The atmosphere was almost like a day on the beach. People enjoyed just hanging out with beautiful views of lake Walen. We stuck to the easier routes in the 6a range. As is typical for crags with a wide range of grades the easy ones ended up being the most polished and in any case presented a good challenge for us. The gallerie is notorious for crimpy small holds and fairly long routes - we needed the full length of my 70m rope. Good times.
BuschnicK
Outdoor enthusiast, programmer, opinionated babbling bloke.
2024-09-15
Cragging at Gallerie Amden
2024-09-07
Barglen (2669m) via "Jesi", 190m, 6a
Björn and I decided to explore a new (to us) climbing area up at Melchsee-Frutt. The approach is a bit longer than usual, so we took Björn & Sandra's "Büssli" (VW van) and mounted our bicycles on the backrack. I have been to Melchsee a bunch of times, but got there by either walking up or taking the cable car. This time we drove the winding mountain road. It requires good timing as it changes direction every hour, going uphill on even hours and downhill on odd ones. Even before we reached the small road we passed crowded parking lots and lots of tents. The Modular Music Festival in full swing - drugged or hung over people walking about even in the early morning when we arrived ;-)
We mounted our bikes at the Melchsee and proceeded to pedal up towards the Tannensee. A surprising number of people walked around there too. Drawn by the "Plauschfischen", a invitation by the local fishery club. We kept biking until the road turned to gravel and eventually became too steep and loose for my bike. At that point only a few hundred meters of road were left anyways, so we proceeded by foot in pathless terrain. A long traverse under the looming cliff of the Hohmad. We couldn't find an obvious approach to gain it, so at some point we just scrambled up the steep gravel. We chose a spot that made us head straight towards a climbing party already on the wall. On noticing us, one of the climbers shouted down to us from about two pitches up. He appeared to be the local expert and was keen to demonstrate it. After he learned what route we were aiming for he lectured us on how it wasn't the best choice for that grade and recommended a different one. Björn and I consulted for a bit but in the end decided to stick with our original plan. We still learned of www.barglen.ch from the encounter, a great resource on routes in the area. Thanks!
By 11 o'clock we had finally reached the start of our route and started climbing. This went very smooth and we did enjoy the route. If the others are even better as the guy claimed, we should definitely return for more! Our rappel line crossed a few other, harder, routes and we eye balled them, trying to gauge whether they'd be within our abilities. "Dä Burner" (topo1, topo2) looked particularly nice.
We made it back down by 3 pm and this time decided to traverse directly at the base of the cliff. There are a bunch of caves cut into the rock and quite a few of them were busy with climbers preparing their bivouacs for the night. Nice spot! Sheltered from the elements with great mountain panorama to fall asleep to. Unfortunately the weather forecast for the next day predicted thunderstorms and lots of rain. Wishing people the best of luck we reached our bikes and sped down the mountain back to the Melchsee village. Unfortunately (fortunately?) our timing was almost maximally bad wrt the road opening times. So we bridged the better part of an hour by sitting in the sun and enjoying a beer on the terrace of a café ;-)
A clean on-sight for the both of us. On a great weather day. In great atmosphere and mood. What more could you wish for?
2024-08-31
Läged Windgällen West (2'572m) via "Langi Zyt", 200m, 6a
Björn and I went up to the Läged Windgällen. I had been there just a few weeks prior with Arne. At the time we had to bail before we even started climbing - just when we had reached the base of the wall, a thunderstorm was rolling in and got everything thoroughly wet. This time the weather was great. In fact, up high was where it was bearable, the valleys were way too hot. The one successful climb I had already done on this mountain was the Zentralpfeiler. I remembered that as a pretty old school mountaineering route, requiring strong nerves on so-so rock and sparse protection. Luigi had recently returned with somebody else, climbing yet another route, and reported that it was "mental": sparsely protected and with a lot of exposure. So it was that Björn and I came prepared, bringing extra trad gear and expecting the worst.
We would be surprised! It turned out to be a complete plaisir climb. The rock quality, while not bomber everywhere, was solid enough for an alpine climb. And the protection and diffiulty grade were well within our comfort zone so that we didn't place any additional gear. We made good time up and down and were surprised that the route book, although being shared between two routes, had only few entries dating all the way back to 2005. Great day out! Can I haz moar of these pleaz?
2024-07-20
Sweden
For our family summer vacation this year we went exploring in Sweden. We took the nighttrain from Zürich to Hamburg, rented an RV there and then drove North to Sweden via Denmark. We had no plan on where to go. To the extent that at some point we told the kids that we'd be crossing a long bridge in a few minutes - and then the bridge turned out to be a ferry. Talk about a vacation planned out in meticulous detail ;-P
Our modus operandi was to just sort of eyeball the map for landmarks that looked interesting to us and then drive to the nearest campground in the area. We stayed for two nights on every campground so that we'd have a full day for exploring on each. The kids were great and quickly made friends wherever we went. Often finding other German or Swiss kids. But even if they didn't share a language things worked out.
We had loose plans of meeting up with five different groups of friends. Two of which actually panned out. Thomas and Stine live in Hamburg but had existing commitments on the two weekends we passed through. Linus and Gintare live in Stockholm but had family emergencies preventing travel. Björn and Sandra are friends from Zürich who were driving around Norway at the time. We thought we might meet up on their way back "down", but the timing didn't work out. Bastian and Rebecca and kids were doing their traditional summer vacation in a rented country house. We stayed in their front yard for a few nights and had a great time together. Including visits to the nearby lake and Astrid Lindgren park. Finally Bernd and Anna and kids were coming down from the very North of Sweden where they spent a few weeks hiking and camping in the wilderness. At this point they are Sweden professionals, having thoroughly fallen in love with Lapland and travelling there often. We spent several nights together on different campgrounds on our shared journey back. This was particularly valuable time for me as they are old and good friends from Münster who we hadn't seen in enough years that we hadn't even met each others younger kids yet. Great to finaly remedy that! Hopefully there won't be many years before we see each other again!
This was the first time we travelled in an RV and it turned out pretty well. I'd not rent the exact model again - it had a fatal design flaw where a foldable shower (nobody needs or uses that in a cramped RV!) caused one of the beds to be too short and worse, have a hard wooden board right through the middle of it. Whoever came up with that design clearly has never tried to sleep in it. Such a stupid and unnecessary mistake.
We of course couldn't have known this ahead of time, but it turned out that we had fantastic weather for pretty much the entire duration of our visit. A small handful of rainy days, nothing but sunshine and blue skies for the rest. So we could easily have stayed in tents as well. The RV was meant as our rainy day backup solution - you don't want to be stuck in a tiny tent with cranky kids for an entire day.
Overall a great vacation. I think we'll do this kind of road tripping again. And making a point of visiting old friends along the way!