The goal was to summit Speer (1950m). Ben, Gintare, Linus and me. Linus and Gintare couldn't figure out their alarm clock and so Ben and me had to wait for about an hour at the trailhead in Amden. Weather was nice and sunny with no wind. Good in theory, in practice the sun turned the snow into wet and heavy slush which made progress difficult at times. And there was a lot of snow - 2m signposts were completely buried. We could see quite a few fresh avalanches and witnessed an impressively big one live. Kinda scary.
Since trailmarkers were completely invisible under the snow we had to find our own way. We followed the map and traversed a very steep northern slope covered in a hard crust of ice. Tough to negotiate and walking with your feet bent at a 45° sideways angle hurts your ankles after a while. We decided to descent into the valley and climb up again instead of continuing the traverse. Wasted a lot of time with that so we ultimately decided to forgo our summit attempt and head back instead. Turned out to be a wise choice because even so we were still hiking at dusk.
We climbed 880m, descended 1380m and covered a distance of around 15km. It was a great trip with beautiful vistas, secluded silence and fun companions (and a very international expedition to boot! USA, Finland, Lithuania and Germany ;-)).
our snow shoe trip wasn't quite as impressive but lots of fun.
ReplyDeletesnow shoeing is great!!