Climbing Mittagflue, "Heidi mir wei di" ~400m, 5c+

Luigi and I went climbing on Friday. The weather was just too good to pass up. Our original plan was to go all the way up to Sommerloch at the Grimsel pass. The pass is still closed for the winter, but accessible all the way up to the lake. However, once we got there it was obvious that we couldn't make it to our destination because there was still too much snow. So we pivoted to climbing the lake slabs. We hiked across the dam and started making our way around the lake. The bridge for the footpath was still out, so we had to cross the creek from rock to rock. The closer we got to the wall, the more it seemed that climbing would again not be feasible. Too much snow and moisture on the rock. Indeed, we ended up turning around.

Räterichsbodensee. We originally wanted to climb higher from here, but that looked pointless from this vantage point.

Overflow drain of the dam. Reminded me of this short film.

We turned around before crossing this dicey slab of snow. The wall was wet and icey anyways.

Luckily Grimsel offers lots of fine granite climbing, so all we had to do was drive back down for a few minutes and take our pick. We chose the Mittagflue, easy slabs that I have only visited once before. The wall was already crawling with climbers. At least a dozen parties. Including a team from Stuttgart that was hiking in with us. Smalltalk on the approach ;-) We chose to climb "Heidi mir wei di" ~400 meters or 9 pitches with sections up to 5c+. Even in my current unfit state this was easy cruising and we were making good progress. I had to climb the second pitch twice because Luigi dropped a biner which I went and retrieved.

View towards Guttannen.

The wall.

The climbers.

About half way up the wall we must have lost our way. The route is relatively sparsely protected to begin with, but even by those standards it suddenly was extremely runout. Some study of the topo revealed that we had accidentally crossed into a neighboring route. No big deal, as we could traverse back into our route and still climbed all the interesting, i.e. hardest pitches of it.

Runout? There are at least two quickdraws between Luigi and me!

Luigi in one of the few steep sections of the entire wall.

Top!

Once we topped out we had to decide whether to hike out or rappel back down. Since neither one of us knew the hiking trail and it requires rappels as well, we decided to just rappel back down the entire route. Luigi accidentally dropped one of his climbing shoes from the very top. Quite sobering to watch it tumble down the wall for what felt like an eternity. Anyway, we could see it land on an outcrop a few hundred meters below and we managed to retrieve it during the rappel.

Summit snack.

Preparing to go down.