Piz Güglia (3380m)

Arne and I had big plans for later in the week. They involved going up high, so we figured an acclimatization trip was in order. Piz Güglia is easy to get to by driving up the Julier pass and hiking from there. It's usually rated a T4 trail all the way to the summit. The mountain is steep in all aspects, so the trail is exposed but not very difficult. Or so we thought. It turned out we were early in the season (in July! This summer is truly fucked) and large patches of snow made the trail all that much harder, more risky and partially entirely inaccessible. We came prepared and brought crampons and ice axes. We didn't use the former, but the latter came in handy. Given the conditions we had the mountain entirely to ourselves for the first half of the trip. We met a lone hiker at the Fuorcla Albana saddle at 2869m altitude. He had come up from the other side and was sitting around, contemplating whether to continue or not. He ended up following our footsteps and route finding and we summitted together. A czech guy living and working in Pontresina, so this was basically his home turf.

Despite the tricky conditions we completed the round trip in very good time and I made it back in time for dinner and bedtime story with the kids. Both Arne and I felt good and strong for the entire day, so we were ready to continue with our bigger objective. Next time ;-P

A hearty breakfast at the best highway stop I know: Heidiland.

The locals jumping around.

Arne.

Sören.

Quick break.

Arne. Pretending to be excited about the trail. Which was still pretty mellow at this point - albeit protected by wires.

This is starting to get more exciting. Absolute no fall zone.

Me coming up.

Arne. You can see a massive wall of snow in the lower left, blocking the trail. We deemed it impassible, so we scrambled up some random couloir to the ridge. Not knowing whether we'd actually be able to continue there, we made sure we'd always be able to retrace our steps back down the steep unprotected scrambling.

The ridge proved very friendly! Good for us.

Summit!

Trying to stick to the trail for the way back down...

...led us back to the big chunk of snow blocking the way. This time we used our ice tools to chop off the corner and squeeze through via some dicey climbing. Note how exposed this is - falling here would very much make it the last fall of your life.

Me pointing out where we squeezed through and scrambled over.

Long way down.

The czech guy in the foreground. Our ridge and summit in the back.

Back at the saddle. With the dangerous parts behind us, it was mostly eating altitude from this point on.

Surfing down the snow. Fun, but surprisingly tiring.