Cragging at Gallerie Amden

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.

The views and atmosphere aren't too shabby - especially considering that we are literally right on top of a road (the routes start on the roof of a half tunnel built as avalanche protection).

Björn preparing to come back down.

A common theme: climbers in t-shirts, belayers in down jackets ;-P

Sören.

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 ;-)

In the gravel on the approach.

Björn's macro photography.

At the start of our climb.

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!

Warmup.

Björn.

Nice chimney.

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.

This was one of the harder pitches. Even slightly overhanging in places.

Björn walking up the ramp. The only section with a bit questionable loose rock.

Björn on the sharp end.

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 ;-)

Family picture!

Coming back down.

Quite steep!

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?

Flowery meadows in September.

Random munition lying around.

Some sections were a bit swampy. Bare minutes before we got back onto the gravel road and our bikes I made a single misstep onto grass that was less solid than it looked ;-/

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.

It's a pretty wide wall with lots of (potential) routes. But apparently the rock quality isn't consistently great.

Björn.

Sören.

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?

IIRC This might have been the crux pitch?

Super fun dihedral.

The second but last 5c pitch.

Quite overhanging for the grade, but on friendly jugs. Fun!

"Langi Zyt" and "Linke Südwand" share a route book and merge near the top.

Family photo.

Final pitch to the top. At this point three routes converge and we weren't 100% sure we climbed the right one. They are all similar in grade, so I guess it doesn't really matter.

Almost there!

Preparing to rappel.

Björn celebrating.

Lunch break on a nice ledge on the way down.

I eye-balled the other routes that we crossed during the rappel. They look eminently doable and worth returning for.

This guy (or his cousins) accompanied us for quite some time.

Mission accomplished.

Dent du Géant (4013m)

The circus continued on our second day in the Mt Blanc area. After the previous day's aborted attempt we decided to try the same route again instead of going with our original plan of climbing the Tour Ronde North Face. There were a few reasons for this: July is very late in the year for climbing a North face. While this year had unusual conditions and we were cautiously optimistic that it could have worked, looking at the face revealed that crossing the Bergschrund might be an issue and that some sections of the route only had very little snow left. On top of that I had zero intention of experiencing the same kind of idiot traffic jam in a more serious undertaking. So we went up towards the Dent du Géant once more, hoping that an earlier arrival by starting from the hut instead of the cable car would give us a chance of climbing the route in peace.

Early morning view of the objective from our dormitory.

Alpinisti this way. Also everbody else who's drawn by the fame of Mt Blanc...

Just past the Bergschrund.

We had a leisurely late 6am breakfast. Crossing the glacier and negotiating the mixed climbing section at the beginning of the route only took us a little over one and a half hours. Knowledge of the route; going ropeless and improved acclimatization were all helping. When we got to the ledge that marks the beginning of the rock section we encountered a queue of people yet again. At least this time it was progressing - albeit slowly. We still had to wait for nearly an hour, all the while more people showed up and queued behind us. It was already devolving into yet another clusterfuck.

Changing layers of clothing.

Steep no-fall zone all the way to the rock.

I like how you can see the summit literally fore-"shadowed" on the glacier below us. Mt Blanc in the background.

The climb started out orderly enough, but it didn't even last for one or two pitches before people started getting impatient and attempting crazy overtaking maneuvers. Reckless chaos ensued. Parties were climbing stacked four levels deep. Ropes tangling, people (intentionally or not) stealing one another's gear, stepping onto hands and feet, cursing and swearing, overloading anchors by crowding five parties on a single one. Utter madness. At some point we were sandwiched between two mountain guides with their respective clients and one of the guides was practically begging another party to behave and not climb on top of everyone else. No such luck. Some of the guides were themselves part of the problem. They promised their clients a roundtrip from cable car to cable car. This gave them a fairly limited time window in which to complete the climb, so they were trying to overtake and rush their clients and everyone else.

Well tracked snow.

Waiting around for our turn to climb.

Finally progressed to the front of the queue. Arne is already belaying me. I still found the time to take a picture because I had to wait for people to clear the pitch ahead of me.

Once we reached the summit ridge things got even worse. The mountain features a dual summit, you first scale the lower one, then the second, higher one. After which you have to return to a spot between the summits in order to rappel. This meant that we now had traffic in both directions, making things even more chaotic and dangerous. Some parties abandoned their ropes completely and went free solo. Again, one of the more respectable guides was begging them to be safe and follow reasonable climbing practices, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. The mountain comes equipped with two parallel rappel routes (apparently it regularly sees a lot of traffic?). Even so, the rappels turned into another bottleneck. When it was Arne and my turn to rappel, some shoving assholes behind us were making up stories about wives in labor and other such shit to skip the queue.

The queue in the other, the "up" direction.

Massive granite slab.

Arne. Trying to stay warm while waiting around.

By some miracle (and solid climbing and rappel technique practiced on hundreds of outings) we made it back down safely and quickly. All I wanted at that point was to get out of there. If this experience was at all indicative of the Mt Blanc area I'm done with it. I'll happily climb my tier two mountains while ya'll can shove each other off the famous prestige routes, thank you very much. Yes, mountaineering history was written here. And yes, these are some spectacular mountains and climbs. But the spectacle isn't worth it by a long shot. I'm much more proud and much happier with accomplishments like the Nesthorn. Not 4000m (but close), not famous. Not climbed in months and we broke trail all the way instead of waddling up in a queue of guided tourists.

Tracks across tha glacier back to the hut.

More waiting. Feels like that is most of what we did on this climb.

Pretty steep.

Anyway. We did meet some nice people on the mountain as well. Had some good chats with some of the guides and the Italian husband and wife team also returned for a second attempt and made it this time around. Arne was, as always, a super reliable and rock solid climbing partner. We worked efficiently and maintained our safety standards even amongst all the chaos. So that part was great.

Somewhat hard to see, but this guy was just handing out the rope to his lead climber. No attempt at belaying, the lead was free soloing the entire route. The lead was also the biggest asshole on the mountain that day, recklessly climbing over everybody else, even when asked not to.

Crawling mass of people.

Frayed fixed ropes. The mountain would be much nicer if these didn't exist. Would make for more enjoyable and more challenging climbing and hopefully keep some of the more clueless aspirants away.

Unfortunately I failed to take a picture, but one anchor had a metal chain partially melted away and all the nuts and bolts welded together in blobs of metal. Only explanation I can come up with is lightning strikes. If you are the only piece of metal on an exposed ridge, you get electrocuted ;-P

Arne. Waiting for the last pitch to the summit.

Summit!

Rochefort Ridge.

As close as we ever made it to the Madonna statue that marks the summit.

Waiting our turn to rappel.

Waiting our turn to rappel.

The rappels were actually quite steep and fun!

Back at the hut.

Crowds waiting for the cable car. "Waiting" is really the theme of the trip.

Poco Loco burger in Chamonix. The town was overrun with people parading around their mountaineering gear. The Arc'teryx Academy was in full swing.