28th April 2008
After a couple of comfortable nights in the Jamtal we headed out for the Wiesbadener Hütte. Again this was a pretty comfortable hut with showers and good facilities. The plan from here was to skin up to the col below the Piz Buin and climb that.
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28th April 2008
This was the first day of a ski tour in the Silvretta region which is somewhere I’d never visited before. I was looking for a tour to hook up with and I recalled seeing a mail from John Stafford of the Eagle Ski Club suggesting a trip with the guide Andy Perkins. John confirmed a slot was still available so I met a group of other Eagles in Landeck on Saturday evening, in fact in a fluke of good timing I bumped into John at the station in Landeck-Zams as he arrived from Innsbruck and I stepped off the postbus from Ischgl. In another coincidence we were joined later by John How whom I’d met back in January at the cabane des Becs de Bosson near Zinal.
Sunday was spent skiing a little in the Ischgl area again so the guys who’d flown in from the UK could get their legs a little. A major bonus was that Jimmy Cliff was playing a concert on the slopes above Samnaun (CH), I’ve actually seen Jimmy Cliff in concert before in Switzerland at the Montreux festival in 2007.
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1st April 2008
David and Chris had planned to do the Bishorn today/tomorrow but the forecast for tomorrow is poor so David suggested the Val Rechy instead, by the time we’d got to the top of the Lona lift I’d persuaded him to try the Lona instead. My plan was to ski into the plateau near the Lac Lona and then climb out over a small col between the Diablon and Sassiniere before skiing down through the Alpage des Torrents to the Moriy Barrage. Incidentally, Chris Longbottom has just bought La Ferme here in Zinal, an old restaurant near the centre of the village and will be opening as the new owner in the summer.
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27th March 2008
ascent : 705m, descent : 1180m
We got a weather forecast the night before in the Wildstrubelhütte which gave a pretty grim picture of the next 48 hours, high winds and snow storms starting in afternoon and worsening on Friday. So, like the start of our tour we had to change plans, originally we would have headed for the Lämmerenhütte and spent the night before making an ascent of the Daubenhorn on Friday with a descent to the Gemmipass and down in the lift to Leukerbad. But, high winds and avalanche risk ruled that out, we guessed the Leukerbad lift was unlikely to be running leaving us trapped up on the Gemmipass and there’s no way to ski down to Leukerbad from there. Another escape route would have been to traverse the Gemmipass and drop down to the Kandersteg where the lift was also likely to be closed and the potential ski descent to Kandersteg ruled out as too risky in the conditions.
So, the plan formed was to ascend first the Weisshorn (2948m) , on the slopes of which the Wildstrubelhütte stands, ski down to the Plaine Morte glacier (2700m) which is at the top of the Crans Montanna ski area, then ascend the Wildstrubel (3243m) itself before skiing down to the Gemmipass (2314m) hopefully outrunning the weather system by making an early start.
And there we are (photo) at 0640 on a cold morning outside the Wildstrubelhütte preparing for the short climb to the Weisshorn summit.
GPS / Google Earth Track File : download here
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