SnowSlider - Blogging From the mountains by ise

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.

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ascent : 985m , descent : 497 m

Leaving the Wildhorn hut for the second and final time we headed for the Schneiderhorn (2937m) via the Schnidejoch. The climb on the Schneiderhorn was a little awkward in places and we fitted Couteaux (also known as ski-crampons or harscheisen) to the skis to prevent us slipping on the packed snow and ice of the summit ridge. Reaching the summit we found a 500m powder pitch down to the Alpage du Rawil.

The photo is of Thomaz the Slovenian guide who accompanied us for the trip.

GPS / Google Earth Track File : download here


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ascent : 1063m , descent : 1063m

Tuesday morning was rather better weather and leaving the hut at 0800 we set off for the Wildhorn summit at 3245m. This is a reasonable climb from the hut although the last few metres seemed hard work. Unfortunately, as we were a few metres from the summit a helicopter came in and dropped some skiers at the summit, that’s a bit soul destroying really, we’d climbed over 1600m over two days and spent the night in a damp hut and endured some bad weather so a heliskier doesn’t look to have put much effort in. I’m pretty sure our descent was all the more fun for the effort we’d made though.

On the way down some of us stopped and climbed part of the Schneiderhorn until the bad weather and cloud came in, so we turned around and skied out to the Wildhorn Hut again.

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ascent : 719 m, descent : 0 m
This was the first day of our Wild High Level Tour with Claire and Neil with Julie-Ann Clyma as guide along with some other clients. The original plan was to ride the lifts at Les Diablerets, ski down to the Col du Sanetch and climb the Arpelistock but this wasn’t really practical as weather conditions were appalling and the avalance risk was too high. So, the fallback was to take a trains and taxis around to Lenk then get a taxi up to the roadhead at Iffigenalp (1584m), from there we climbed in fairly poor conditions with high humidity to the Wildhorn Hut (2303m).

We were the only group staying in the Wildhorn Hut, not surprising given the weather really! It was a cold and damp location really but adequate to spend the night.