Wild High Level Route - day 4 - Wildstrubel (Thursday 20th March)
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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