The Aletschorn has a reputation for being a long, long way from anywhere! Most people will take two, sometimes three, days to climb it, staying at the Oberaletsch Hut to summit via the South West ridge. The SW ridge is the new “normal” route as the Mittelaletsch Bivouac was destroyed in an avalanche making the old normal route somewhat obsolete. Sebastian and I decided to traverse the mountain in a day / night as some form of sado-masochistic endurance test.
We started at 11:00pm in the village of Egga and began with a frustrating and tiring climb in ski boots, carrying our skis through rotten, soft snow to reach the Hotel Belalp. From here we descended in crampons a steep and narrow gully above precipitous cliffs (skiing seemed like a bad idea) before traversing to the glacier. Finally, we began to make steady progress and passed the hut and continued on as the terrain became increasingly steep. Conditions were excellent and with couteaux (crampons for skis) we were able to skin up the steepest of inclines.
We were feeling pretty good, but once we hit an elevation of about 3,500m it started to get really tough. It was our first mountain of the Spring / Summer season so neither of us was well acclimatised. We eventually made it to the start of the SW ridge and swapped to crampons and hoisted our skis on our packs, just as the sun was starting to rise. It had taken just over nine hours to reach this point and we had climbed about 2,500m.
The climb to the summit was easy terrain so we climbed un-roped which allowed me to take some photos as the sun rose. I was a little stronger than Sebastian and went ahead but I was having to “chunk it down” into manageable sections, sometimes as little as mentally saying to myself “just reach that rock 10m away”. The final 450m to the summit took just under two hours and every step was a struggle. We summited after 12 hours of effort.
We then began the descent down the North West ridge which required some delicate climbing over rock ridges and whilst there was a fair degree of exposure, I felt pretty comfortable for my first outing of the year. We saw two other mountaineers front pointing (sticking the sharp, front teeth of your crampons into the ice) and crabbing sideways across the face below us. There was obviously some unseen danger below them and their position looked precarious – they were unprotected.
We decided to take a conservative approach and put in an ice screw and Sebastian lowered me down to take a close look. Below was a huge crevasse, the bottom of which I could not see but the upper edge was overhanging and so unless you were on top of it, it was impossible to spot. We worked our way to the right, front pointing, but with the protection of a screw. We then abseiled off a Abalakov thread which is made by drilling two holes in the ice and then threading the rope through to avoid having to leave behind a very expensive ice screw.
Safely across the crevasse we then had to traverse another ridge before finally being able to put our skis on. The ski down stands out as one of the most memorable of my time in the mountains. A descent of 1,700m on perfect spring snow through one of the most spectacular landscapes imaginable.
The last few days have been incredibly and un-seasonally warm and so the usually jagged and sharply defined seracs and crevasses have all melted to give the impression that they were painted by Salvador Dali in the style of his “dripping clocks.” Interspersed between these soft, smooth icy formations were small lakes of cobalt blue. I could have spent an entire week photographing this incredible landscape but being late in the day and with the sun now intense the threat from wet avalanches and rockfall was acute. I could not recommend enough a trip to the Aletsch Glacier and a gentle ski tour through this incredible landscape. Eventually we found our exit from the glacier but the only way out was another skin of 300m in the baking sun and wet avalanches representing a credible threat. We took the safest line and needed just under the hour to climb what would normally take me about 20 to 25 minutes. We finished in the ski resort of Rierderalp and a cable car, bus and train took us to Blatten and then finally a taxi back to the car. In total we covered 32km, climbed 3,600m of vertical and consumed 3,380 calories in 18 hours. Not a bad way to start the season!
Expeditions 