Today’s music brought to you, and me, by Kinderzimmer Productions.
Compared to our usual ideal case scenario of not having to do much more than fall out of bed to get to the mountain, the drive to Kaunertal is long. Like, over an hour. It involves lots of hairpin turns and several tunnels. The frog on the dashboard was nodding its head to the music. I wasn’t sure if I was feeling sick or not. In the end I figured it would be best to just do the same as the frog.
The Weisseespitze is a peak conveniently located just above a ski area. The north face gets a fair amount of traffic as an easy “iceclimb" but no one got in the way of our skiing today since we are goodfornothing students and went when other people work.
Having spoken to someone who had done it a few days earlier, we decided to save ourselves the painful stairmaster straight through the face and followed the ridge up from the right. It is hard to tell what the snow is like from below since it is not actual snow but glacier ice with some snow sticking to it. Sometimes there is not much at all of said snow and when finding that out it is preferable to have crampons on your feet rather than skis, thus the hesitation.
Cornelius in red, Toby in dark green, me in brighter green.
After the initial rollover the pitch is a fairly consistent 50ish degrees for maybe 250m. It flattens out considerably once you pass a kind of step not quite half way down. The snow was edgeable but hard enough to make falling seem like a not so good idea. In some places we were punching through the crust, which kept things interesting.
I did this in almost powder as one of my last ski days in late spring, pleased to have come full circle. It is not exactly wintery here yet but we do have melting glaciers to crawl around on. So we do.
