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I invited my friend Erik Massih from Sweden for my birthday party two months ago and while we were discussing other things Erik mentioned he had booked a sales meeting in Meiringen, Switzerland in June. We spoke a lot about climbing in the Swiss and somewhere in the process we made this plan for climbing there for the weekend before his meeting.
We discussed everything about climbing in Wenden, Graue Wand and Grimselpass but as it always goes the plan didn’t go quite as it was planned. This time the weather was crap in the Swiss and we had to go for one of our plan B’s which was climbing in Presles, France. I’ve been there once before in 2005 and I’d loved it then. Erik had always wanted to go there but never managed so. And now it was only a short 500km drive from Zurich to get there. It didn’t hurt the weather looked most reliable there too.
It was quite a lot of travelling for two days of good climbing but well worth it. Thanks Erik!
The pics and a short trip report are now online.
http://www.patagonia.fi/blog/?page_id=379
We had plenty of both good and bad luck in this trip. I don’t know which we had more but things never seemed to go as they were planned. But I guess that’s how it is in Patagonia. Most plans end up being changed. It’s only the stuff that get’s done what is reported in the press.
The good luck part of the trip was definitely with the weather. We had two really good weather windows during our trip. But the bad luck part was that we totally missed the first window because I was sick. I had two days of diaharrea, some fever and one week of malicious throat infection with thick green slime. I felt like I had to throw up my lungs every morning for one week. I tried all I could to speed up the recovery: eating antibiotics and all sorts of pills but nothing really helped since it was a virus. With bad weather being sick would have been much more tolerable but with blue skies and little wind… It really made me think of Alanis Morissette and her song Ironic.
Luckily we got a second chance and in the second window we got two summits done. We climbed Aguja Guillaumet via the Brenner ridge (6b, 350m) on February 19th and Media Luna via Rubio y Azul (6c, 350m) on February 21st. The Guillaumet climb was a shortish day from Paso Superior but the Media Luna was really at the end of our limits regarding endurance. We climbed the Media Luna on the last day of good weather in a 24 hour round trip from the Bridwell camp. The climb itself was not that long but the approach was 7 hours of hiking both ways.
Here is one teaser picture. More pictures to come once I get them sorted out.
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