The inviolable West ridge of the Salbitschijen gets festooned at each break in the weather with slim ropes and shiny carabiners, yet even facing today’s modern equipment the mountain shrugs off many parties to benightment and inevitably failure. We were no such party as pitch by pitch we chipped away at its 36 rope lengths. The high alpine granite cracks bite our skin and tear our rubber climbing soles and the gargantuan length breaks our will but we have been waiting for this weather window for almost 2½ weeks, our ferry is booked and we have no more time its make or break. The drawn topo is an artist’s interpretation of the route, it’s open to speculation and with no English description we wing it getting lost a little but it’s all part of the experience, nobody said it was going to be easy.
This has to be one of the most memorable routes I’ve climbed.
North Ridge of the Piz Badile
The sweeping granite curtain of the Piz Badile’s north ridge extends down to the Sasa Furä Refugio, where we stayed overnight. Our plan was relatively simple but the execution happened to be flawed, we where to walk over from Val Di Mello (Italy) to the Refugio in Switzerland as 2 teams of 2. Me and Anna set pace losing Dan and Lorna as they adjusted their packs, flying up the hill we hit the Italian Refugio after 2 hours, reveling at our eminence we then sat and waited for the others.
40 minutes later and still waiting, have they packed it in and turned back? Anna examined the map suspecting correctly that we had taken the wrong track up the wrong valley, this fuck up turns our break for the border into a 12-hour day crossing shark tooth rocks and dealing with the effects of a higher than usual altitude.
From Dan and Lorna’s perspective, the two of us had abandoned them, it wasn’t until reaching the Swiss Refugio hours before us that they realised we had taken the long way round.
3:45 AM my first official alpine start, breakfast and coffee then sweating it out again for a few hours to reach the base of North Ridge.
Unique pitches escalate our position up the monolith spine for 1200m taking turns out in the lead me and Anna simul-climb for hours, only stopping due to the teams we caught up.
Going up it turns out was the easy part, getting down required vigilance as we take a few wrong turns, our Saviour took the form of a Swiss Mountain guide who summited just behind us, we chatted to him for a while and he seemed impressed about the behemoth 12 hours walk-in, later on when he noticed he couldn’t see us on the decent he popped over a ridge and shouted down, You are on the wrong side of the mountain!
Bottoming out was a relief but with 4 hours of heavy, hot and steep descent still to go we required a rest day the following morn.