Hello readers. Well were down and finished. Our last day was fantastic but with a very long and tiring walk out. We left the hut about 0600hrs and made good time up to the summit of the Zumsteinspitze. A party of two Italians was already at the top and after a few handshakes we moved in front of them down the knife edged snow ridge toward the next peak. About two thirds of the way down, we tacked an awkward rocky step that switched our minds from "snow mode" to "rock climbing mode". The ridge onto the Dufourspitze was a sheer joy to climb. It mixed both snow and rock and presented challenge after challenge to keep us on our toes. Looking back, we could see the Italians still stuck at the tricky rock step and had we stayed behind them, we would have had to wait nearly an hour. At 0820 we topped out on the roof of our part of the world. In the far distance we could see Mont Blanc, the only peak in the Alps higher than where we stood. We descended a fixed rope to the col between our peak and the Nordend, which looked tantalisingly close. It was a shame not to bag an extra four thousander, but we knew we still had a long way to go. At 0900 we set off down the glacier through stunning and huge crevace systems. Later we continued through the lower complex crevace field, needing to back track a few times as the way ahead was impassable. We crossed a huge boulder field and found the marked path that descends below the Monte Rosa hut. A long and weary walk down, across two more glaciated areas and the separating moraines, and we were finally on the marked path back home. Six and a quarter hours of hard descent saw us back at Rotenboden railway station, where we had started our ascent of the Riffelhorn a week earlier. The train ride down to Zermatt was a real relief for our aching feet. We were tired and dirty, but had grins like Cheshire Cats as we had our first well earned pint and began to talk about our next trip.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:35:03 +0000
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