Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Alpine Training week Stubaier glacier part II

And this is what the training near Franz Senn Huette looked like!






















































Alpine Training week Stubaier glacier part I

Right after coming back from a month-long trip to the USA, I had just enough time to wash my mountaineering clothes to pack them again for an alpine training week in Tyrol, Austria. We started with a three day theoretical introduction to rope technique and crevasse rescue, followed by a two day practical training near the Franz Senn Huette in the Stubaital. During the theoretical introduction, Bernhard and I had some time for climbing in and hiking, and during the practical training, we hiked to the Lisenser Ferner glacier in just awesome weather. See some of our impressions of our last week here: Hiking up Hundskopf in the Karwendel mountain range:




















Monday, April 15, 2013

Leobner

Just a couple of pictures from the last weekend. The weather forecast said something like 'very sunny, 20 deg Celsius, no wind, perfect spring weather' and so we hiked up the Leobner in our Gesäuse nationalpark. Well... we had around 0 degrees in 2000 meters and it snowed. But moment we returned to the car, the sun came as promised and so we spent the rest of the day on our motorbikes. Actually, it was a perfect day. :)
















Monday, March 25, 2013

Mayrwipfel

Initially, we planned another bivouac tour somewhere in the mountains, but the weather report turned out to be really bad, with rain and high winds. But sitting at home? Nope. We decided to hike up the Mayrwipfel to do at least some physical activity, and were surprised by the beauty up there.
And I'm highly motivated to do some physical training right now since I've applied for overnight backcountry/wilderness permits in Yosemite National Park, CA. I will have to carry EVERYTHING on my own there... tent, stove, food, bear canister, basic climbing gear... so I've even packed my bag with some extra kilos this time!
















Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Xeis (Gesäuse)

It had been very warm recently, and we tried several times to find some ice for ice climbing... but all water ice is gone now. So we wanted to summit a couple of peaks around, but we had a very high danger of avalanches, making any risky mountain hikes to very dangerous adventures... although we had the brightest sunshine since weeks
. After our summit-less trial of hiking up Dürrenstein we really needed to get out again. On the Dürrenstein tour, we faced massively wet and heavy snow, had to climb over dozens of ground avalanches and slept in a wet bivouac before turning around with reaching the summit on the next day. Frustrating.

Instead, we wanted at least to train a bit for the mountaineering and glacier tours that we want to do in summer and hiked up to Lahngang and to the Spielkogel via Johnsbach and Mödlinger Hütte. The snow was quite good in the cool shadow, but very, very wet and heavy where the sun had already been. Good cardiovascular training, though.



March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau.


March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau.


March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau.


March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau. The final meters to the summit.


March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau.


March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau.


March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau.


March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau.


March 2013. Lahngang, from Kaiserau.


March 2013. Johnsbach - Mödlinger Hütte - Spielkogel.


March 2013. Johnsbach - Mödlinger Hütte - Spielkogel.


March 2013. Johnsbach - Mödlinger Hütte - Spielkogel.


March 2013. Johnsbach - Mödlinger Hütte - Spielkogel.