New Year's Eve on the Mittlerer Durchstieg
A hard ice route to close out the year, with a rappel I'd rather not think about.
Machine-translated from the German original. The German version is the one I actually wrote.
New Year’s Eve, and instead of doing something comfortable Maxi and I got on the Mittlerer Durchstieg in the ice arena.
The arena sits opposite the Brunnalm ski area near St. Jakob. The approach is best done on touring skis, and the avalanche forecast deserves to be taken seriously — on the way in, on the way out, and inside the arena itself.
The route was hard. I logged it as WI5. The topos I found afterwards put the Mittlerer Durchstieg considerably lower, at WI3 to WI4+. Either conditions were different that day, or we weren’t in the same line at all. I’m leaving my grade as it stands.
What stayed with me wasn’t the climbing though, it was the rappel after the WI5 section. Grim. I don’t want to write any more about it than that.
It turned into a long day. We fell asleep before midnight and slept through the new year.