First go at ice: Linker Zottenfall

Where the ice started. Not much kit, lightweight axes, and we got on it anyway.

Machine-translated from the German original. The German version is the one I actually wrote.

The first attempt at ice climbing at all.

We had little with us and the wrong things: lightweight axes of the sort you take on a glacier route, and correspondingly few screws. For a WI3+ that just about works, and with every swing you notice the tools weren’t built for it.

It was clear quickly that more would come of it. Ice climbing is absurd — you climb something that won’t be there in spring, and everything depends on how well you read what’s in front of you.

Everything that followed on ice started here.