Biting and Chewing

I didn’t actually bite off more than I could chew, but I didn’t say ‘no, that’s too much’ either. Suffice to day, I didn’t make it through my partner’s project to climb the Piz Disgrazia from the Swiss side last weekend.

It was going to be long. The “normal”-ish way to go in winter, from Switzerland, takes you up to a hut called Forno that’s closed, so we had to find another route. We went to a hut called Albigna, which was already a 4 1/2 hour hike, mostly with the skis on our back walking through avalanche destroyed woods.

From there, the next day, the route went up 1,300 meters over the Passo dal Cantun at 3’150 meters, then down to around 2’600 meters, then back up the Monte Sissone at 3328 meters (with a ridge to climb) and down to a bivouac. The down on the south side of Sissone also includes a steep ski that may or may not have had some snow still on it (I never got that far). The second day was supposed to be around 1,900 meters of up, all together. And I’m neither acclimatized or particularly in shape for that long of a ski.

(After the bivouac, they planned to go up the Disgrazia, then reverse the route back but descending the valley where the closed Forno hut is found.)

I was with a group that said they’d go “slowly” but we still averaged 400 meters per hour for the first climb with quite a bit of distance involved (I always laugh at that. I mean, you can go for hours and hours in the Netherlands and not go up one single meter, so that ‘how much can you go up per hour’ depends on how much distance is involved, too.) I got to the top of the pass and wanted to throw up. I also had problems with my boots. They require thick socks in them not to rub in all sorts of wrong ways, and in the spring it’s just too hot to wear that sort of socks. My feet wind up sweating which causes other problems than the rubbing boots.

The thing is that my boots are only very comfortable when they are on a flat surface. The fact of walking for hours on the edges and having the angle held in place by my ankles and shins put a lot of pressure on my shins. (When there’s powder, or a track to walk in, the skis can be relatively flat even when going sharply up hill). Spring skiing is usually walking up on a more or less frozen surface and then, when possible, trying to ski down someplace where the sun has hit it a bit to soften the surface. My boots are uncomfortable for spring skiing. I now have lovely, deep bruises on my shins.

I also don’t really like spring skiing. It’s warm down below with pretty flowers everywhere and green trees, and going up to the sterile mountains, while beautiful, is hard to motivate for. Add on the looooooooong bits of walking with skis on your backpack, which is a ton of weight, and the fact that the huts are closed so you have to bring your own food, and spend hours melting snow to eat it, I mean, it’s pretty but not that pretty.

I wouldn’t have chosen a project this long and hard on my own. Not being particularly in shape for long hauls like that, maybe 1,300 meters per day would have been reasonable. This tour was 1,200m day one, 1,900m day two, and 1,700 day three, and spending quite a bit of time at 3,000 meters and above, so enough altitude to cause headaches and whatnot if you’re not acclimatized.

So after the first big “up” I realized I couldn’t make it much further and my partner very, very kindly agreed to come down with me. I don’t know how tired he might have been because he would never admit to not being able to do the whole tour. I get the feeling he was suffering, too, and was maybe a bit happy to have me as an excuse to go down.

Foro didn’t come with me this time, and now I’m going home to spend the day with him, and suffer no more.