Trekking to the Ramoljoch Pass in the Austrian Alps

The last two days of our seven-day trek through the Otztal Valley in the Austrian Alps took us up over 4000 feet to the Ramoljoch pass, and then down the other side more than 5000 feet in a single day. It was my favorite part of the trip, as there are no ski resorts in this area, just glaciers and rivers and valleys above the tree line. Also, as you'll see in the photos, the morning of the second day was the climb to the saddle (AKA "joch"), where you get to the top and cross out of the Otztal Valley and into the other valley. 

Here we are after leaving the little village near the base of the valley. The hut is actually visible in this photo, but it's miles away. 

We passed a few grazing cows when we first started out. The jangling of their bells could be heard from a good distance. They were curious about us as we passed, probably hoping we had food for them.

As we climbed higher and higher on our side of the valley, the views of the other side got better. We could see a beautiful, braided river at the base of a side valley across from us. Also visible in the lower right of this photo are a couple of two-story buildings used for resupplying our hut by cable. There were cables stretched all the way from those buildings, across the valley, to our hut. There was a small aluminum box on the cable that could be used to send up food, toilet paper, and other essentials. 

There were no cows at the higher altitudes. We were heading to 10,000 feet (about 3000 meters) that day. Instead, we passed lots of sheep. They were also curious. Some even came over to see if we wanted to share our lunch with them. 

This was the view looking back towards where we started after a couple of hours. 

Here we have a good view of the Gurgl glacier. As with almost every glacier in the Alps, it's lost a large majority of its mass over the last fifty years. The bare rock marks where the ice used to reach. It's much smaller in terms of both height and length. 

After a few hours, we're getting closer to the hut, which is barely visible in the upper right corner of this photo. Unfortunately for us, it's closer, but still far above us. The trail rises gradually for most of the hike, but that changes at the very end. 

Here's how it looked as we got to the final approach to the hut. 

Luckily, this section of the trail was relatively short. 

Once we arrived at the hut, we sat out on the nice deck facing the glacier and the valley. It was only around 4 PM, and they weren't open yet. Luckily, they brought us food and drink out on the deck. It was fantastic weather, cool and pretty windy. It's funny everyone is looking at their phones here, as there was no signal, but one can try. Plus, they could have been reviewing all their photos of the day. 

Closer view of the glacier field across the valley. This is the Gurgl glacier. Notice the huts way up there, below the left ice field.

While we were waiting for dinner, I went back outside to look at the glacier. As it happened, a whole herd of sheep showed up to munch on the sparse grass around the hut. That poor grass has no chance to grow, as these guys eat every bit as soon as it pops up. It's hard enough with the cold weather and high altitude. I can't believe there's anything left alive once you add sheep. 

So, we spent the night in the Ramolhaus hut, in a tiny, six-bunk room, with sponge baths at the sinks in the (quite clean) bathrooms, and lots of snoring. Then it was time to do the last 500' of climbing to get over the Ramoljoch pass and start the 5000' descent to the town of Vent on the other side. 

When we woke up, we were in the clouds. We couldn't see anything but gray mist in all directions. After breakfast and packing up, we started to get glimpses of the mountains across the valley again. They would appear and disappear by the minute for the next couple of hours. 

Finally, it was clear enough to get started. We walked out the opposite side of the hut we had arrived from the night before, right onto the trail to Vent. As you can see from the photo, the clouds were filtering through as we walked. It was very slippery crossing the packed snow, but we managed. 

Then we reached the really exciting part - the via ferrata - where they've installed metal steps, with cables to hold onto, for the 500' ascent to the saddle.

You can tell how steep it is from the way the people only a few steps ahead are almost directly above us. 

I absolutely loved this section and wished it was even longer!

Since before the trip began, I'd been worrying that the heights, exposure, difficulty, and technical nature of this section would cause problems for our group. Our guide company rated this section as "Extreme." Fortunately, none of it slowed down the group at all. We went right up this section without a complaint or a rest. 

Here's how it looked facing back toward the way we came as we got near the top. As you can see, the clouds still hadn't cleared out by the time we reached to top. They were still filling up the Otztal Valley that we had come from. 

Finally, we reached the top, which was around 10500'. From up here, we could see into the other valley, which had its own glaciers. I loved how the clouds were below us, and hugging the mountains on the far side of the next valley.  We were curious why the glacier clearly had two different colors, and all these black lines of sediment.

The rest of the day, we would be hiking all the way down, even lower than the lowest part of that green area, a descent of over 5000'. Long day, but we brought plenty of food and water and took a few breaks to enjoy the views and listen to the glacial river flowing beside us. We were so lucky with the weather on this day too, as it had been raining every day earlier in the trip. 

Kyrgyzstan Climbing - So Close to the Summit!

After spending a night cold enough to freeze our water bottles solid, even inside out tents, we got up around 4AM to pack up, eat a quick breakfast, and start our first summit attempt.  Of course, it's dark at that time, so we all had our headlamps on.  The reasons for starting so early include the fact that the glacier is less likely to swallow you when the temperature is lowest, and that bad weather usually arrives in the afternoon.  So, the idea is to get up and back down before bad weather arrives.  This means the team is obliged to maintain a fast pace, with few stops.

As far as the guide's pre-trip research indicated, no one had climbed this mountain before, which meant there was no established route.  The guides conferred on a route by looking at satellite photos, and then looking at the mountain itself once we arrived at advanced base camp.  This photo shows advanced base camp (see tents at lower right) and our route from there to the glacier.  We would have to go around the vertical edge of that big white glacier, by climbing up beside a steep and icy waterfall, to reach the peak.  Once at the glacier, we took a sharp right passing off the right side of the photo, out of view from below.

The first several hundred vertical feet of climbing were on that terrible scree terrain; loose rocks of all sizes.  At one point, Syco grabbed onto a three-foot tall rock to pull himself up, but the rock rolled loose.  He fell, landing flat on his back, which scared the crap out of us.  Luckily, his backpack broke his fall, and the huge rock fell beside him, instead of on him. We were all relieved to see him back on his feet in no time, as if nothing happened.

This mishap reminded us of the story Dave had told the night before about a recent trip he led in Mongolia, where a woman on the climb suffered a compound fracture in her leg while high up the mountain, in a region where no helicopter rescue was available.  They had to splint her leg, give her antibiotics and pain killers, and physically carry her down the mountain.  Dave and Misha had told us there was little chance of a helicopter rescue here either, so the idea that something like that could happen on our trip was in all our minds. 

After an hour or so of hiking, a little bit of dawn light started to filter into the sky.

Here we are approaching one of the more difficult passages of the climb, just at the icy waterfall.  Misha is preparing the rope so we can do a bit of rock climbing alongside the waterfall to get over this vertical rocky section.  Misha is out front, holding a rope, scouting the way up.

This was pretty daunting.  Being roped together meant no one could take a step up until the person behind was ready.  The worst point was where there was no good grip for our feet or our hands. All we could do was scoot up using the friction of body on rock, praying we wouldn't slide backward down the rock face.  Falling, even when roped in, is no fun: think broken nose, broken teeth, etc.

An hour later, we'd put on crampons and hiked a good ways up the glacier. There's an art to hiking on a glacier while roped together.  First of all, never step on the rope. Second, match your pace to the person in front of you, so there is little slack. The less slack there is, the shorter their fall into a hidden crevasse would be.  Third, don't jerk the rope too taught behind you.  Fourth, each footfall must be as close as possible to the same as the person in front of you, since stepping anywhere else may break through the surface to a hidden crevasse.

Here we are arriving at a brief resting point on the ridge.  Those are Misha's hands, reeling in the rope as each person arrives on this rocky outcrop where we stopped to decide where to go next.  That's my brother John, head down, trudging up the incline.

This spot afforded a spectacular view into the next valley.

A panoramic view of the same valley.  This is a truly remote place, where very few humans, if any, ever go.  Yes, there are still a few places like that left on our planet.  It makes me sick to think most of you are looking at this on a mobile phone screen.  If so, at least do me a favor and turn your phone sideways!

At this point, I was pretty exhausted, with the climbing, and the pace of the climbing, but the group was all in favor of continuing to the peak.  After a brief break, where we all tried to have some water and a snack, we returned to the wide open glacier, heading toward the peak.  The hiking became steeper and steeper as we approached the peak, with nothing but wide open white glacier in all directions.  I was just behind Misha, who was leading.  As we moved up,  he slowed down, searching with his ice axe for anything solid to use as an anchor.  Finally, he stopped and looked around.  He turned back to talk to Dave, saying it wasn't safe to continue without any anchor points, as there was a danger the seven of us could set off an avalanche.  Dave agreed with Misha, and we were all content to defer to their expert judgment.  At the end of the trip, we learned that one of Misha's best friends, an elite mountain climbing guide had died in an avalanche about a month before, in bad weather on Lenin Peak.

Knowing we'd reached our high point for the day, we all paused and looked around.  Here's what the peak looked like from where I was.  We estimated we were between one and two hundred feet from the top.  So close!

The tracks we made are visible as a line across the glacier leading up to the point where we've stopped.

This view shows the entire valley, all the way back to our base camp; all the way back to where we saw our shepherd on horseback in my second article on this trip.  In the middle of the river bed, way down there, you can even see the giant boulder we hiked past in another photo from my first article on this trip.  The boulder looks like a big black speck in the river bed about one sixth of the way up from the edge of the glacier.

In this photo (taken by Syco), you can see how photography is a bit of a challenge in this situation.  My pack is resting against my leg. The camera had to be packed away any time we were on the move.  I could only take photos when the whole group was stopping for a time.  It took time to take off the pack, get out the camera, take a few photos, then pack it away again.

After this, we turned back and headed down the mountain.  It was then that Dave, at the lead of his rope, was checking for crevasses with his ice axe, and dropped into one suddenly.  Fortunately, everyone was doing just as they should, the rope was taught between team members, and Alan and Rhys immediately fell back and dug in with their crampons and ice axes, securing Dave at the edge of the crevasse.  He'd only sank in up to his chest, catching his crampons on the far side of the crevasse.  He was able to leverage himself back out of it.  You can imagine how frustrating it was that my camera was packed away at this point!

A short while later, we arrived back at the icy waterfall we'd climbed on the way up.  Misha spent a few minutes deciding the best way to descend.  Here's Rhys rappelling down the icy waterfall we'd passed on the way up.

The view of the valley from up here, at this time of day, was beautiful.

This article is the third in a series about a truly adventurous mountain climbing trip my brother and I took to a remote part of southeastern Kyrgyzstan, near the Chinese border.

Click here to see the first article, which as all about getting to base camp. 

Click here to see the second article, about setting up advanced base camp, and training on the glacier.

Kyrgyzstan First Ascent - Training Day

After setting up base camp the previous afternoon, we packed up and headed out early in the morning to look for a good site for the first advanced base camp, and to do some alpine mountain climbing training.  We walked along the riverbed in some places.

[Note: I love making the photos huge, but I know this causes issues on some people's laptops.  To make them fit on your screen, you can press Control-Minus once or more times to shrink it.  Also, you can click on any image and it will pop up in a viewer sized for your screen.]

It took a few hours of hiking to get up to a good site for advanced base camp.   Millions of years of glacial motion has ground solid mountain rock into gigantic moraines of gravel, hundreds of feet high.  Moraines are no fun to hike on, because rocks are rolling and sliding under your feet with every step.  This photo was taken from the area where two glacial valleys join together. 

The aquamarine color of the pond is typical of glacial runoff water all over the world.  Water running off of a glacier contains stone dust created by all these rocks rubbing together.  The dust is so fine that much of it stays suspended in the water, rather than sinking to the bottom.  I've seen glacial water this same color in Canada, Norway, Argentina, and other places too.  

Here we are just after setting up our tents at advanced base camp.  This is where we'd launch the first summit attempts from.  For those of you who aren't sure, I'm the one on the left.  That's my brother John on the right, the one responsible for getting me into this crazy adventure.

After we set up our tents, we hiked up onto the glacier and did some training with crampons, ropes and ice axes.  Here's the team, all roped-up and ready to go.  That's Misha, our local guide on the left.  Then Dave, our guide from Secret Compass, John, Rhys from Sydney, Syco (pronounced seeko) from the Netherlands, and Alan from the UK.  We just found out Misha is going to be a member of a team attempting a rare ascent of K2 in winter.  So, yeah, Misha is a world-class mountaineer.  I'm actually worried for him on that trip.  That's extremely dangerous, even for elite climbers.  Here's a link to the climb.  Misha is a nickname for Mikhail.  His full name is Mikhail Danichkin.  

Misha set up a route to practice using our ice axes and crampons.  When I saw what he was doing, I was asking myself if it was OK to opt out of the exercise.  Of course it wasn't.  After climbing down one side of this glacier runoff stream, we had to jump down from one side to the thin ledge of ice on the other side.   Here's John mid-jump.  That's Misha watching over him.  

Once on the other side, we had to climb up and across the nearly vertical ice wall.  Here's John using nothing but his toe spikes to climb the wall.    

In this close-up, you can see the bottom spikes of his crampons are touching nothing.  

This is hard on the calf muscles, not to mention scary!  You have the sensation that the grip these two small spikes jutting out in front of your toes might break the ice any second.  Each time you take a step, you must always have two other points of support: ice axe in one hand, and the toes of your other crampon.  The most precarious points along a traversal are at the ice screws that secure the safety line to the ice wall.  At that point, you have to unhook one of your two carabiners from around the rope, then re-attach it to the rope on the other side of the ice screw.  Then you have to do the same with your second carabiner, so there is no time when you're not secured by at least one carabiner during the crossover. The whole time you're moving the carabiners across, you're supported by nothing but toe spikes dug into the ice.  

It was a great relief when we got to the top.  The relief was short-lived though, because Misha made us do it all over again for more practice.  Happily, having learned a lot from the first time across, the second time was considerably less nerve-wracking.  After this, we did training on crevasse rescue.  That was truly fascinating, as we learned how to use knots and carabiners to create leverage that allows a smaller person to pull a larger person up out of the crevasse.  

During this time on the glacier, the clouds came and went. Sometimes, it was all gray looking up the valley from where we were standing.  I couldn't get enough of staring at this peak, even if I was supposed to be concentrating on the training.  

There were glacial runoff streams all around us, like the we were training on in the photos above.  While we were in the middle of crevasse rescue training, I took a few minutes to run over and catch this one, taking advantage of a brief period of full sunlight. 

Other times, the sun broke through and brought the mountain tops into sharp relief.  You can actually see the advanced base camp here if you're looking at this on a computer screen, through probably not on a mobile phone.  You can see the green, blue, and red tents on the flat area just this side of the lake. 

Here's Misha over there taking photos later in the evening.  See him?  He's on the ridge, just under the cloud a bit to the left of center.

See the next article for photos from our first climb. 

Click this link to see the first article in this series about getting to base camp.  

Mountain Climbing in Kyrgyzstan

Early this summer, my adrenaline junkie brother was looking for something big to do to mark his fiftieth birthday.  Searching on the internet for "extreme adventure" and similar terms, he came up with this company based in London.  They've been doing extreme trips for years, like mountain climbing in Iraq last year, or crossing the desert in Libya even while it hovers on the brink of political chaos.  The trip that caught John's eye was to attempt first ascents of peaks in southern Kyrgyzstan, in the Tian Shan group of mountain ranges.  Like almost everyone, I had to look up where Kyrgyzstan is.  These would be peaks even the guides had never been to, with no known records of any previous ascents.

In preparation for the trip, we both spent lots of time this summer hiking stairs while wearing heavy packs.

After months of asking what we had gotten ourselves into, it finally arrived.  It took 24 hours of travel to get from Houston to Bishkek.  We finally met the cast of characters we'd be spending the next two weeks with at the Southside Guesthouse, a cozy place with a shared breakfast room and picnic table out on the patio in the enclosed yard.

The guesthouse was full of the most adventurous travelers we've ever met.  We met two different couples in their early sixties traveling with their own vehicles all the way from England to Shanghai.  One couple was driving a Land Cruiser, and the other couple each had their own giant off-road-capable motorcycles.

Our team consisted of a driver, a cook, a porter named Daniel, a Northern Irish guide named Dave (a former British paratrooper who guides TV crews in dangerous places these days), a local guide named Misha, who is a leading Kyrgyz mountain climber, me, my brother John, and three other climbers.  The three other climbers were Rhys from Australia, Sico from the Netherlands, and Alan from the UK.  All 25 or 26 years old!

Here we are about to head up to base camp in our GAZ-66, a Soviet military truck.  Manufactured in the late 80's, it was still going strong.  This is the only photo I didn't take. It was taken with Dave's phone.  

After spending the night at Misha's parents' cozy B&B in the lakeside town of Tamga, we were headed up into the mountains.  We passed over a high plains area between two mountain ranges on the way.  This was before we left the road behind.  This was early in the morning, so there was a nice mist rising off the highland lakes between the snow-dusted peaks.

Another from the same area.

Here we stopped to look around just before the road drops back down toward the rivers we would soon drive across.  

This was in a restricted area close to the Chinese border, requiring a permit to enter, but the driver just blew past the checkpoint off-road. There was a bit of nervous laughter about that. Here we were in a military-looking vehicle.

We drove across a giant riverbed, actually the confluence of two major rivers.  It was probably more than a mile across, of gravel, grass, and rivulets of varying depth everywhere.  We were often hanging onto anything we could grab onto as the truck negotiated steep rivulets.  Sometimes it felt the pots and pans in the back of the truck clanged loudly as the flew in the air as the truck seemed like it was about to roll over.  But the truck was built for this stuff, and we had an experienced driver.  The view from the other side.

A short while later, we arrived at the end of the valley where they had planned to establish base camp.  There was a shepherd on horseback, his three sheep dogs, and about a hundred sheep.

This was miles from any town or road, and long past any mobile phone or internet connectivity.  The shepherd lived out here in a tiny house with his family and a couple of other workers.  Hard to imagine what life is like for them.  

Misha told us these horses are a Kyrgyz breed adapted to the steep mountains and cold temperatures. We saw them riding these horses up impossibly steep rocky inclines with ease.

After our guides had a brief chat with the shepherd, the GAZ-66 headed back into the river bed and up the valley.  The funny thing is, we were all still out taking pictures.  The driver left us, and kept going for about a half mile without us.  The cab of the truck is not connected to the back half, so we were joking that he had no idea were weren't in the truck.

The river was getting deeper as we went up the valley, so we stopped to reconnoiter a good camp site on foot. I took this looking back down the valley. You can see Dave walking along the stream in the reddish jacket, and the GAZ-66 parked a ways behind him.

That afternoon, we set up the base camp at the farthest point up-valley that the truck could drive safely.

Here's a view of the base camp from one of the mountains just behind it.  What, you don't see the base camp?  See the zoomed-in version just below this.

And a closer view of the very same photo.  The yellow tent was the dining tent. You can see the GAZ-66 parked on the edge of the river bed.

Down in that riverbed, John found this Ibex horn.  Hunters come from around the world to hunt the Ibex here.  Misha (our local guide) said they're pretty common in the area we were in, but we never saw any live ones.  Only a couple of horns like this.

Next up, click here to see photos of us doing scary stuff our first day at advanced base camp.

You can see photos from our first climb in the third article.