Variante Babylon WI7 M9 (M8?) Bad Gastein

Restday work, sharpening our tools

[Marianne] 

Okay, so we climbed the long ice thing in they valley. 

Now it’s time for our original objective. 

Actually, I was confused with what the objective was. 

We talked so much about freeclimbing an old aid line, that I for some reason thought that was our objective.

Dennis seemed more aware on what to climb. 

As I’m still feeling sick even after the forced hot-weather-melting-ice-restday yesterday we decided I should do the first pitch and see what I feel like on the rest of the route. 

Supervisor right and Mordor left

We were the only ones today in the valley. The avalanches from the previous day showed us we’d made the right choice on taking a restday yesterday. Today the Eisarena was one big frozen cold mass again.

We geared up and I climbed the first pitch of the route. 

Eisarena with the first three obvious lines on the right: Supervisor, Mordor and Babylon

The ice seemed dry from a distance but felt wet and delaminated when I swung my axes. 

It sometimes hardly held my feet, making me kick more then three times every move. 

Some people call the soft ice ‘ego-ice’ as it takes your axes so easily by just swinging once every move. Leadclimbing in such conditions is different...If my axes get in that easily, I thought, then how easy would it be to rip out again...?

Crappy ice

I got a good look at the mixed pitch we were about to climb. 

With in mind that this was ‘Rodeo’ and old AID line that had never been freeclimbed. 

Two days ago I saw the climbers pulling on the slings and pitons in the pitch, so I was quite conveinced this must be the AID line. 

In the distance me on top of the first pitch

Insecure as I always am I decided it would be good if Dennis would try this pitch and if he couldn’t make it, I’d try it. 

The small dagger Dennis’ was traversing to barely touched, totally delaminated and way smaller then two days ago. 

Traversing to the wet dagger...

Dennis placed his axes as high as possible in the fragile thing, balancing, hardly touching with his feet. 

He made it through and we were both happy he could clip a fixed nut. 

Next was a iced crack for seven or eight moves. 

Dennis desperately hammered his axes in, and mentioned to me that it felt like his axe was moving. Like the pick or the head of the iceaxe had loosened. 

This was not the time for bailing gear, so we kind of ignored it. 

On top of the crack the small ice curtain was winking to him, get me, swing me, come closer. 

Thats where the route was heading, but as all the ice that could be used two days ago had melted away, it was a super long reach to the wet curtain.

Waiting, watching, moving for a bit and finally really reaching, Dennis made it to the curtain, hastily moved to the top part with his axes to place a blue Totem cam in the horizontal crack above him. 

[Dennis]

Now I was safe to head for the huge hanging ice above me. 

I precisely placed my feet and slowly moved up in the big wet snowy curtain. 

Luckily for me there was already some sort of feet feature.

Slowly working my way up the curtain getting stupidly pumped being very nervous. 

Finally the curtain seemed to be sort-of attached to the wall and I placed my first screw.. Pfff... what a relieve. 

Onto the ice curtain

[Marianne]

Not much later he screamed. I’d never heard him scream like that!

I knew straight away that he was falling. 

I was instantly 100% alert and bright, but the rope never came snug. 

“I fell” he screamed down, “but it’s okay”. 

WTF, it’s okay?

He shortly explained his heroic Vertical Limit action. Both hands and feet ripped out of the snowy wet ice, but he managed to swing his axes back into the soft ice and it held over a meter lower...

Soon after he made belay in slightly better ice all shaky from the adrenaline boost rushing through him.

Later we discussed the 'fall' a couple times and came to the conclusion that Dennis saved himself because of his speedclimbing experience. 
On the speed comps it often happens that you 'rip' out of the ice, and then you always try to get back in as fast as you can. 
So, speedclimbing is helpful for outdoor iceclimbing after all :)

[Dennis]

Marianne’s turn. 

I couldn’t see her and had to keep the rope loose to avoid pulling off all the ice that she still had to climb. 

Slowly she climbed through the melting dagger into the granite crack. I heard she didn’t hammer here axes in, trusting on the newly created ice holds in the crack. 

Big mistake...

She later told me she took a hold, what turned out to be a bad foothold. *pop* off...

I’m trying to keep the rope tight but I don’t want to brake the fragile ice above Marianne. Unable to see under roof I haul up the rope bit by bit. Suddenly there is a small jerk on the rope. I try to tighten the rope and hear a little shriek.. The next moment the rope comes fully tight end there is a huge piece of ice tumbling down... Marianne your oke!?

[Marianne]

I swung down, stretching the rope all the way back mid-air to the height of our previous belay taking with me a good bit of the big curtain above me that wrapped around the rope. 

One iceaxe in my mouth, one iceaxe in my hand made it hard to scream but made nice teethmarks on my axe. 

Okay, second try. Disappointed, should have done this in once!

I started again, onto the small dagger, into the crack, avoiding the wrong hold and making sure my axes stuck inside the iced-up crack.

[Dennis]

This time trying to communicate a bit more I hear Marianne is coming closer. She made it through the crack section traversed and climbed the curtain nicely. From here on it’s still 100m+ to go so Marianne climbs up the WI5 ice stretching the 50 M single rope to the max. I start following when the rope is all gone. Still very wobbly and insecure now the adrenaline is gone I’m going very slow. Also not sure that Marianne made belay already. After a slushy pitch I find Marianne in the middle of the waterfall. She got stuck here because she ran out of rope. 

So I start leading very careful trying to knockdown as little ice as possible. I’m starting to feel less and less secure now the last bit of adrenaline is gone... Getting higher running out of rope and only 10 more meters through the gully to top out I’m stuck. No more rope.

No more quickdraws only 2 screws. So I yell to Marianne to start climbing place the 2 screws put them together fixed my Microtraxion and climbed on very slowly but secure avoiding any ice fall.

Dennis is tired :)

Yes he is :)

[Marianne]

All the time we got showered by snow, the higher we got the worse it became. Although the last section wasn’t as hard as the first pitches it wasn’t comfortable to climb. The snow was painful on my face but I was warm, and had enough energy. I still felt sick, headache, cough, and a painful body, but I didn’t care, as this was probably the most real iceclimbing I’d do these weeks.

And then Dennis told me he was happy we climbed Babylon. Ow, right. I thought we were in Rodeo, trying to freeclimb it all. Right, that gave me such a different mindset. Oh well, whatever, it was nice anyway :)

We topped out in the snow and hiked down through the old avalanches. 

Happy we’d done it and happy we were safe we rolled down the hill.

Now I really need to rest as the cold fever isn’t getting any better. Just a couple more days my dear body, just a couple more and then you have weeks to recover. Come on now!

Bad Gastein Austria, Supervisor 270m WI6 on a 'sick' day.

After  three weeks of competition climbing we are on the road again.

This time not with our beloved VW T3 Syncro campervan, but with a simple rental car. No warm home, kitchen, bookshelf full of climbing guidebooks, and our sweet little bed.
Just before the start of the Rabenstein IWC the gearbox decided to bail on us. Not a chance that they’d have a gearbox like ours in Italy.

Actually, getting the car to the garage was the biggest challenge.

Markus Bendler, who decided to retire from Worldcup climbing after Rabenstein told us Bad Gastein was one of the more interesting places for proper Austrian ice right now.

A snowy ride through Austria brought us in Bad Gastein. As we don’t have heating and the kitchen in the car we found a place to sleep in the “Euro Youth Hotel”.

With some very good advice from the local hero Hans Zlöbl who also wrote the guidebook with Sepp Inhöger we diceded a good starting route would be the classic “Mordor” in ”Eisarena”, just up the valley from Bad Gastein.

After dinner Marianne tells me she is not feeling really well. I totally understand where she is going through. I din’t recover very well from my fever after Korea.

So we decided to go to sleep and see in the morning.

After a feverish warm-cold-hot-sweat night Marianne isn’t feeling good. But she decides that we “have” to climb. So we have a good breakfast and head out.

We arived at the parking up after Böckstein around 8:30 to find 6 other cars in place and loads of people walking up…

Our own walk up, takes us ages, every ten steps we have to gain our breathe again. Not becuase we’re Dutch and not used to the height, but becuase we probably both are still in a bad fever.

When we arive at the bottom of the route there is a line of 2 parties for Mordor. 2 parties for Rodeo. The only route free is Supervisor the WI6. So my first ice route this season will be the grand classic WI6.

The parties next to us like to talk loud and bright and some turn out to be talented rock, axe and ice throwers. There were two big winners: one who pulled out a block the size of a good sized radio in the second pitch of Rodeo, the other got full points for dropping his iceaxe down the cliff in the fourth pitch of Rodeo…

Dennis felt ‘tensioned’ with all the activity next to him, I noticed it made in pretty insecure and he wasn’t too fast in the first pitches.
I wasn’t faster then him at all. Soreness in my whole body, headache and out of breathe with every move. I was happy the ice wasn’t too hard so I only had to swing once in every move.

The higher we climbed the harder it became. Dennis didn’t feel any better when he noticed he should have tightened his frontpoints on his crampons. They were loose as shit and ‘trembled’ with every kick and move.
That was just one of the little details you forget when you haven’t climbed ice yet this season.

He also figured his mixed picks on his axes weren’t made for blobby ticky WI6 pitches. As we first wanted to do the easy Mordor or the mixed route Rodeo, we both had our mixed picks on our axes. The extra teeth make the picks sink in well, but it makes it a pain getting them out again.

My picks were doing better as I already filed off the extra teeth.

The higher we got the more difficult the climbing, but our bodies went souple through the ice. Even with every breathe I had to take :)

When you’re seconding climbing big flowers is fun hooking your way up. But while I was leading the flowers felt really insecure. And those coliflowers won’t give any good spots to put screws in.

Next problem was our rope.

We like to stretch out pitches. Climb the full ropelength up to 50 or 60m.
Our rope is getting old and thin ropes are expensive…
The rope was totally soaked after the first pitch. It made it super hard to pull up and even belaying became impossible with a Reverso on the half frozen soaked rope.

On the single last pitch I belayed in my downjacket. The snow wettening the jacket and soon the puffy became like wet toiletpaper wrapped around my feverish body.
I knew what was going to be next and I so wasn’t looking forward to that…

At the same Time I (Dennis ) was working on my squats. Pulling the rope up that seemed to be pulled down even harder every meter is was ascending.

Every iceclimber knows when you get it: walk up, cool down, then start to climb when you’re cold and then it starts: screaming barfeys. Called after the things you want to do then: cry, scream and you’ll have the feeling of throwing up (or you actually do throw up).
Once you’ve gone through it, it won’ hit you again for a while.

I cried when I reached the belay.

Dennis thought I wanted to return as I wasn’t feeling well, but with just one long pitch left I couldn’t resist: need-to-climb-ice-now.

The last pitch started tricky and topped out in the wet ice. Dennis traversed from our belay to the middle of the ice getting to the more stable part of the slightly overhanging wall.

We rappeled over the old ‘tv-bolts’ through the dozens of frozen Edelweiss flowers and slid down to the car through the thick layer of fresh snow.

A perfect occlusion after a great day in the Mountains.