On the 10 and 11 July I teamed up with Blair and Mustard for the Balmhorn-Altels Traverse. This is a classic Swiss mountain traverse between the highest and 2nd highest mountains in Kandersteg. The complete traverse is over 3600m high.
We departed Kandersteg at lunchtime and made the long slog, with a short and steep glacier section, to our bviouac site at 3100m. We had a lot of cloud but eventually this cleared and when we woke at 2.30am we were blessed with an almost full moon.
Our ascent of Balmhorn was straight forward and very quick with one small crevasse to jump just before we reached the summit at 5.45am.
Then the fun began! We made our traverse across to Altels. This was spectacular. Most of it was enjoyable apart from a few hair raising sections where we had to climb with the front points of our crampons onto the Balmhorn North Face which had a 2000m vertical drop. It wasn't hard climbing but it was daunting looking between your legs at a massive drop. After a tricky rock scramble we were on the summit of Altels at 8.00am.
It was a great feeling to have the traverse behind us and be able to look back at it from the Altels summit. Unfortunately we had to make a very long descent off Altels for 1900 vertical meters over loose scree, thin ice and rock. this took us 3.5 hours. However a couple of ice creams at the cable car station soothed my blisters.
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