The morning arrived, and we headed straight out onto the ridge, using the exploration of the night before to navigate a good route. Looking back we could see the other parties coming out… the guided ones in the front – it appears that the hotel was slightly ahead of the hut in its timing to their advantage.
We were chased all the way up the ridge to the Solvay hut by the leading parties, and eventually the first one overtook us. Taking a quick breather, we had some great views down the valley as the sun was coming up.
The next difficulty was the snow field under the top rock steps … at this time it was well frozen and proved to be a simple step climb. Then we were into the fixed ropes on the steep rock steps… general practice here is to use the rope only as an aid, because hauling on it will drain the energy and causes you to not use your feet properly. However as you are feeling quite drained already and it is very steep, you soon end up hauling.
The summit was all you would expect from a great peak… we went across to the Italian side, just so that we had been to both ends.
We spent quite a time on the top just marvelling at the views, before down climbing the fixed ropes – saved an abseil.
At the snow field we caught up with several Italian parties, all charging up at the same time … the ropes were knitted and lots of chat going on. We just sat by the top belay spike and let the games play out, once they were past us it was clear the "nice" frozen snow from the morning was now really broken up so we resorted to a couple of quick abseils. Before long we were back at the Solvay hut … not a nice place to hang around, and is really an emergency shelter only.The way down the bottom half was much more complicated when facing downwards and looking at the multiple tracks – essentially in the morning we had followed up just to the left of the ridge, but now everywhere was a complex puzzle.
Eventually we ended up back at the Hornli hut. Similar time as the day before, so we had plenty of time to wonder at the route and how rewarding it had been. Amongst the tourists coming up were Bryon and Chris, they had been on the Zinal Rothorn and the Obergabelhorn the days before and we had left before they returned. A quick catch up and to pass on the information we had learned in the last day or so, and we started off down the valley.
With money tight again, we elected to walk all the way down to the valley – in hind sight again as with last year.. it was much, much further than we expected and we should have caught the cable car, and saved our feet. However as things turned out it did not matter.