Bernadeinwand (Attempt)

Published on 2009-6-15 by Michael Stanton

Bernadeinwand attempt

June, 2009

Garon Coriz and I tried to climb the Direct North Face of the Bernadeinwand on Saturday morning. At the car it seemed like it wasn't actively raining. But once at the rock it was black with water, and then it started to rain. We went up anyway out of sheer stubbornness. The first pitch chimney was like climbing in a shower. It was very unpleasant to have streams of water going down my jacket to my chest! We went three more pitches, but on the last one I took a wrong turn (rather, failed to traverse hard left) and ended up at an unknown belay station. It had been a bit tough to reach it too on the wet, black rock. Garon came up and looked to the left for the proper station. He didn't see anything promising.

Looking up, I imagined we could climb this variation. I saw some bolts and the next belay station. But I didn't know if it would connect again with our route and might get really hard. We only had one 50 meter rope, and I didn't want to have to retreat from high up. So we rappelled down to an intermediate anchor and I went left in search of the belay. Found it. But by this time, the rain had picked up even more, it was getting awfully late for a "morning trip" (I didn't have the whole day), and a series of moves off the belay were quite burly given the conditions. So we decided to go down.

What a hassle! I tried rapping straight down, but I didn't have enough rope to reach any kind of anchor or place to build one. So we resorted to belayed climbing back right across the traverse. Then we could connect bolts or pitons the rest of the way down, having to leave 2 carabiners. Sigh!

Oh well, it was a nice learning experience. In general, if the rock difficulty stays below 5.6 or 5.7, you can climb in even heavy rain. But 5.7 climbing often requires enough friction to make slick rock dangerous. Better luck next time!