Climbing on Pico Italiano.

In the later half of April I did two trips to Pico Italiano. The first attempt was not successful because we decided to continue on the glacier for too long. There is a point where you choose to go left towards a couple small snowfields and a couloir, or keep moving up on the glacier and try to get to the 5700m high summit from the opposite direction. We decided to take the glacier approach even though it was obviously full of crevasses. First it was better to follow a terrible, steep, narrow scree slope between a rock face and the glacier. After a gaining elevation slowly there, we arrived at a spot where the glacier looked nice. It was the upper part of the glacier almost where it turns into snowfields.

It was nice and steep at first. Then the angle eased up and we really had to work to find a way across and over the numerous crevasses. Most of them were really deep, maybe 10 meters or more, and some were about 5 meters deep but really wide and had snow on the bottom. Being in that labyrinth of crevasses was actually quite fun for a moment, but eventually there was a very long crack in the glacier that simply made it impossible to cross it. It wasn't even very wide but just enough to be too much, the bridges that covered it were just really really thin and it was too dangerous to try them, walking along the edge of the crevasse was equally dangerous because there was a spot where another crevasse was too close and made the bridge too thin and anyway further away it seemed really bad. Going down a little bit and following the edge of the glacier was not possible because right there was a vertical 10 meters high slick rock wall and right next to it was a vertical ice wall that was as high as the rock wall. A lot of time was spent trying to figure how to get across the crevasse but no solution was found. The elevation there was 5430 meters and the best climbing was really close but we didn't get there.

Just 5 days later I went and tried another route on Pico Italiano by myself. So, this time instead of following the glacier like last time, I took left. I had started the walk from the road early and got to the beginning of Pico Italiano's lower southern snowfields really fast. There was a bad rock fall about 400m to my right. About 10 boulders the size of a closet broke loose and flew and rolled down at incredible speeds. I checked out if there was an easier way up, but ended up taking a quite steep and narrow couloir. It is about 50-55 degrees and steeper than it looks like in the picture.

I had seen this couloir pretty well in December from across the valley. Then it was still covered in snow and all white but now it was very icy. There was a section of approximately 15 vertical meters/45ft that was pure hard and slick ice, not crunchy ice, but higher up it looked like there was crunchy ice. So I got to the last meters of the icy section, grabbed a rock with my hands with ice axes hanging from the leashes and thought I was in a good position, but then my foot slipped. In a couple of seconds I was 50 meters down. I'm lucky I didn't hit the rocks but my knee got twisted and it took 5 hours to get to the car.