Snowshoeing towards the Klein Mythen

Our first attempt to recreate (part of) a fun blue-white hike on snowshoes. The weather forecast is dodgy for the afternoon, so we have something reasonably short planned: heading up to the Klein Mythen Vorgipfel on snowshoes and then doing the ridge to the Klein Mythen itself with crampons.

We start under clouds in Brunni and start our way up to Zwischenmythen. The snow is packed enough to just walk the first bit, but once we're in the woods we put on the snowshoes. Up, up we go, following the remains of a track, but still having to do a fair amount of trail making. Once past the alp at p1353 we lose the old track and it's trail breaking the whole way... slow going in the deep snow, but fun to go through the woods like that. Once we get to the cross at the pass we turn up the ridge and start to climb more steeply. Route finding is interesting here in the steep woods, and breaking the trail makes us quite slow, but up up we go until we emerge from the trees.

The last steeper bit up to the ridge has less snow, making for easier walking but feeling more precarious, so out come the ice axes. By the time we get to the ridge itself greg is ready to stop and doesn't have much interest in putting on the crampons and traversing the narrow ridge, so we stop for a break and to enjoy the fantastic views. The sun even comes out, yeah!

After the break Greg puts on crampons for the first, steeper, bit of the descent and gets to enjoy plunge stepping his way down. Andrea follows with the snowshoes. Once we're out of the steep bit we have a quick lunch break and then head down through the woods, more or less following our route up. Descending in the deep snow sure is easier than ascending was!

Back at the alp we realize that we've got a ton of time before the next bus, so we do an extended break before heading back down the way we came up. We've got time to have a cool drink before getting on the bus and starting back to Basel.

This was a nice trip! For planning future stuff: trail breaking in deep snow, particularly uphill, is slooooow. Greg needs to get used to doing slopes above 30% on snowshoes (with the crampons it was no problem). Doing a narrow snow covered ridge is going to be a psychological challenge. :-)

Track, obviously somewhat screwed up: