In contrast to the past two days of cloudless blue skies, today we wake up to low clouds. There's a pretty good chance that this would result in a change of plans if we were at home, but we've got a trip planned with the guide, so off we go. We meet David in Andelsnes and then drive up the valley to the Trollstigen. It's still early, so there's essentially no traffic, which is a bonus on the windy road up to the pass and into the clouds. By the time we get to the pass itself we're fully in the cloud.
We park, grab the gear, and then follow an unmarked trail up, up the valley side. Visibility varies from decent to marginal, but following the path is easy. At some point we turn off along a much fainter use trail which we follow more gently up and around the corner of the Bispen and onto a set of slabs. Near the base of the South ridge we put on the gear and rope up so that David can short-rope us the rest of the way across and up easy (but exposed) slabs to the base of the East ridge.
The climb up the East ridge is fun and easy. The rock quality is mostly quite good and climbing in the big boots is no problem. David mostly leads, but like on the Romsdalhorn he does let us do a couple of the easier pitches and follows along to coach and make sure everything is done safely. It turns out that climbing in a cloud is really no big problem: we didn't have views, but it wasn't actively raining and we could always see where we were going.
We're at the top sooner than it seems like we should be. There are no views to appreciate, but we still do a short food break before doing a brief practice session on setting nuts (something we don't often do) and then heading down the North ridge. This is a hike/scramble and we do the scrambly bits short roped (we are, after all, with a guide) before packing the gear away and doing the rest of the descent back to the saddle and then down to the parking lot.
By the time we get down to the car it's lightly raining and the clouds are quite thick... the drive back down is a bit nerve wracking until we end up behind a big bus, which makes everything easier.
This was a good day of climbing and it was quite nice to spend some time doing trad climbing with someone providing advice and suggestions. G isn't convinced that this is something we want to make a frequent habit of (you spend too much time thinking about gear placement and not enough time actually climbing), but it's definitely good to know and it would be nice to have the option to safely do more pure trad routes.
Noteworthy aside: though we have now climbed to the top of it we still haven't actually seen what the Bispen looks like aside from on photos. We'll have to go back in better weather to check it out!
Stats (for whatever reason it took a while for my watch to pick up the GPS signal): 7:11, ~8.5km, 830m up and down.
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