During the Easter weekend of 2021, five members of the AACZ expedition team met for two days of climbing and skitouring in the Roseg valley.
We had the goal to get accustomed to self-sustained camping for two nights and climbing, while getting to know other team members that we hadn’t climbed with before.
We met on Friday noon in Pontresina and started skinning up the Roseg valley. As expected, the long approach with heavy backpacks of more than 20kg in relatively hot temperatures turned out to be a good warmup for the weekend already. Eventually we found a beautiful bivouac spot close to the Chamanna da Tschierva at about 2500m, set up our tents and had an early dinner.
The next day we got up early and quickly headed out towards the Piz Roseg North Face. Having arrived there, we left our skis at the bottom and split up in 2 teams. Christina, Martin and Max teamed up to tackle the classic north face route while Ulla and Bruce left to climb the gully “Sainza Culazchun”.
Weather and climbing conditions turned out to be perfect – blue skies, hard snow and just little blue ice allowed us to progress quickly.
We arrived in the late afternoon on the summit of Schneekuppe, the two teams being separated by about 1 hour. Given the late time of the day, we decided to skip the main summit of Piz Roseg and descended quickly back to our skis.
From there it was a quick ski descent on hard snow until we arrived at our tents to have our well-deserved dinner.
The next day we were planning to go back to Zurich the same day, so in order to recover and still have a good day in the mountains, we did a ski tour up to Piz Morteratsch. Again in best weather and good snow conditions, we arrived there in the early afternoon before heading back down to our little base camp. We quickly packed up our tents and gear and skied out of the Roseg valley. We finally arrived back at the Pontresina train station just in time to catch the train back home.
After all, the weekend was a great success. We learned about the difficulties of carrying heavy backpacks and camping in winter conditions, got to know our team members, and we climbed some great routes.
(Max Brunner)
