My mom was on business in Austria for a few weeks, so me and my sister Marta (who lives in London) decided to fly down to Vienna last weekend to hang out for a couple days.  Saturday was spent touring the city, where we somehow managed to survive the sweltering heat by eating a Sacher Torte, visiting the (cool) Opera house, and doing a little bit of shopping.  Sunday we left town for a trip up the Schneeberg, a nice little mountain south of Vienna just on the edge of the Alps.  What a view!

 

I've posted a few pics in the photo gallery

It all started as a bit of a joke email conversation..."forget about climbing on a rock wall, let's go find some buildings to climb on campus!"  After a day or two of emails and a few videos of 'Parcours' sent around, as well as a field trip by Markus to the UNIL (the uni right beside our polytechnic), it all turned a bit serious.

 

Thursday after work we grabbed our climbing gear and starting scoping for things to climb.  We started with the staircase behind the lab, then moved on to some of the buildings, lampposts and artwork our campus...

 

Check out the photo gallery for the results!

 

Below are also some photos of Markus' research....although they look great in the pictures, in reality they're a bit harder to climb

 

Our inspiration: http://www.alainrobert.com

 

I finally have my mountain bike in Lausanne, so I figured it was time to take it for a spin.  Saturday morning I met up with Severin, a buddy from the lab, at 7:30 on the pier, ready to take the boat to Evian-les-Bains across the lake.  After a half hour boat trip, we landed in France and of course went straight to my favourite boulangerie for some nice french pastries!   We also had to fill up our water bottles at the Evian spring...best water in the world!

 

After a stop at a bike shop in Thonon, we headed south, climbing up to the Plateau de Gavot just underneath the Alps.  We made it by road to Bernex, a nice 40km warm up before we hit the trails just underneath the Dent d'Oche, which happens to be the highest mountain you can see from the beach of Lausanne.

 

As soon as the trails strated, disaster struck quickly.  In the first 15 minutes of climbing, I managed to over-stress my chain which somehow snapped the biggest gear in my cassette, bent the second one and also rendered the third one useless!!  I think it's time to replace part of my drive train...anyway, from this point I no longer had my three easiest gears, and climbing became quite a bit more tiring.

 

After climbing a bit and coming down into a valley, we reached a fork in the trail.  The bike trail went left, but there was a hiking trail to the right, so of course we decided to take the hiking trail .  The trail quickly became too rocky and steep, and we ended up pushing our bikes up the trail.  Of course we found some cows along the way (and the associated cow dung all over the trail).  After climbing through a thick forest, we finaly reached the Col du Peruis ridge (at least that's what I think it's called), having climbed 600m from Bernex, for a total of ~1200m vertical from our starting point Evian.

 

Our happiness was short-lived however, since we had run out of water and hadn't eaten anything in 6 hours, and still had to make it back down.  The way down followed the ridge, sometimes at less than a metre, which made riding a bit scary at times , and made us carry our bikes quite a bit.  I managed to flip over my handlebars at one point, bending my brake lever and getting a nice scratch on my thigh.  After bushwacking a bit with our bikes on our back, we finally found a major trail, only to realise that it went down the cliff on a 30m ladder!  Not wanting to climb back up anymore, we took our bikes on our shoulders and climbed down the ladder.

 

At this point we finally made it to a trail that was rideable, and found a stream to replenish our water supply.  The descent on the trails was fast, long and hard on the brake fingers, but definately much better than climbing on foot!  The rest of the ride down was on paved roads and was nice and fast, since we had to go down over 1000m vertical to make it to Evian.  We came into town just in time to see the French fighter patrol flying in formation and doing lots of crazy stunts for an airshow they had that day.

 

Lessons learned today:

- it's time to buy a new rear derailleur and casette...and unbend the brake lever

- don't take hiking trails if they're not on the biking map!

- cow hoves make annoying potholes on trails, and cow dung is very sticky after a rainfall

 

Pictures are posted in the photo gallery, as well as on my Picasa page.

 

Google Earth trace of the ride (road ride in blue, trail ride in yellow)

This Saturday was a day of new experiences for me...first time hiking a glacier, first time spending the day at 4000m, first time using crampons, first time climbing a rocky ridge....what an amazing way to spend Canada Day!

 

It all started in Lausanne at 5am, when lab friends Markus and Okuary came to pick me up.  After a long drive into the Valais, a train ride to Zermatt, and several gondolas and cablecars, we arrived at our starting point, Klein Matterhorn 3883m.  (on a side note, I didn't clue in that hiking a glacier without sunglasses causes snowblindness...so I ran around Zermatt looking for the cheapest possible pair before we started the hike.  Finding a pair at 30chf was quite the feat in a Swiss mountain resort...)  After strapping on our harnesses and securing ourselves to the rope, we were off to cross the glacier.

 

After a few hundred meters we split off the main path and went east across the glacier, underneath the Breithorn 4165m.  Once we were underneath the ridge, the crampons came on and we climbed up a nice steep slope to reach the ridge and start our rock traverse.

 

Traversing the ridge was amazing! On the south side you have a spectacular view of the Italian alps, and to the North you can see the Swiss side, along with a gorgeous view of the Matterhorn (the mountain that's on the Toblerone bar...).  Belaying with 3 people was fairly tricky, but we slowly made our way across the ridge, taking a few pictures along the way.

 

After many hours of climbing we finally made it across the rocks to the snowy ridge leading to the Breithorn, the peak we were trying to climb, but unfotunately it was already late and we had to catch the last cablecar down!  In the end we didn't reach the summit, but after the amazing experiences of climbing the ridge we had no regrets!  The only pain was getting back down the glacier to the cablecar, since it was late afternoon and the snow was soft so we kept falling into the snow up to our hips!

 

Here is a Google Earth path of our hike: Breithorn Hike

Check out the pictures in the gallery for more of the story.

(for higher res pics, check out my Picasa album)

 

PS - I tried to get a Canadian flag to put up on the summit to celebrate Canada Day, but they're pretty hard to find in Switzerland since Canada didn't make it to the World Cup....