Hiking Melbourne

I recently stumbled upon this funny piece and I don't want to withhold it from you. Lucky for you, I can read Bavarian so here's the English translation. Translated from the Bavarian original "Sieben Berglügen" written by Stefan Frühbeis 1 "Almost there" If you hear the following sentence from the mouth of your local climber: "Almost there!" - then you should be very suspicious. "Almost there!" actually means that you are not exactly there, and it will take at least an hour and a half or 650m difference in altitude. And it also means that you should please finally stop nagging about the route of the tour. "Almost there!" is the most used and most important mountaineering lie. 2 "No need for gaiters - for sure!" Noobs should know that seasoned mountaineers carry so-called gaiters in their backpack during at times, which they use as needed, for example to cross old snowfields while remaining dry feet. Whether...

Last year Anna and I climbed a mountain and I started writing a post only to put it into the proverbial freeze-drawer of every blog: The draft folder. Now before this post gets serious freezer burn, it's time to thaw it up, add some spice and dish it up. Here we go: Ama Dablam (6812m) is known as one of the most impressive mountains in the world, not for it's altitude, but for it's beauty, aesthetics and the pure exposure encountered high on it's flanks. The mountain has gained in popularity over the past years with post-monsoon 2016 being the busiest season hosting over 400 registered climbers. It's common to encounter high altitude Everest veterans having problems with the technical difficulties encountered on the crux pitches of this climb. Summit - clear skies -32 °C - afternoon of 16th November 2016: Let's get off this mountain. It's four o'clock, we got about an hour of daylight left and we got a lot of abseiling to do. Five minutes la...

We're back in Melbourne ... at least for a couple of hours since Anna has to fly out to India again. The trip to Nepal was awesome which means there are tons of GPS data, pictures and videos to go through. Hopefully I can put something together which is worth reading. Stay tuned ...

On the 16th November 2016 at 16:00 local time we reached the summit of Ama Dablam 😎

In case you didn't know: Mountaineering is mainly "left, right, repeat". Yes there's some climbing involved ... sometimes ... however hiking is an essential part of the journey even if it includes crampons, ropes and all the fun stuff. Anyway: Soon we're off to the wonderland of Nepal having a go at Ama Dablam:   The Himalayas from 20,000 ft. from Teton Gravity Research on Vimeo .