Patteriol by the northeast ridge
Multi-pitch climbing
The 3,000-year-old Patteriol is located 15 km southwest of St. Anton. It is a rather inhospitable peak that tourists do not flock to. This is because, on the one hand, there is no cable car, and on the other hand, even the normal route is a climbing double. There's a cross on top, that's all. We went there on the 25-pitch climbing route described on the Bergsteigen server.
On bikes and mountain meadow
The route to the boarding is no longer completely trivial, you can either start from the mountain hut Konstanzer Hütte, where you will spend the night before, or from St. Anton.
It is about 3 km uphill from the cottage, from St. Anton 15 km. The road is closed to cars, it is ideal to complete it by bike, but be prepared for a 700 meter elevation gain. We set out from St. Anton easily at 7 in the morning, if we had known what awaited us, we would have left earlier.
We left the bikes on the red hiking trail by the sign with the arrow pointing up. The arrow led to a steep meadow full of wet grass and azaleas. The idea of keeping our shoes dry lasted about ten minutes. According to the description, we were waiting for 400 meters of climbing with a mountain meadow that was quite slippery. The fog rolled in around us and when the sun finally peeked out we saw a fog hole below us and a rock slowly started to rise above us.
Climbing the rock
We start belaying with at least half the rope, we hunt for a topo on the mobile phone, but we did not reach the beginning of the multi-length. Unfortunately, we found a somewhat stupid place and the traverse did not miss us, we only found ourselves in the top on the fourth length, where we discovered the first stand.
The climb is easy, but long and with views
We have a total of 12 lengths to reach the crest. With some, we don't stay long and basically we both go, but the journey takes quite a while. Sometimes it is also difficult to find another stall. We are happy for the downloaded gpx coordinates, without them it would not be possible and one would get lost in the rock.
Feet in climbing frames
We set out in heavy boots, or rather in climbing shoes, and gradually changed to climbing shoes, one is more confident after all, most sections are of difficulty 2–3, the most difficult place is marked as 4+.
Nordostgrat
Here we are slowly reaching the crest, after which it is still 13 lengths. It's noon, that's when we planned to be up. A number of other photos are on the iPhone, which landed somewhere in the north wall. The sun is burning us all the time, because the first section you climb the south face and then the sun is everywhere. We are always happy when we find a rivet or a bolt, it means we are doing well. There are usually two in the stalls, usually one in the 45 m long length, given that we have two three-wire halves (half ropes) – we quite intelligently assumed that this would be enough for us in such an easy trip and we will go most of the way without belaying – we are happy, when we find the bastard.
At the top at six in the evening
There is nothing at the top, it took us 10 hours to go up. If I knew at the top what still awaits us on the way down, I would probably start crying. The first signs came when we were looking for a path down – according to the downloaded gpx, we were not the only ones wandering here. In short, it's a climbing double down – that is, if you don't get lost… This year there is surprisingly a lot of snow in the mountains in the summer, which was also in the gullies that we were obviously supposed to go through, so we descended carefully close to them, sometimes it went better, sometimes worse, we always rejoiced at the newly found stone man.
One in the morning in civilization
Gpx downloaded from bergsteigen.com , which we followed shows 20 km from hut to hut, that corresponds, I think, well, we found and walked about 14 km. We were at the bikes a little after eleven in the evening and we still had a journey to St. Anton, someone said in the morning that we should keep our headlamps in our backpacks, although of course this is complete nonsense.
The Verwall Matterhorn
Paraglide marks the climbed mountain, which they call the Matterhorn and the guardian of Verwall. Morale, good weather and enough time are needed for this expedition.
