Kristoffer Szilas

This weekend I went ice climbing in Rjukan (Norway) with Martin Ploug. We started by climbing “Juvsøyla”, which turn out to be very good alpine training as there was over one meter deep snow all the way to the bottom of the climb. We had to dig a trench through the chest deep snow on our way up the approach gully and the mixed first pitch was basically a rock slab covered in deep snow and about four pieces of protection for this 60 meter pitch.

The ice conditions on the pillar itself were very good, but for some reason I found it very tiring and my forearms got so pumped that I had to clip into my axe and rest on the crux to place ice screws. At the belay it turned out that my crampons had been twisted right of my boots exposing only about 5 mm of the frontpoints making it virtually impossible to put any weight on the feet.

The next day we went down to climb “Lipton”, but the conditions were simply terrible despite it had been climbed only a week earlier. I had climbed the route two years ago, but it looked nothing like what I remembered. The first pitch had formed an overhanging curtain and the free hanging pillar had collapsed.

So we went over and climbed “Rjukanfossen” instead to get something out of the day and it turned out to be a very nice climb and especially the final mixed bit.

All in all it was a very good weekend of ice climbing and gave some alpine experience which is what it is all about anyway.