Eiger - Grindelwald to Mittellegi Hut

August 7, 2017
Eiger Mountain, Switzerland
Part 1

We finally made it! Almost a year of planning had finally gotten us to Switzerland! We arrived in Zurich at noon and immediately jumped on a train to Grindelwald about 3 hours away. When we arrived, we went straight to Grindelwald Sports to get weather information for the following days. Our primary objective, the infamous Eiger Mountain. Our original plan was to sleep and get organized, but the weather forecast was terrible. It appeared that we would have just one day of nice weather before the rain and snow came, so we headed to camp and slept for 4 hours before our 2:30 am wake up.

There is a train that will take you 3/4 of the way up the Eiger and drop you off, but we felt like this was cheating. We wanted to climb Mittellegi ridge in its entirety. The lower section is long and far more difficult than the upper, including a via ferrata, 6,000' of elevation gain, lots of 5.6 climbing, several rappels and a few pitches of 5.9 climbing. For this purpose, almost all that attempt Mittellegi ridge choose to bypass this lower stretch of the route and focus on the upper 1/3rd to the summit, which is relatively straight forward and has fixed ropes to assist in the difficulties. We left our camp in Grindelwald at 2:45am and walked through town to reach the beginning of the Eiger trail. Following this for about an hour, we found the route to steadily steepen. First fixed ropes, then cable to hook into while you traverse ledges and finally, a via ferrata leading to the Ostegg hut. After 4 hours of hiking and climbing, most people choose to stay the night at Ostegg, but we didn’t have the time for that. We rested for a half hour, ate some food and continued toward Mittellegi hut, far up on the ridge.

The views from Ostegg and above really open up. You get unobstructed views of the Schrekhorn and Wetterhorn, both 4,000 meter peaks with impressive climbing. We hope to climb Wetterhorn after the Eiger if the weather improves since we climbed the mountain with the same name at home in Colorado.

Above Ostegg is where the route really gets interesting. Extremely exposed with fatal consequences if you fall, climbing difficult terrain in the loosest and most fragile rock either of us had ever experienced. The route finding was difficult at best and the climbing required complete concentration. Together we seemed to make good route finding choices and we had a fair idea of where we needed to go so for the next 6 hours, we worked our way up loose gulley’s to knife edge ridges, getting ever closer to the still distant Mittellegi hut.

Looking down at Ostegg Hut and Grindelwald

After gaining what seems to be an impassable section on the mountain, you traverse left for a ways to find a window in the rock that you have to crawl through. So small that you have to take off your pack to get through, this window gives passage to the final section of the ridge to the hut, amazing views of the upper portion of Mittellegi ridge and access to the most difficult part of the entire route - the reason a huge majority of climbers choose to take the train to the upper hut - a 45 meter section of mandatory roped technical climbing.

The window you crawl through; it's not the obvious one, it's in the cave down and left of that one

window cave to the right

You start by working your way up a clean face with very small hand holds, using mostly your feet to keep you stuck to the wall. Then you make a technical traverse left for about 15'. There are no hand holds here but since we climb a lot of slick sandstone at home, we found the gneiss quite sticky for our feet. You reach out to a fixed bar in the mountain, and together with the bar and a bolt, there is a 4' portion of webbing you can grab onto. It the interest of safety and time, I reached for the webbing and quickly came to a belay. The belays here are interesting corkscrew type bars fixed into the mountain. They are placed for the guides to use and help them move efficiently, so I utilized their system. I secured myself and belayed directly off the corkscrew as Laura made her way up.

The most technical part of the route is up the crack to my right

Justin in the first pitch of the 5.9 portion



We had been hearing loud crashing all day and wondered if it was distant thunder, but at this belay station I was fortunate to see the glacier calving, making the familiar sound. A huge block of ice, maybe the size of 20 houses broke off and fell down creating a mini avalanche below. This was a cool spectacle I had never seen before.

The following section is about 100' feet chimney and a small hand crack in a corner. The crack has moss and weeds growing most places so this section was also ascended using mostly our feet, with few good hand holds for security. After we made it past the final difficulties, we climbed up and down several huge gendarmes, staying as close to the ridge as possible. We reached the Mittellegi hut after 13 hours of hard work.

We planned to stay at Mittellegi hut for the night and make a decision on weather and a summit attempt the following day but when Laura walked into the hut, it was empty. The attendant informed us that everyone had cancelled and that there was a blizzard coming the next day. She gave us the option to stay but said we could end up stuck there for a few days until the weather cleared. She told us that if we hurried, we could catch the last train down from the Eismeer station. We had about an hour and a half to make it so we made a quick decision and took off down a steep scree slope. Rappelling to a low angle section of rock, we traversed for 45 minutes to another rappel that landed us on the glacier to walk across to the train station cut into the middle of the mountain. We crossed the crevassed terrain and raced up through the tunnel.

The train station was empty so we found a phone and Laura called the train station. The conductor answered and said he would stop for us in 10 minutes! Phew, we just made it and didn’t have to add another 10 miles to our already very long day.

The train eventually got us back to Grindelwald where we stopped at the grocery store for dinner supplies and headed back to camp. We relaxed and looked at where we had been over the last 17 hours to a hard earned bottle of wine and a tasty jetboil sausage and pasta dinner. When we awoke the following morning, the weather was clear but quickly confirmed that we had made the correct decision heading down the day before. There was a fresh coating of snow on the Eiger and the rain soon arrived in town. Surely it was snowing 10,000 feet above - a bad place to be!