We went back to Interlaken on Friday night to meet up with Mike. Ahh - the joys of a proper meal and a comfortable bed (the Alp Lodge felt like a 5-star at this point). Early Saturday morning, we took the first train up to the Jungfraujoch.
Lauterbrunnen etc.
N side of the Jungfrau.
Giving Mike approximately five minutes to acclimatize, we headed down the tunnel for todays objective.
The weather was considerably better than it had been 3 days previously.
The objective was the Jungfrau it/herself. The route was quite straightforward - skinning to the base or part-way up the summit ridge, followed by booting up to the summit. The main part of the summit ridge, whilst hideously exposed, would probably be skiable. The main issue, which turned out to be a very real one, was the east facing steep slope below the saddle and above the ice-cliffs that had probably wind-loaded during the previous storm.
Skiing down from the Jungfraujoch.
Skinning around to access the shoulder.
There were several other parties in the vicinity. A group about an hour ahead of us had turned round concerned about the wind-loading.
Undeterred, we continued upwards.
When we reached the questionable slope, another problem presented itself: the weather was closing in fast. I didn't fancy skiing down the summit ridge in zero visibility and I certainly wasn't going to down-climb, so I turned around. The others didn't seem to concerned about that, but having checked out the slope, decided that it was too windloaded to cross so turned around too. Jungfrau 4 - Utah 0.
The ski down was quite good in places but the light was getting really bad.
Like father..
..like son!
We skied down the glacier in worsening weather towards the Concordia Hut. Thinking that we would lose all street-cred if we checked into the hut at lunchtime, we decided to ascend a face on the N-side of the glacier that had a nice rock ridge for easy navigation. This proved to be a very bad idea as it was really warming up and we were getting quite wet. An hour of slogging was enough and we had a nice ski down through a variety of crusts.
Wet and tired, we arrived at the Concordia hut to find that they had run out of slippers. The situation was remedied by large quantities of beer and wine!