Bishop

Brent Bishop
Tuesday, August 18, 1998

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It's your Swiss correspondent here. Anyway, The weather here is really bad. It's terrible — too hot and stormy; the north face of the Eiger is running with water and stormy as well.

One thing that was kind of interesting, yesterday, we went to a little town in the next valley over called Rosenlauie and I'm probably mispronouncing that, but there were these big limestone faces there — we're talking 23 - 24 pitch routes, and we did this one called Glacier Symphony. A 23 pitch route, we only got to pitch 14 when things stormed and we had to bail off in the rain, but just absolutely amazing...the quality of the rock and the amount of it. You go to this little town up the valley and hike an hour up to the glacier and the route starts right there.

It blows me away that if there was something like that in the US it would be a destination climbing spot, unequivocally on the scale of sort of a Smith Rocks or a Yosemite, and also it would be a national park because you look over this amazing glacier and feel like you're in Alaska. I mean you start at the toe. Literally you walk from the snow 30 yards and rope up.

And also, this route, it's called a "sport route" and was put up on lead, but it sort of puts the sport back in sport climbing. We took a light rack and used it a lot. The bolts were... you're looking at run-out of at least 40 feet on a lot of it. It's just amazing climbing over here and we're having a good time.

Our plans are to pack up and head to Chamonix right now as we speak. The weather is supposed to be a little better over there and right now there's sort of not a chance in hell of getting up on the Eiger given the weather and the conditions up on the wall.

So, we're headed to Chamonix where we can get on routes with less objective danger and we can bail when the weather gets bad.

Anyway, I'll be in touch and I'll let you know how things are in Chamonix. And we'll probably head back here and see how the weather shapes up in a couple of days because the primary goal is to get on the Eiger, but it looks grim as I speak.

Well, hope all is well in Seattle. Life is rough here in Switzerland and we'll talk to you later. Bye.

— Brent Bishop, Mountain Zone Contributor

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