Summer in Switzerland 29 degrees
I have a blog coming up where I interview a proper mountaineer; as in a person that has summited K2 and Everest multiple times kind-of-mountaineer. Writing about my experience of doing a via-ferrata seems a little tame, really. It’s a bit like telling Bear Grylls that you stayed the night in a camp site, after hearing his account of wrestling a salmon out of a mother Grizzly Bear’s mouth for his supper during an Alaskan winter.
My husband planned a trip to Switzerland to snatch a bit of mountain air and summer before September presented itself, warm coats and all.
Most of our week in the Alps was spent eating ice cream, swimming, doing low adrenaline things like kayaking in lakes fed with limpid glacial waters and hiring e-bikes for the smallest effort way to get great views. We stopped regularly to stare at cows, who really do wear bells, dangle in cable cars sipping Flauder (elderflower herby Swiss fizzy water), and to marvel at the enormous lung capacities of the alpine hornists. Safe to say we did very little that required physical effort.
That was the case until I drunkenly consented to being booked on the Murren via ferrata on the final day. Meaning ‘iron-path’ it is a type of mountain scaling activity where you are clipped onto a metal cable and walk on metal staples ‘stemples’ hammered into the rock face. And that’s it. They originated in the Dolomites to aid movement of troops through the mountains in the first World War. You clip and unclip as you go to make it round little metal pylons that hold the cable to the rock. How bad can it be? Yes, it’s high but it’s fine because you’re tied on twice. “It is very safe” said the website that hires out carabiners to unsuspecting non adrenaline junkies like me.
Murren
Murren is a town in the Swiss Alps that has no cars. You can hike there or as we did, get a cable car followed by the beautiful clackety mountain train. Murren and the neighbouring Gimmelwald is stuffed with painfully fit looking people; evenly tanned and wearing Lycra well. It is for snowboarders in the winter and base jumpers in the summer.
On our first morning there we grabbed a breakfast pretzel and perched on an empty hillside watching the sun chase the umber down the valley. Then “Grutzei” shouted from behind me, I look straight up to see a pair of hairy legs in boots, pensile and attached to a man with a big colourful wing above his head. He swooped over and then below us, missing trees by millimetres before being sucked up towards the sunny patches of sky.
Our meeting point for our guided via ferrata was the pavement outside Intersport Murren. We join a group of 6 others and get strapped into our webbing. I winced at how tightly I was cinched, for the guide to say “I can leave it baggy if you like, but you won’t thank me later.” Click. He moves on to the next person.
Once all trussed up in our gear we walk down the road, and through a tunnel in the mountainside clinking gently. On the other side of the tunnel is the beginning of the via ferrata. We are shown how to clip on and off the cable and told to practice a few times. Our guide Swiss and dry humoured telling us “these carabiners are your best friend for the next 3 hours, let’s hope you don’t fall out with each other.” I laughed and passed over his use of the word ‘fall.’ The finger thick wire headed along a wall and down into some relatively normal looking woodland. I practice my belay technique. Click on, then off but always have one carabiner attached.
Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy..
The first 40 minutes were lots of scrabbling and balancing on staples, surrounded by trees which thankfully hid both the sky and more importantly the cliffs below. I got chatting with the lady behind me. She had forgotten to wear boots and gloves and was sliding about a bit. Some of the stemples were placed really far apart, not great for my stiff hips, so I did quite a lot of hanging from the wire and dropping myself on to the footholds. She was doing the same, shredding her palms in the process, waving her stigmata at her husband, chastising him for forgetting her mitts. This strategy worked fine in the woods as I could kind of slide down the grippy mud between the steel steps. I wasn’t scared in the slightest. I wasn’t really paying much attention to the route at all.
The cliff face…
Then from the left I hear my husband, who is the least overdramatic person I know, say “Oh, right. Oh … right. God.” A slice of light cut into the forest and that was the stark end of the false comfort offered by the woods.
I became suddenly aware of tension in my harness. I was leaning back on it, but couldn’t see anywhere to put my feet. I was grateful that I was lashed in firmly at this point. The wire was tense and I could feel it being heaved at by the climbers below me. The force nearly knocking me off balance. Beside my left toe, through the staple (which felt like a little wobbly stirrup barely tacked into the rock) I saw nothing but sheer rock face. Greyish, bleached-ish and dry. My right toe was still dug into some perfectly good earth in the woodland. I looked to turn back, but at that point I didn’t have the choice to. I made the choice to continue the moment I clipped on an hour ago. I had people behind me and nowhere to go but forwards. Onwards towards something that every instinct I had was telling me ‘don’t do it!’
Again “Oh … Right” vocalised ambiguously from my left.
I take the first step out onto the cliff face. It was a cartoon. My toes stot on a tiny ledge “try and get your feet as far into the crack as possible as there are no staples for the first bit” came a closed mouth shout from the guide who was 20m diagonally down on the rock face, holding his go-pro in his teeth. Both my hands were clasping the wire, and feeling as though they weren’t mine. Both carabiners were attached. Dead ahead was a neat alpine plant, clinging on with its hairy roots. I resented its pulpy little form, the fact it didn’t know it was stuck onto a 500-metre drop.
This was the only time I looked down properly; the valley floor was a snapshot bucolic scene, with specs of cows, a church bell and tiny sounds of life filtering up the rockface from ½ a km below. The fear hurt. It was a pain of grief and regret, shame, a weight, perspective narrowing and I didn’t know how to move. I’d been told that when people panic the guides shimmy over to them and hold them, swaddling their body until the moment passes. I wanted that. But I couldn’t speak to ask. There was an other-worldly part of me that wanted to unclip and fall to allay that agony. I unclip one carabiner, re clip it the other side of the stanchion, slide it along and re clip the next one. I was completely dissociated, mind and body taking completely separate paths.
There was a whimper coming from somewhere… Shallow breaths between the child-like and pathetic mewls that turned out to be my involuntary sounds of fear. It was almost impossible to take a foot off of a sound stemple, then shimmy over the sheer drop to the next. This was mainly because of the mental leap but also because my ass cheeks and legs were trembling.
Below from my left my husband offers gentle support “you’re doing really well.” The first time I have ever told him that particular version of ‘shut up’! He does. Briefly.
Then a few seconds later grins at me and says. “Jools, don’t worry, I haven’t seen any cable worm so far, so we are probably ok!”
The laughter released the tension, and on reaching the end of the 100m cliff section I leapt into the arms of the American woman following me, bleeding palms and all. That feeling of elation, relief, gratitude for life is perhaps part way of understanding what makes extreme sportspeople tick.
Aaand (sort of) relax
The rest of the via ferrata was tame in comparison. A tightrope and a narrow 80m long Nepal Bridge (think Indiana Jones) were skippable in comparison and the end came as an anti-climax; unclipping at the bottom of someone’s garden and walking through town a couple of kilometres back to the start.
We hit the Quollfrisch hard that evening. On the scale of 1 to Free soloing via ferrata is pretty safe. it was the first time I think I have ever been truly responsible for my own safety. No one else was clipping and unclipping me. No one else could take the steps. I googled Murren Via Ferrata after our trip and was chilled to read that a woman had fallen to her death on the Nepal Bridge a month earlier.
I am pretty sure I’ll never be chasing the dragon when it comes to extreme sports. Its odd, the real anxiety for me starts after the fact, with a sort of mistrust of my past self. Lots of “what if I hadn’t clipped, what if id been distracted, what if I’d heeded to that desperation to escape the fear?” I even zoom into photos to check if I was actually clipped in.
I got home, and agreed to do another in the Lake District with Explorer Scouts, ‘cause I’m crap at saying no.
Blimey Jools… buttock clenching stuff. You trally need to take more notice when your husband suggests an outing
Thank you Jools for another riveting read! The tension is tangible – this is sooooo what I don’t want to do!!! Definitely a sport best enjoyed from the safety of my sofa,
Oh….. Jools; “where angels fear to tread….” Came to mind. I really admire your courage- but what a brilliant achievement! An amazing adventure, written so descriptively. I was with you all the way.