Snow report Saas Fee, 07/18/2021

Snow condition

The conditions on the wall are really good for the ascent, almost no bare ice contact. In the top third there is only about 20-30cm of snow on ice in places, but it was always enough for good footholds. In terms of the descent, you can also get through without any contact with bare ice, the rock bar at the bottom has plenty of snow and even the bergschrund is easy to cross in many places. You can ski down to just above the Mischabelhütte (up to approx. 3,400m), after the glacier plateau it is best to stay close to the rocks, as there are some crevasses lurking further to the left.

Snow quality

Between Tuesday and Friday morning there was a lot of fresh snow with snowfall limits below 3,500m, at times even below 3,000m. Due to the partly diffuse radiation on Friday and the fine weather day on Saturday (+ clear night to Sunday), the lowest third of the wall was already covered with a good layer of hard snow. The top 2 thirds still had powdery snow. Unfortunately, an icy layer of hard snow formed between 2 layers of powder snow, which significantly spoiled the enjoyment of the descent. In places, there were only a few centimetres of powder snow on top of the snow cover, in combination with a steepness of just over 50 degrees, often only very careful turns were possible. There was a bit more powder snow in the middle section, where there were some really nice turns. Below the wall at 8:15 a.m. it was still frozen as hard as a rock, as the sun was unfortunately often hidden behind clouds. Below 3500m, the transition to very powdery snow was relatively quick.

Fresh snow with wind must also be taken into account in what is supposed to be summer, which is why we only did the wall on Sunday (hardly any precipitation on Friday, fine weather on Saturday, clear night on Sunday). This meant that the avalanche risk was lower, but the risk of falling was significantly higher due to the icy conditions. There was a quite powerful avalanche crack below the Allalinhorn north face, probably blown up on Friday or Saturday.

Overall impression

Lenzspitze north face, a worthy end to the 2020/2021 winter season! Until the end of June, the wall was still pretty bare, but in the last few weeks it has received a lot of snow and has therefore finally been in skiable conditions very late in winter. Of course, there are also a couple of catches, carrying 1800m of skis up to the glacier plateau of the Hohbalm glacier takes a bit of commitment, and on the descent it's another 1600m with the skis/board on your back. But as they say, climbing steep faces is no walk in the park, and with a few doses of MagicMan it's doable. Unfortunately, the wall wasn't as good as we had hoped. It was rideable, but not a nice, smooth, fast descent (at least as a boarder, the backsides were rather borderline). Now it's slowly but surely getting to be summer...