Schüsselkarspitze / Scharnitzspitze, 24th / 25th June 2023

Rain in the night of Friday to Saturday. Saturday morning was wet and cool with low cloud. Armin and I had originally wanted to do the Jörg / Simon, but we waited first for the rock to dry. By the time we got up to the bottom of the Siemens / Wolf it was still cold and there were still a lot of water streaks on the rock, so we decided to do the Hannemann on the Scharnitzspitze instead.

Rockfall debris beneath the Hannemann on the Scharnitzspitze

The bottom of the Hannemann was covered in brown dust, and the ground at the bottom of the climb was covered in debris from a rockfall. We decided that we didn't know where exactly it had come from and that we didn't want to risk there being more loose rock up there which could fall on us, so decided against this route as well. We ended up doing Phantasia, a new route which follows more or less the same line as the Siemens / Wolf just a few metres further to the right. Armin got the two hardest pitches and I was glad that he did, since they seemed hard to me for V+.

The abseil down to the Wangscharte

The standard descent seems now to be to scramble along the ridge from the finish of the Siemens / Wolf and down to a single glued bolt, then abseil from this (28 m) down to the flat area which I used to reach by abseiling straight from the top of the Siemens / Wolf and then making an exposed traverse to the right (looking outwards, i.e. towards the west). From here walk and then scramble down past another glued bolt to a huge abseil ring marked by a red arrow on a metal rod. Abseil from this (45 m) down to the Wangscharte, and from there back down to the bottom (56 m).

Michij in the Siemens / Wolf

On the Sunday Michij and I did the Siemens / Wolf. This was pretty different from how I remember it. I remember more grass and I don't remember the belay in the niche (where there is now also a belay belonging to Phantasia on the other side). In particular I don't remember the difficult face climbing in the last pitch, although I guess maybe I climbed a different last pitch last time.

Phantasia had a hard crux on the first pitch which I was glad not to climb. The Siemens Wolf had a few metres of nice climbing at the start of the last pitch. Otherwise both routes had a lot of badly protected low grade wandering. Neither was particularly good.