Piz Palu Traverse — Women's Alpine Adventure Club

By Sally Lisle

In July this year, Sally managed to seize the opportunity to make a trip out to the Swiss Alps with one of her favourite climbing partners Nick. In this blog she writes about one of her favourite mini adventures. It was the first of the trip - The traverse of Piz Palü.

You can read about her full trip and her top tips on mountaineering in Covid times here

The “Silver Castle” Piz Palü is a beautiful and quite imposing mountain in the Bernina region. Its three summits and ridge run along the border with Italy. The name Silver Castle was given to it because of the impression it makes on people down in the valley from the village Samedan.

At about 5pm we headed up the Diavolezza cable car entering a thick cloud as soon as we stepped out at 2973m. From there, believing with all our might that it was going to clear overnight, we headed South East away from the hut, past Piz Trovat on a well tracked ridge. After about an hour we found a clearly often used spot perfect for the tent located just at the point where our route took us onto the glacier. Here we got prepped for the 5am start, bedded down and got melting snow for dinner whilst debating what we could improvise for cutlery… Yes, despite the extensive planning both of us managed to forget spoons. FYI - Nick opted for a torn off corner of a dehydrated meal packet and I went for the wrong end of my toothbrush in the end.

5am came around ever so quickly and we leaped into action stashing our camping kit for us to retrieve at the end of the day. The Silver Castle meeting us like this made the alpine start instantly worthwhile.

The conditions and visibility were perfect, moon shadow made way for the beautiful sunrise and bluebird day to follow. No fresh snow meant an obvious route took us across the glacier, weaving through the glaciers with ease and up to the saddle just to the east of the main summit.

From here the ridge gets gloriously steep with a knife edge ridge leading up to the summit.

We were the only people who didn’t turn round at the summit - a much easier alternative to the traverse is reversing the approach. From Piz Palü, we dropped down west following a long rocky and surprisingly technical ridge to the Bellavista glacier and a well-deserved lunch stop.

Rocky ridge dropping off the west side of Palu

After lunch it was time to get our skates on. Our descent followed the Fortezza ridge where we were please to find the promised metalwork and made swift progress onto the snow slope below. Dropping onto the main glacier again, we headed back across towards the Diavolezza hut. As time was running out we needed to come up with a cunning plan. After crossing back over the glacier there is the final hurdle – a 300m steep scree back to the cable car. After some quick sorting, I staggered up the slope with all the heavy kit, while Nick legged it away with a nearly empty pack to make the dogleg journey out to retrieve our stashed bivi kit. I’m delighted to say I got up in time to order beers to meet Nick with, who made it back with a comfortable 10 minutes to spare before the last lift!