Alpspitze - KG Weg - 04 Sep 2019

As our first real alpine adventure, we chose to do the KG Weg on the Alpspitze. It is a route with roughly 14 pitches, where you can also decide to not go on and walk down after about 7 pitches. It is located right at the top of the Alpspitze, next to the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain.

We left Munich pretty early, got the second cable car to the top and started into the route at around 9:40 AM. There were already quite a lot of folks up there, most of them hiking or doing the via ferrata. The rope team in front of us let us skip ahead, which was really nice.

Flo led the first pitch, which is also the hardest pitch of the whole route with a grade of 4+/5.5. So still really easy climbing and well in our comfort zone. The hardest thing about it is finding the right spot where you have to stop following a ledge to the left and start going upwards. There's a bolt here, but it's still easy to miss. Flo led it perfectly though.

The weather was really nice, the route a real pleasure with lot's of bolts and no further problems finding the right way. The Perfect day!

We arrived at the "midpoint" of the route within our previously decided on timeframe, had a little Brotzeit and started looking for the entry to the second half of the route. We crossed the scree field, found an entrance to a route and started up. I headed up, found one bolt - and then nothing. The guidebook wasn't very clear about this part and we thought we were on the right path, but just couldn't figure out where to go from there.

After a while of discussing what to do, Flo decided to start looking up ahead without a rope. The terrain was pretty easy but there was a lot of loose rock. With the rope dragging over the rocks, the danger of triggering rock fall was greater than risking a fall. After what seemed like an eternity to me, he came back and had found the real entry to the route. We headed up together - unsecured - and after another while finally stood at the start of the second part. Tho whole ordeal probably took us two hours and probably a few years of lifetime due to the stress.

The rest of the route was very easy climbing, but not so easy route finding. Distances between the bolts often were over 10m (32 feet) which made it pretty hard to know where to go at times. We went pretty fast in this part because we now were a pretty well oiled multi-pitch machine, but it took us quite some time to get to the top anyway. The most beautiful moment was when we saw (and heard) some birds soaring over the peak ahead and realized that it couldn't be far anymore.

We arrived at the peak incredibly relieved, but also in a bit of a hurry as it had become quite late. We stopped for another short Brotzeit anyway and then started going down the via ferrata. The way down was another adventure in itself, which I won't indulge in for now.

I guess this was a pretty classic baptism of fire for two budding alpine climbers. The climb was incredibly beautiful and also incredibly scary at times. We certainly didn't make the right decision all the time but came out in one piece in the end. And we learned a lot. Never underestimate the difficulty of route finding!