Inna sent me to a three-day winter mountaineering course as a Christmas present. The original plan was to have two people plus the guide but in the end we had a group of 5-7 people. I don't usually like big groups but the Romanian people who joined us were really friendly and fun to hang out with so no complaints!
We spent the first day climbing Lespezi (~2516 m) in less than ideal conditions. It was snowing a bit, it was quite windy and the visibility was pretty abysmal towards the end of the day. We made it to the summit anyway and even had a dog to accompany us all the way up and down the mountain :).
The dog did its best to stay warm.
The big sign at the top of the mountain was barely visible.
Visibility in general wasn't that great either!
The plan for the second day was to climb another mountain but I managed to convince our guide to teach us some winter mountaineering techniques instead. In the end only I and the guide stayed behind and honed our skills as others went to climb yet another mountain. They weren't very successful however as they faced even stronger winds than the day before and had to turn around before reaching the summit.
This is the scenery in which we practiced some essential winter skills with Nicu, our guide.
One of the two shepherd huts we visited. These things are open in the winter for all visitors!
The third and last day of the course was reserved for some ice climbing practice. Ice climbing is naturally very weather dependent and the avalanche report didn't look very promising. We started the day early to avoid travelling in the riskiest avalanche areas during the warmest time of the day and made it to the top of the Transfăgărășan road and even found some ice suitable for climbing there. The ice was really, really hard though and proved to be a real challenge for all of us. Even a more seasoned ice climber who arrived after us with his mono-point crampons struggled to get up the short section of ice that was there.
Getting back to our car proved to be a bit more challenging than we had anticipated. A group of tourists had gone to one of the areas with high avalanche risk at the warmest time of the day and had been hit by an avalanche, causing two of them to fall down quite far down the valley. Luckily only one of the fallen tourists was injured and even she didn't have any life-threatening injuries. Because of the high avalanche risk we had to wait for the weather to cool down before crossing the same section, and in the end the local mountain rescue service helped us with setting up ropes to make sure everyone made it across safely. The unlucky group of tourists had been waiting for four hours to get out of the dangerous section of the mountain before they finally did. Some of them didn't even have any kind of head gear!
After crossing the dangerous section it was an easy and beautiful walk back down to the car under the stars. I have to get back to the mountains soon and take my camera with me this time! These mobile phone photos are atrocious!
Can you spot the famous road in the picture?
This is the place where the avalanche accident happened. Can you see a mountain hut in the picture?
Some big and beautiful icicles :)
The seasoned ice climber trying to make his way up
Somehow the snow cover makes these relatively small mountains appear a lot bigger!
The mountain rescue team at work
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