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A day of deep snow

My plan was to wake up early, walk back down along the road for about a kilometer and start ascending towards Stâna Piscu Negru and continue to Muşeteica via Piscu Negru peak. My backpack was a lot heavier than usual because I was not only carrying a tent but two sleeping bags, a stove and fuel as well. The downside of going solo is that one can't usually halve the weight for many things that you need anyway. Despite the heavy backpack I made it to Stâna Piscu Negru in good time and after a brief break I continued south to get to the ridge that would take me to Piscu Negru peak.

"Great, someone has already broken the trail!" I thought as I started the gentle ascent towards the ridge. My thoughts made a U-turn pretty fast as the track disappeared some minutes later and I found myself in waist-deep snow. It didn't take more than twenty meters to realize that there was no way for me to finish the route with such a heavy backpack in snow that deep. It was time to create a plan B.

During the second day of the winter mountaineering course that I attended I had already wondered why the rest of the group attempting to climb Muşeteica opted to make the already long trip even longer by adding Piscu Negru peak and a long ridge traverse to it instead of climbing straight up to the ridge from Stâna Piscu Negru. This thought worked as my backup plan. I didn't really know what the climb up to the main ridge would be like but the only other option would have been to descend all the way back to the road, walk up to Cabana Capra and try to climb Muşeteica from there.

To get to the small ridge leading to the big Piscu Negru ridge I had to descend to a small valley and climb back up from there. The descend was rather steep and on the way down my leg got stuck in a hole of some kind as the rest of my body continued forward. Thankfully I didn't have much speed but even so I felt both my ankle and knee twisting in a very unpleasant manner. The heavy backpack and surrounding powder snow made it difficult to get into a position that would allow me to free my leg. Finally I managed to get myself in an upright position by pulling on a branch that had revealed itself as I stumbled in the snow. Both the ankle and the knee felt a bit uncomfortable for a while after but luckily the feelings disappeared pretty fast.

While climbing Lespezi during the winter mountaineering course that I just mentioned above we were accompanied by a stray dog that made it all the way to the top with us despite the windy, snowy and cold weather. Believe it or not but the first living creature that I saw after arriving at the mountains was this very same dog barking and running towards me with a friend of his! This pair followed me through the hole arduous day and made it look easy! Too bad dog tracks don't really help much when it comes to breaking trail in deep snow :).

It took me about two hours and a half to get up to the main ridge. The first third or so of the smaller ridge is rather steep and I was using both of my ice axes and crampons to get up safely. Higher up the angle eased up quite a bit and turned to a steep hill walk. There was snow on the smaller ridge as well but certainly not as much as on the way that I had initially planned to use. Down at the bottom the weather had looked pretty grim but as I got higher the clouds started to disappear and soon it was so bright that without my category four sun glasses I wouldn't have been able to keep my eyes open for a second (my eyes are very sensitive to light).

Reaching the big ridge gave a huge morale boost as I was finally able to see the route almost in its entirety and knew how far I had to go. Going was slow though because the snow wasn't compact enough to hold my weight and I fell through constantly. Not to waist-level but knee-deep snow was more common than I would have liked. The dogs didn't seem to mind the snow or other mountainy nuisances like seracs and avalanches. Perhaps they are too light to trigger either?

After reaching the main ridge one has to climb a small intermediary peak and traverse a relatively narrow ridge to get to the final section leading to the summit of Muşeteica. Reaching the small peak felt like yet another victory and for a while I was either going down or horizontally instead of just ascending all the time. As a bonus the ridge was relatively narrow so that forced me to slow down and recover a bit. There were some small seracs on the ridge but it was easy to spot them from afar and select the route accordingly.

According to the map (see the picture above) there's supposed to be only one ridge leading down from Muşeteica to Cabana Capra, and that's what I wanted to use on the way back. In reality there were at least three ridges going in Capra's general direction and I couldn't really tell which one was the right one. I thought that I'd be playing it safe by selecting the closest one to Muşeteica and left my backpack next to it as I continued towards the summit.

I've been told that the view from Muşeteica and the ridges surrounding it is the best you can find in Făgăraș mountains and I don't have any problems believing it to be true. I tried to take pictures but I guess one has to be there to truly understand how amazing the view is. Just be sure to check the weather forecast because clouds can ruin the view completely.

I hadn't even heard of Robiţa peak before I made it to the main ridge, but the traverse from Muşeteica to Robiţa seemed easy enough so I bagged that summit as well. It added maybe half an hour or forty five minutes to the trip. Now the only part left was to get down safely...

I grabbed my backpack and ice axes and wore my helmet as I started descending the ridge that I thought was the one I had read about and that was marked on the map that I had. The start of the ridge isn't very steep or challenging by any means but I was afraid for avalanches and surely enough I saw a couple of snow slabs break when I stepped too far away from the ridge. The difficulty is that one doesn't want to walk too close to the ridge because of seracs but on the other hand not too far from it either because of greater avalanche risk downhill.

Quite quickly I reached a point with the dogs where the ridge seemed to split in two. Neither of the two options looked very inviting but it seemed quite clear that the one on the left might be at least somehow possible as the other one looked really steep and rocky. Many parts of the descend weren't super difficult thanks to the very deep snow (up to chest level) that I found but I felt like the risk of avalanches breaking out was way too high for me to be there.

At some point I reached a section that was too steep to hold any snow and I had to down climb on absolutely horrible quality rock. I was standing on my crampons trying to find a place that would hold at least one of my axes but all I found was this rotten rock that kept on falling down. In the end I had to take my gloves off and down climb using a bigger boulder that was on my left. After this steep section I had to descend along a couple of couloirs, which wasn't very difficult but again felt very unsafe because of the avalanche risk.

It took me quite a while to get down but all three of us (me and the two dogs) made it safely. The funny thing was that I ended up quite far away from the Cabana Capra and it would have probably been better for me to continue up along the road instead of going back down to Capra and then climbing up to the road again where I spent the next night (check the picture of the map again to understand what I mean). The whole trip took me a bit less than eleven hours and I was very happy to put up my tent, eat, drink, fall asleep and hope I would have some strength left for the ice climbing course starting the next morning...

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