Hi all,
returned home from this mornings tour into the Lech Valley. Many thanks to all callers and my apologies, I wished I could have stayed longer on the summit, but owing to the wx, this wasn’t possible.
The wx report predicted rather smooth conditions (“like yesterday”) with sunny parts and some rain and thunderstorms - but not before the afternoon, so I decided to do an early start and try to reach the summit as soon as possible. I left home at 4.15 local time and reached Elmen in the Lech Valley at 5.35, there is a big wooden bridge spanning the Lech river over to the small village of Klimm, with parking places nearby. I started at 5.45. The sky was overcast with the peaks being all in clouds, temperature abt 10°C.
Lucky beggar that I am it started to rain after 45 minutes, only a few drops first but pouring rain very soon, which forced me to stop and “dress up a bit”. At this point I wasn’t sure if I should continue, but I decided to, I had seen some bright spots in the sky, hoping the wx could do a turn around: Indeed the rain stopped after 20 minutes and believe it or not, even the sun showed up for a short time. After one more hour I reached a snowfield which had to be crossed. I moved on and after a rather exhausting climb over a steep scree slope (two steps forward - one step back) I gratefully reached solid rock again.
Soon there was some distant rumbling to be heard from a thunderstorm of which the weatherman said it wouldn’t appear before the afternoon had come :-). I reached the summit at 9.00 local time, the visibility wasn’t much more than 100 metres. A pity, because this one is an excellent viewpoint under normal circumstances. At least there was no rain - for the moment. I set up the rig and started to call on 30metres but to my disappointment no one came back to my calls. I went onto 7032kHz and just had to call once to bring in the first qso. This turned out to be most useful for a successful activation, because in the meantime it had started to rain again and the fat clouds carrying the thunderstorm were approaching slowly but definitely from the west. At this point I had to abort the activity for safety reasons. I carefully stored the wet logsheet, packed in my equipment as quickly as possible and left the summit. It rained heavily all the way down to the car and I noticed another thunderstorm right across the valley. This kind of weather is haunting me for quite a while now, lets hope we will get stable condx soon!
73 Bernhard, DL4CW
For the record:
Klimmspitze, OE/TI-256, 2464m ASL
Starting point: Bridge at Elmen/Klimm, Lech Valley, 972m ASL
ascending time: 3 hours 15 minutes
descending time: 2 hours