Having walked up Aggenstein with James last year, I knew there was plenty of climbing on the large rocky faces, so this was an obvious choice of where to head with Rob and Win, as the walk in wasn’t too long, the climbing was easy but sustained, and was relatively well protected with bolts.
We decided to climb the Linke Südwand-Platte up the south west face, which is, I think, mostly what we ended up climbing! Some of the descriptions online suggested that it was very easy to end up on the routes to the right and the left, and we certainly found that. I don’t recall spending so much time looking at a topo and feeling confused before!
The walk in was fairly pleasant in the cool, shady morning air and we arrived at the start of the route in relatively good time. After quickly eating some food and gearing up I set off up the first pitch and the route finding was initially very easy, until I got to the belay. At this point I had no real idea where the second pitch went, and I didn’t find the topo much use either.
After much deliberation, I set off up the slab under an overhang to a bolt, and then stepped right into a groove before following the obvious rising traverse line of bolts above. I then had to traverse a long way right to find a belay, something which wasn’t really marked on the topo.
With the next pitch I set off back left and soon the topo started to make sense again, and provided us with a lovely pitch climbing a wonderful slab with a brilliant outlook over the Tannheimer Tal. The next pitch was the crux, and I think I stayed too far left at some point, but the climbing was brilliant nonetheless, and after 45m of climbing found a small belay on the slab below the final easy pitch to the first summit.
From the first summit a short walk and scramble took us up to the crowds on the main summit. After finishing our lunch and playing with the coughs, we headed back down the Bad Kissinger Hütte for a well earned beer!
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