What a day!

 

(Story by Simon Oberrauner)

 

2 pm Saturday, Thomas Friedrich picks me up at my flat, and we start our journey to Sulden. We arrived at Sulden, where we met with Joerg Lehner and Nina Knittel, at 10 pm.

The Plan: Climbing Ortler via Hintergrat and fly down back to the car. 

We started at 3:30 am at Sulden, the first snow-flied was super easy and we could walk it without crampons. As the sun started to rise we could see massive avalanches at the North East side of Königspitze. We reached the first climbing section in day light and prepared our harnesses and rope to secure each other. The climbing was not too difficult and we moved on quickly, after passing the first section we had to slow down since there was already a couple of people waiting in line. 

So we enjoyed the nice view. 10:15 am we reached the summit and found the perfect conditions for a take-off just next to the summit, awesome! Tommy was already connected to his TONKA when I was going to take a summit selfie with him, so Joerg Nina and I did the same and we all launched together. The flight down was spectacular but wild glaciers and steep rock-faces with uprising thermals made it challenging to take line close to the terrain, nevertheless this flight will always stay in my memories it was fantastic.

We landed next to our bus packed our glider and went straight for a super nice Italian pizza.