Helvetia part VII: Multipitching Bire

On Tuesday 10th August, I had maybe the most awesome and a quite long day off, when we went to climb Bire, one of the closest mountain peaks.

We took the Oeschinensee cable car up and started hiking the path up towards Bire. It took around 40mins to walk the path to the beginning of the climb. We started climbing around 11.30am. The pitches were pretty short, straight forward and quite easy, cause the whole Bire route is graded as 5a, which is the hardest grade of the pitches and some of them are even easier.

After some hours of climbing, we reached the grassy part before the peak. We had to walk on a path towards the peak and those last pitches. The last pitches were also quite straight forward, but towards the peak we found out the lack of bolts, so e.g. we had to make a 'slings around few rocks' anchor once. Finally, we reached the top of Bire around 18.30pm. At the altitude of 2500m, the views were quite poor at first, cause of clouds, but we were actually above them. The whole climb was pretty much around 450 to 500 meters, so it's obviously going to take for a while.

After the climb, we started to head down on a miserable path towards Oeschinensee. Actually, we had to call to the centre to delay our route card. Finally, we reached the village and we called to the centre again to sign in our route card, cause we wanted to catch the last pizzas at Dessis (Hotel Des Alpes) and so we did. Totally an awesome ending for an awesome day, when we had pizza and beer at Dessis around 22.30pm.