Matterhorn Plans...

The Last month as been pretty hectic so finding time to blog as been difficult, but the silence as a good reason behind it, I have been planning, and training like dog on heat, its been a busy year and allot of changes have happened so I have found it pretty difficult to get away to attempt some of the routes I want to try.. but.. I have been thinking for a while and wanting to try something difficult and challenging, I decided that I was going to attempt to solo climb the Matterhorn via the zmutt ridge and descend the hornli ridge in a weekend trip from the UK.. I have been training hard and pretty focused that I can pull this off.. however just recently a Friend Matthew Pigden as joined me and Ive decided to team up with him to raise the chances of succes, although I'm a little thoughtful that it wont be quite as an achievement I'm also very relieved as it does change the odds of success by a large amount, but never the less its still going to be a tough climb to pull off. The Zmutt itself is a long route on not so good rock, the difficulty of the route can change dramatically depended on the conditions, we will be relying on weather to be perfect and both of us at the top of our game.
So its Happening!!!! We are flying out to Geneva on Thursday 12th of September then making the drive to Tache, we will start our climb on the Friday and plan to gain the ridge of the Zmutt, here we plan on bivying with an early start, then we will climb together moving fast and light and hopefully in one push make it up and over the mountain back to the Hornli hut in a whole push, we do have the Solvoy hut high on the mountain should we come across any difficulties but this could be dangerous due to us both not being acclimatised.. we Have Sunday as spare day should we need it. before flying back to the UK on the Monday.
This is going to be pretty tough with the fact we ain't acclimatised, the weather and the amount of time we have to pull it off but we are both training very hard and both focused on the task in hand..
The next month will involve allot of fitness training and monitoring of the mountain weather conditions.. we have a back up plan should the Matterhorn be off limits but il keep that quite for now as we are focused on the main plan.. Keep checking my blog for progress and updates on how we are getting on..

I would just like to say a big Thank you to KS Services for there help and support with the financial side of this climb.. Thanks guys :-)

The Matterhorn