Piz Palue (3901 m) West-East Traverse, Bernina

Our intention today: Traversing the three peaks of Piz Palue, starting from Rifugio Marco e Rosa (3609 m), following the "Bellavista Terrace", and finally heading on to the Rifugio Diavolezza and back to Pontresina.

Piz Palue is located in the Bernina range at the border between Italy and Switzerland, with the western peak lying in Italy (Lombardy) and the central and eastern peaks lying in Switzerland (Graubuenden).

We left the Rifugio at around 5:30 am, after a disappointing italian breakfast, which was white bread and zwieback. I counted how many muesli bars I had left and hoped they would cover my energy demands for the day. But then - the wonderful morning ambience made me forget all my nutritional worries.
It felt like magic to cross the bellavista-terrace, pass huge ice crevasses, aiming for the rising sun!

The views to our back exposed Piz Bernina, which we had traversed the day before, while the view ahead presented the first of three peaks of Piz Palue: Piz Spina. Before the ascent, we took off our crampons for the climb (grade I - II).

After summiting Piz Spina, we climbed down the other side, and soon had to put our crampons back on as we climbed up a small snow slope to the central Peak of Piz Palue, which forms the highest point of the mountain and the summit of the legendary Bumiller pillar. The view on it's ice nose was pretty impressive!

The traverse over to the eastern peak and down continued on a quite steep snow ridge. The descent was however much easier than the descent the day before on the Spalla ridge, because it was still earlier in the day, and the snow was not as much softened by the midday and afternoon sun. 
I think, I smiled all the way along the Ridge, at least with my heart!

Traversing Piz Palue was a wonderful experience. Although it is a serious alpine undertaking and the travel was very exposed throughout, there were no real technical difficulties. This made the whole day very enjoyable, and we reached the Rifugio Diavolezza at 1 pm. We enjoyed the view on to the northern side of the mountain (see photo below) and took the lift down to the station from were we caught the train, the "Rhaetische Bahn", to Pontresina, were we had parked our car.

 Photos taken by R. Aufschnaiter and S. Pontasch.