The first part was a ramble across an alpine valley, picking our way amongst boulders and along gravel filled tracks. That brought us right into the cirque scoured out by the once present glacier. From here the only way was up.
The path, such as it was, was steep immediately. Progress was slow. The grass soon turned into stone and gravel which rolled away under our feet, and threatened to make us slip, at every step. Eventually, after plodding laboriously upwards for what seemed like hours we had moved around the corner from the cirque, and were faced with bare rock.
We were able to move faster across the great slabs of grey wacke stone. There was no marked path but we could see some tiny silhouettes above us of people making their way along a ridge slung between two mountains: that was Gertrude's Saddle, our goal.
Then the grey slabs became boulders that rose above us like cliffs. This is where the steel ropes came in; we climbed and hauled ourselves up the rockface.
At last, with a final scramble over boulders we reached the saddle.
And after half an hour looking at the amazing views we had to do the whole thing in reverse, including using the ropes to climb down those boulders. It could have been worse; the boulders could have been wet or icy and very slippery. It was anyway a perilous and slow descent; our feet slipped constantly on the gravel.
It was late evening when we got back to the van at last. We were hot and bothered but high on the views, the fresh air and our sense of achievement. Not so high, however, as to be prepared to jump into the icy cold pool near the end of the walk that was being fed by melting snow up in the mountains. We left that to the young German woman who had made it down just before us. Her boyfriend didn't take the plunge though, and even she didn't stay in long.
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