UKC

Can someone who has come down the badile south face recently, comment on whether raps are actually required. I am aware there are fixed ab stations but can some of these be avoided/ down climbed? And by down climbed I mean by punters. I am trying to avoid taking 2 ropes up the nordgrat. 

1 x 50m rope is enough for the descent. Some (around 3 from memory) short abseils but no longer than 25m. Some easy down climbing. Overall reasonably straight forward descent.

Cheers, enjoy! 
Jack

I've attempted the Nordgrat twice, both quite a long time ago. First time we succeeded and descended by the south face - I remember it much as Jack describes. Second go we had to retreat down the ridge by abseil as the top part of the ridge carried a lot of snow. There were solid abseil rings all the way but we were very grateful for two ropes.  

Martin

We downclimbed almost all of it, but did a couple of raps near the end. We had gone up a route on the South Face so had two ropes, which made life a little easier, but there were intermediate rap stations to a single rope should be enough. Not sure if you need 60m or a 50m.

In the end, we thought it might have been a little quicker to do a few more raps. but there wasn't much in it, and it's probably just because we're a bit shit at downclimbing.

There is what looks like a newly bolted descent down to the gianetti hut. Each rap is approximatley 50m (so you need two ropes) 

From the summit scramble down what seems to be the normal way but at a lone Bull ring bolt keep right untill you see a large wide gully on the right. On this wall there is a two bolt anchor that you do a 50m abseil to the next anchor after this 3 or 4 more 50m abseils all in line down the face put you at the foot of the moraine (with another optional abseil to cross a snow patch) 

Its hard to explain the descent but we followed an italian team all the way down that had the new descent discription (whilst we had the plasir guide book descent) and if you phoned the Gianetti hut they would be able to tell you the way and maybe send you some topo ?

Hope this helps we did the north ridge 4 weeks ago and it was brilliant 

All the best 

Aled

Did you carry the extra rope in a pack on the way up? Do you think it was worth it for the faster descent?

well originally we went to do the Cassin but i didnt feel great on the day so ended up doing the north ridge 

If i wanted to do the north ridge specifically i would have taken a single rope and tag line as the new descent is really easy providing you have the ability to do 50m abseils. A lot of ground between bolted anchors is loose and unpleasant and intermediate anchors of various quality exist between bolted anchors.

We actually got a bit lost after the second bolted abseil  and couldn't locate the next anchor but the ground is really low angled so i scrambled around trying to find the next set of bolts along with an Italian team who was having the same problem. Im not sure if we missed an anchor (as ive been specifically told each anchor is 50m away from the last) we found our 3rd bolted anchor about 65m inline with the last abseil. Hopefully the gianetti hut has a descent topo as its actially a really quick way down provided you locate the bolts easily