UKC

Dent Blanche

I was planning to climb the Matterhorn in early September, but recent incidents has put off a bit.  I am also climbing with my daughter, so I now feel that the risk on that mountain outweighs the reward.

I am looking at climbing the Dent Blanche via the South Ridge and wondered if anyone had any advice about the approach?  I was thinking of the cable car to Schwarzsee and walk to Schönbiel Hut for a night, then on to the Dent Blanche Hut for a summit attempt and descent the following day.

This is the end of our week in the Zermatt region and we will already be acclimatised from our other excursions.

Does this sound like a "good plan"?

I can only offer advice for the approach from Evolene.  It's a long (1600m or so ascent), but really steady walk-in to the hut from the car park - it's well marked and maintained.  When we did it (9/10 Sept 2016) there was very little snow cover on the route, or the small dry glaciated areas you cross to get to the hut.  But of course, that could be different now.

It's well worth looking at Google Earth - the images are now so detailed you can even see people crossing the snow above the hut!

We opted to summit and descend all the way back to the valley in one day - that's a big day out!  You could of course stay in the hut for another night and have a more leisurely descent.  We virtually had the mountain to ourselves as we got up & out fast and then took the more technically difficult route over the Grand Gendarme.

It's a serious mountain, a proper adventure...

There's a good little blog post on Graham Frost's site that's worth a look: 

https://www.frostguiding.co.uk/blog/633/Dent_Blanche_South_Ridge.html

It's a big day from Schönbiel to Cab de la Dent Blanche up the Stocki gletscher, and a worrying place to be if the weather comes in...

If you are going to descend down on the Evolene side, then surely better to start from there. Or did you mean descend to Zermatt!?

Agree. Seeing we did the N ridge and back to Cham in a day, it seems perfectly reasonable to expect to do it from Cab de la Dent Blanche there and back in a day. 

I haven’t looked at the condition of the glacier for a couple of years but from the Arolla (/Evolene) side someone suggested this as a hut-to-hut with actually very good acclimatisation stages:

Day 1 Arolla to Tsa hut

Day 2 Tsa hut to Bertol hut over the Tsalion (?) ridge and Aiguille de la Tsa

Day 3 big glacier plod over to the Tete Blanche then N to the Dent Blanche Hutte.

Day 4 S ridge of DB then either straight down to Evolene or have another night  at the hut.

None of this is any harder than just doing the S ridge of DB as far as I know - haven’t done this apart from the Tsa to Bertol bit, which is delightful -but it’s on a wee list for next year....

This is great advice - thank you for taking the time to share!  I was too focused on the "I'm going to Zermatt and I'm going on the gondola to Schwarzsee, and I'm going to see the Matterhorn" to see this better plan.

We are arriving in Arolla to begin our holiday, and walking up to the Dix hut to climb Mont Blanc de Cheilon first.  My plan then was to come down and travel to Zermatt by train; however, now I will look at staying in that valley and making a plan similar to yours.

Thank you for replying: as you can see from my response above I have not considered starting from the Evolene side.  Stupid of me really as we are going to be there anyway!

Thank you for this.  I will certainly look at this plan.  A few days, hut to hut, is definitely up our street.

You're going to get an even better view of it from the summit of the DB anyway!

Well done for taking the decision that the Matterhorn's probably best left well alone at the moment.