An Integral descent of the Mallory

Mallory

On Sunday after yet another dump of snow I headed up the midi with the idea of skiing Mallory without rappel in the back of my mind. The day didn’t get off to the best start, after meeting Luca for first lift, I realised I had skis with pin bindings and alpine toe pieces on my boots. Oops! So I drove back home to swap them and ended getting a lift up by myself.

The Mallory looked perfect and I decided on the way up I was going to go for it if a weather window came. The clouds cleared just as I was putting on my skis at the top and two people had already skied into Eugster so I knew the snow was stable. I skied fast down to the demi lune making the most of the great snow conditions. The first crux passed relatively simply with some side stepping passed the rock and then I was at the diagonal. The clouds were just starting to close in the exit couloir, so I skied fast down to the second crux which was almost gone and passed with some actual skiing as opposed to side slipping like in my pervious experiences. As I got to the usual rap point I was now in the cloud and  skied down a snow ramp on the right in bad visibility. At the end of this I couldn’t see a way to progress and it just looked like it cliffed out, I searched around in several places for a way through with no luck. Then just as I was going to give up and climb back up to the rappel point it cleared enough for me to see a way down. I crossed a dry rock slab about 2m wide to join a gully at the very bottom right of the snow ramp. From here it was about 10m of side stepping down and left across another small icy gully to join a traversing patch of snow which I used to rejoin the point which you normally rappel to. Here is a close up picture.

Mallory Crux with out rappel

I have heard a range of things such as; it has never been skied without rappel, it got done all the time back in the day and it was done once by a snowboarded in 1999. I have no idea which is true.