BootsnAll Travel Network



Closing Boccalatte

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The end of the season has come and gone. The last two weeks at the hut were incredibly slow. The weather was touch and go and the nice periods never lasted long enough to solidify the conditions on the climb. Massimo stuck around for a few days. We hired him to help us bring supplies up and down. He was going to the valley anyway to get some stuff for himself so we offered him a discount on his stay if he brought up some stuff on our wish list. We also had him bring down some of our things as a precursor to closing.

At the beginning of the season we thought we would take advantage of the helicopter scheduled to fly out at the end of the season. But there was a significant rise in the price of helo minutes this year so we decided to close by making various trips to the valley on foot loaded rather than using the helicopter to fly stuff out. In the last week of August I hiked out the last load of our stuff and drove it all to Milan where I picked up our motorcycle. I rode it back up to the valley and hiked back up to the hut for our last week.

The weather stayed crappy and we had almost no overnight guests. This made closing pretty easy and we started knocking things off our list. Since we were making progress and had no reservations it was looking like we might be able to hike out early; Monday instead of Wednesday. So, on Sunday afternoon we started the push to close up the systems. For water we have a concrete reservoir that collects snow melt-water. Often times by August there is no more seasonal snow-melt to capture so I run 100m or so of hose up to a cascade that flows off the glacier itself. This year I rigged up a harness so I could hang a funnel right over the falling water to captured it and fill the reservoir. It was one of the first systems that needed to come out as part of the closing process.

The cascade is down in a narrow chute that is prone to falling rocks. I try to get in and out as quickly as possible. I managed to undo the harness and free the funnel with no problems. But I still needed to bring in the hose and detach the funnel from the end of it which involved climbing down into the chute. While down in the chute I needed to pull on the upper end of the tube with the funnel on it in order to take it down. In the process I freed a head-sized rock which was lightly perched at the top of the cascade which came whipping down towards me. Having worked down in this trench before I had developed an escape route precisely for incidents like this but I had to act very quickly. On the side of the chute there is a small place with a few footholds that is clear of falling rock. The problem is that it is relatively smooth and far from flat. In my haste to avoid the falling projectile I was not able to get a good footing and went sliding down about ten feet back into the chute farther down. In the meantime the rock went hurling by leaving me unscathed. But, in the process of coming to a stop from my slide, I twisted my ankle. Nothing major, in fact my bleeding hand caused me more immediate pain than my foot. I quickly finished up in the chute and got out ASAP. After pulling in the water line, I went back down to the hut to help Luci take down the railing and the gutters. Since we were planning on hiking out the next day I didn’t want to take any chances so I wrapped my ankle in an ACE bandage and tightened my boot then went back to closing tasks until we only had the point-of-no-return tasks left.

At about 3 in the morning I woke in pain. I thought I was going to get away lightly but I was wrong. I grabbed a steak from the freezer and rubber-banded it to my foot and put it up on a coiled climbing rope and tried to get some more sleep. At first light it became obvious that I was not going to be hiking out. The pain was pretty intense and I had quite a limp. Since we were in no real rush to get out we decided that it would be better to just take care of over the next couple of days and take advantage of the helo flight on Wednesday to fly out. I probably could of taken a bunch of Ibu and toughed out the hike but with our busy September schedule we didn’t want to do more damage to it.

So we flew out of Boccalatte down into Val Ferret on Wednesday morning like rock-stars arriving at the Grammys. We spent the next couple of days visiting friends in the valley and riding the motorcycle. Easier than walking on the ankle, actually. Knowing that I would not be trying to convince them to go for a hike, Luci’s parents decide to take up our offer and come up to the valley for the weekend. We relaxed around our friend’s hotel where we booked them a room and went for rides in the small valleys of the region. We ate well, as usual, and then all went back to Milan together.

Now, back in Milan, we are tying up loose ends and getting ready for our trip to Asia and our season in Antarctica. On the 19th we leave for Thailand. It is going to be a challenge packing for both Antarctica and Thailand.



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