They move on a knife’s edge: climbers who strive upwards on rocky ridges and firn ribs. They don’t choose a route through the wall or track up snow-covered slopes in serpentines, but prefer a route given by nature: on the ridge, the direct line in the constant up and down to the summit.
Climbing on high alpine ridges becomes a dance over the abyss. Left and right it often goes down more than 1000 meters. Absolute freedom from vertigo, good physical condition and a lot of experience as well as a good sense of direction and a constant view of the weather conditions in the sky are the prerequisites for a successful tour.
The Hamburg extreme mountaineer Ralf Gantzhorn, who had a fatal accident on a mountain tour in Switzerland on June 24, 2020, loved these “ladders to heaven”, as the title of one of the many books he published.
He is not only magically drawn to the four-thousanders in the Western Alps, but also to the rocky outcrops in the Dolomites, the cliff coast of Scotland and again and again to the remote and windswept mountains of Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, where he made the first ascent of the north face of Monte Sarmiento in 2010 .
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