Outdoor enthusiast, programmer, opinionated babbling bloke.
New address https://buschnick.net Please update your feed readers. I got fed up with blogger's cumbersome interface, slow performance, tracking and convoluted HTML templates. So I wrote my own exporter that takes all my blogger posts and converts them to markdown. Now a reasonable person would then feed these into something like HUGO to generate a website. But no one has ever accused me of being a…
It's mid May as I write this, our garden is in full bloom and I already had to cut the grass several times. So I guess winter season is officially over - even though some of my more dedicated friends are still going ski touring. My skiing this season was basically all in service of helping the kids learn to ski. And learn they did. During our traditional week in the Kinderhotel Kröller in the…
Zürich had been in a layer of clouds for a while. A classical weather inversion situation with dense low clouds turning everything gray while you get beautiful clear blue skies up in the mountains. So I decided to escape into the sun for a few hours. Between family commitments I didn't have enough time for a big outing - and the high mountains have too much snow for comfortable hiking anyways. So…
I have a visceral reaction to people talking about "prompt engineering". This is an attempt to reflect on why this phrase elicits such a strong negative emotional response in me. There are a lot of things to criticize about the current AI hype and its impact on the web, the environment, the economy and society at large. That’s not my focus here. I want to instead evaluate what I understand good…
Afroz suggested to go hiking on the weekend. He had a nice trail in Valais in mind. I was up for spending time outside, but the proposed route would imply a four hour one way car commute, tilting the balance of commute to hike entirely in the wrong direction in my opinion. So we spontaneously compromised on a trail near lake Klöntal. My idea was to link some smaller unremarkable mountains that I…
Fresh snow in the mountains on a weekend in September. A perfect weather forecast for Sunday. So where does one go? Gallerie Amden is the easy to reach, go-to crag for folks from Zürich. So this where Björn and I headed. And what felt like half of the rest of the city as well. The atmosphere was almost like a day on the beach. People enjoyed just hanging out with beautiful views of lake Walen. We…
Björn and I decided to explore a new (to us) climbing area up at Melchsee-Frutt. The approach is a bit longer than usual, so we took Björn & Sandra's "Büssli" (VW van) and mounted our bicycles on the backrack. I have been to Melchsee a bunch of times, but got there by either walking up or taking the cable car. This time we drove the winding mountain road. It requires good timing as it changes…
Björn and I went up to the Läged Windgällen. I had been there just a few weeks prior with Arne. At the time we had to bail before we even started climbing - just when we had reached the base of the wall, a thunderstorm was rolling in and got everything thoroughly wet. This time the weather was great. In fact, up high was where it was bearable, the valleys were way too hot. The one successful climb…
For our family summer vacation this year we went exploring in Sweden. We took the nighttrain from Zürich to Hamburg, rented an RV there and then drove North to Sweden via Denmark. We had no plan on where to go. To the extent that at some point we told the kids that we'd be crossing a long bridge in a few minutes - and then the bridge turned out to be a ferry. Talk about a vacation planned out in…
After a lot of "circular" chilling it was high time for some "triangular" action again ;-P Unfortunately it was the middle of the week and none of my regular partners could escape their work commitments. So I went by myself. I parked the car between a bunch of expensive Porsches at the Ybrig colf course and headed out. Not even a hundred meters later a sign informed me that the trail I had in mind…
I spent a week sailing with my brother, Torsten. He graciously volunteered to write up the experience. Thank you very much for a great time and a great report: Ee - Lauwersoog - Borkum - Langeoog, Langeoog - Borkum - Delfzijl - Groningen - De Waterwolf - Ee, 225 nautical miles Ever since I was a little kid playing with our Playmobil Pirate ship I wanted to have a boat. An oceangoing Sailboat – a…
The circus continued on our second day in the Mt Blanc area. After the previous day's aborted attempt we decided to try the same route again instead of going with our original plan of climbing the Tour Ronde North Face. There were a few reasons for this: July is very late in the year for climbing a North face. While this year had unusual conditions and we were cautiously optimistic that it could…
After our acclimatization hike on Tuesday , Arne got us a rental car (a brand new electric Volvo! My first longer road trip in an all electric. I'm convinced) on Thursday and we made the long drive first to Chamonix and then to Courmayeur on the Italian side. The plan was to spend a night in the valley, then take the first cable car in the morning to climb the Dent du Géant on Friday and the Tour…
Arne and I had big plans for later in the week. They involved going up high, so we figured an acclimatization trip was in order. Piz Güglia is easy to get to by driving up the Julier pass and hiking from there. It's usually rated a T4 trail all the way to the summit. The mountain is steep in all aspects, so the trail is exposed but not very difficult. Or so we thought. It turned out we were early…
Sasha and I went up to Melchsee-Frutt to climb a route on the South face of Hohmad. This choice was dictated mostly by the weather and resulting conditions. It had been raining quite severely over the past days. The farmers around our house tried to make hay in a short sunny time window and now have their grass rotting in the fields. May and June have been unusually wet. For our chosen day we had…
We've had the first really hot day in Zürich with temperatures reaching 30°C. Good time to go climb a North facing wall! On my reconnaissance hike through the Alpstein the previous week I had scouted out tons of inviting limestone towers. Some research in the guidebooks revealed that one of the routes up the first Kreuzberg has been opened by none other than Swiss climbing legend Max Niedermann.…
Good weather! Time for action. Björn, Arne and I headed up to Schöllenen once more. This time with the objective of climbing "Amatörwäg", a ten pitch 6a. We arrived relatively late because I first had to drop off the kids in the morning. But we still managed to find the start of the route and start climbing by 10 am. The very first pitch is a 6a slab that nobody was super keen on leading. I…
Finally a mostly dry weather forecast. But I found myself without a climbing partner. Why do people have jobs? What a nuisance! So I decided to go on a bit of a recovery and reconnaissance hike to the Alpstein. Parked the car at the village of Wildhaus and proceeded at a quick pace up the Flüretobel gorge. I was feeling strong and kept going straight up after exiting the gorge. After only a few…
I had hopes for a multi-pitch climb. They were shattered by yet another rainy day. May saw 1.5x to 2x normal rainfall and June started out in a similar vein. On the other hand Björn was also still recovering from a cold and thus wasn't too sad about going for something a little less committing. So I studied the weather map and cloud patterns once more and decided we should try a new (to us) crag…
A tricky weather day. Luigi and I opted for a late start to give the wall time to dry off and the morning showers to subside. We were still driving through short, but intense, rain showers. But by the time we passed Göschenen on the road up to Andermatt the weather gods were with us and it turned nice and sunny. Schöllenen offers an unbeatably short approach. You park on the pass road and walk for…
First day in a long time with a robustly good weather forecast. Björn and I decided to head for the Holzwangflue on Pilatus. While Pilatus is quite the tourist attraction with lots of infrastructure on its summit, the Holzwangflue sits on its flank in a wild and rural setting. The approach requires hiking for about 500 meters elevation gain and scrambling over a scree field. We found the route…
Łukasz and Afroz contacted me about hiking on the weekend. The weather situation was still somewhat tricky, with fresh snow starting from as low as 1900 meters. And there was a chance of more rain on the intended day of the outing. Thus we decided to play it safe and aimed for a modest hike at low altitude. It turned out to be an extremely lucky choice! One of these farms surely is drying human…
Sitting at the breakfast table with the family, getting the kid ready for school. Looking out the window into a gray, overcast and rainy day. Scrolling around the weather map on my phone. Found the one spot in Switzerland that showed just a cloud symbol instead of a cloud with rain. Rain was expected, but only later in the afternoon. Applied a ton of wishful thinking and spontaneously decided to…
Weekend. Everybody was excited to go climbing. Yet our options were still limited. The entire month has been so wet that most multi pitch routes were still running with water or burried in snow. Thus we decided to go with a safe option that we already knew to work from the previous week's exploit: return to Hintisberg in the Bernese highlands. We needed two cars this time: Luigi and Tobi shared…
The month continued wet and rainy. I still wanted to go climbing outside and suggested a crag that had only recently been discovered by my climbing chat group and promised to be convenient to get to and non-committing. Thus if we should have to bail, it wouldn't be much of a loss. So Björn and I drove up to a small pass in the Jura to visit "Bättlerchuchi" ("beggar's kitchen"). Convenient approach…