Trollveggen. In July three Norwegians, Odd Eliassen, Ole Enersen and Jon Teigland, and I ascended the Troll-Wall in Romsdalen. Almost simultaneously a British team led by Tony Howard made an ascent of the same wall by a very different route. At its highest the wall is 5000 feet high and slightly overhanging, but our route followed the weakest line and stayed not over 2500 feet in the wall itself. From then on it went up along a pillar or tower for another 2500 feet. After spending an unsuccessful week trying to put up a route directly through the steepest and most difficult section of the face, hampered by persistent rain and sleet, we abandoned this and spent three days preparing the first 1000 feet, mostly with direct aid, of the route described above. Thereafter we climbed the 5000 feet from the bottom to top in ten continuous days. Though the upper part of the wall itself turned out to be much easier than we had expected, the top half of the climb above the wall was difficult and just about as steep as the face itself. For eleven days the weather stayed miraculously good in a season which was otherwise bad on the whole European continent. We used no bolts. The rock — gneiss — was very solid, except in some sections. We used direct aid for perhaps 1500 to 2000 feet of the climb; the rest had elegant and difficult free climbing in many parts. Despite the unrelenting steepness — it was nearly vertical — we were lucky to find both big and tiny bivouac ledges all the way. The water problem solved itself, thanks to trickles from two or three snow patches; we should never have succeeded otherwise.

Leif-Norman Patterson