I arrived in Munich the morning of August 28, rented a car and drove straight to Liechtenstein, a country I’ve always been fascinated by. For a while I had been planning to climb this peak from the Swiss side, but the Alpibahn didn’t work with my schedule and the road up to Ijes apparently requires permission from the local council to drive. So, I called an audible and started the climb in Steg, Liechtenstein. This was actually preferable to me in that it gave me more time to be in Liechtenstein proper. I parked at the free overnight lot in Steg, had a nice meal at the Restaurant Seeblick, and then set off on the trail. My aim was to get as far as I could that night and cowboy camp in my sleeping bag under the stars. I ended up camping in a grove by the road about 1.5 hours in.
Then next morning, I woke up at around 1 AM, a necessary condition because I was flying from Stuttgart to London that evening. The path up to the ridge was quite steep, and I wished I had my hiking poles. Then I traversed the ridge west to Schwarzhorn, arriving at 4 AM in the darkness. Free solo downclimbing the Schwarzhorn to the Grauspitz col in the dark would be a terrible idea, so I followed previous climbers’ GPX tracks to go down to the cirque. There I scrambled up the scree and steep grass to attain the col, a 1.5 hour detour but the right decision for me. I then made the easy ridge ascent to Grauspitz, arriving at sunrise to glorious views. On the way back, I didn’t dip as deep into the cirque, instead deciding to do a higher sidehill traverse to meet up below the Schwarzhorn on its southeast arête. This saved a lot of time. I then made it back to my car in just a few hours, and got to the Stuttgart airport on time.