The other day me, Ally Swinton and Jon Griffith headed up to the Grand Gendarme on the Cosmiques arete to get a few photo’s. It was a super fun morning, make no mistake we weren’t there to climb it! It was pretty damn cold and pretty damn hard. We did however get some good photo’s.
With nuclear temperatures in Cham right now finding motivation to leave the comfort of the shade of the flat can be hard but me and Ally Swinton wanted to get stuck into some granite. We really wanted to get on Gulivers Travels on the Grand Capucin but we came to the conclusion that we would probably get fried to death in the process ,being as I am blonde and fair skinned and Ally is…..well…..Scottish. So we decided it was best to stay out of the sun as much as we could. We decided on heading over to the Red Pillar on the Aiguille de Blaitiere’s west face….
So the other day me and my mate ginger Ben (O’Connor Croft) were trying to decide what to do with what seemed to be a good 3 day weather forcast. We banded round some ideas like heading into the Envers for some spliter but came to the conclusion we wanted to climb the North Face of the Petit Dru……
Yesterday (9/8/11) me and Wee Ally Swinton headed up to the Aiguille du Midi for some mixed climbing. We were feeling pretty lazy and couldn’t really be bothered to walk anywhere, so we abbed of the bridge to climb a route the has coined the name “The S**t Route.” The route follows a ice line which finishes at the end of the Arete des Cosmiques after 4 pitches of grade 4. We started up it and were pleasantly surprised to find good ice for the first two pitches, then it turned to s**t. Literally. Unfourtunaly this route is feed by the toilet above. Not very nice and I don’t have anything else to say on the matter. Here’s a video of Colin Haley climbing it in the winter made by my mate Bjarne Shalen of Endless Flow . Click here for the video.
I think the only way to describe this summer is wet. It seems like we haven’t really had more than a handfull of really good weather days to play with so for me getting out and doing the routes I really wanted to do this summer has been quite hard.
However, every cloud has a silver lining and with all this wet weather the mountains have been looking very white which is a good sign for the coming autumn. So rather than worring about what I haven’t been able to do I have been training and enjoying the time when I have made it up out of the valley.