Great slide show last week, the good bits were very good but the bad bits brought back nightmare's of my own alpine experiences sitting out lousy weather in grotty tents for days on end Ughh.
A local Via Ferratta
Several years ago a chance meeting with top guide Pat Littlejohn (Director of the International school of mountaineering in Leysin) changed my thinking on Alpine tactics forever. Over the years I have had little opportunity to put these ideas into practice until 2008.
The gist is to assume the weather is going to be NAFF, base yourself in a comfortable 5***** chalet with access to Interenet or TV weather forecasts with a big pile of guidebooks, you need good road communications so you can get to Chamonix, Grindlewald, Matterhorn, Geneva airport within say 2 hrs & you also need to have a train station & supermarket plus superb walking & climbing, on your doorstep.
As Pat say's that's why the ISM is where it is.
So this year we did it, well we did it twice, once skiing & once climbing.
In Feb we went skiing to 7 different resorts in 7 days including Zermatt & Cham in perfect weather conditions & in summer in generally poor conditions we managed to get out climbing every day.
Night view of Dent Blanche from chalet
The cost of both trips was food & getting there Plus a hire car for the ski trip, thanks to our lovely hostess Gill the 5***** chalet was virtually free, but we did have to do a few DIY jobs round the chalet-big thanks Gill.
Here is a report of one of the climbing days on the Mirroir d'Argentine Sunday 27th July 2008
The route on the Mirroir
Our hostess Gill had been a little vague about the best way to approach the resort first saying its quicker to take a back road then changing her mind and advising to take the main road.
lower pitches
Well mistake no 1 was taking the back road, we got lost.
We had set off from thew chalet around 06.00 am and by the time we had walked the hour long approach we started the rout at approx 09.00 hrs we should have been there much earlier.
So we started up the easy intro pitch's somehow finding adifficult but well bolted & polished variation, today we were 2 ropes of 2.
The second rope on the upper slab
The next mistake was definitely mine I took the wrong line 2 pitch's from the top & found myself on some very slippy & unprotected ground, we all had to reverse the best part of a pitch to extract ourselves.
By now the weather was changing and cloud rolled in adding a sense of urgency to it all. We topped out & I set off along the summit ridge to find the descent path, but I got talked out of this route & we descended to what looked like a good path but turned out to be a red Herring & dumped us in no mans land.
The mist was in & the situation was getting serious, it was getting late & darkness beckoned, I managed to find a route north across some very rough brocken ground & eventually found the decent path.
With big relief all round we followed the very awkward descent path back to Solalex-A long day and a brill effort by everyone.
Route details A big major rock route topping out at 2500 metres it has 13 pitches the hardest pitch being 5b free but this can be aided.
A shot from the Ski trip in Feb 2008