Ice climbing 2012
A week ago, I spent a nice weekend in Chamonix (France) and Cogne (Italy) with Victor Saunders. Our plan was to go ice climbing and improve my technical skills (and offcourse catch up over a beer).
Thursday evening I hopped on a flight to Geneva where Victor picked me up to take me to Chamonix. There, we could make final plans for the weekend. Because it hadn’t been really cold in Chamonix, we couldn’t do any ice climbing there. But about an hour and a half from Chamonix on the other side of the Mont Blanc tunnel, there were plenty of possibilities. The Cogne valley in Italy is at about 1700 meters altitude, so it’s a few degrees colder there.
Friday morning, we drove to Italy after the Mont Blanc tunnel had been reopened. First we booked a hotel and then went straight for the ice. Close to the town, there is a nice route that we could use as a warm-up for the weekend. I hadn’t done any technical ice climbing for 9 years so I wanted to ease into it. The route wasn’t very difficult so that allowed me to refresh my technique and to lead a few pitches. At about 4pm we reached the top so we could leave for the hotel.
The next morning, we wanted to tackle a route that was a bit further away. But when we arrived there, we realised that we would have to plough throught deep snow to get to the bottom of the route. And we probably wouldn’t be able to climb more than 3 pitches. Hence we decided to turn around and go somewhere else where we could climb single pitch sections that were more technical. That gave us a whole day of fun on the ice.
Because we didn’t want to take the chance to get stuck on the wrong side of the Mont Blanc tunnel, we returned to Chamonix on Saturday evening. On Sunday we focused on op aid climbing and refreshing some more techniques. I’ve put a number of pictures of the weekend on this site. You can find them on this link.
During the weekend we also talked about our future plans. Obviously our next trip to Tibet in October 2012 was discussed. But we also touched upon Gasherbrum I, Gasherbrum II and Makalu. But more about that later.