BMG Alpine Assessment 2009
This year’s assessment was convened by Terry Ralphs with Bruce Goodlad working with him for the week. Pete Rowlands, Paul Warnock and Phil Ashby were on the full assessment with Tim Blakemore and Hannah Burrows Smith joining us for some of the week. We met in Kandersteg on the North side of the Bernese Oberland hoping to escape the poor weather to the south. The team headed to the Frunden hut on Sunday morning where we looked at teaching Ecole du Glace and the boys demonstrated there ability to perform a crevasse rescue. As we returned to the hut the Guardian asked us if we were able to rescue 4 climbers from the Gallet Grat which we did. Unfortunately for Tim he arrived at the hut just as we were preparing to head up the hill. You can find a bit more about the rescue here. The weather was very poor overnight with 5cm of fresh snow as we had not made it back to the hut until well after midnight we had a short day on the Frunden Horn which gave very testing conditions. The forecast was still for poor weather so the following day we left the hut early walking to the valley then driving to the Gastlosen, we traversed this superb limestone ridge AD+ in sunshine while we could see bad weather to the south.
On Wednesday we were in Saas Fee to try and look at some ice climbing on the North Face of the Allalinhorn. The weather was terrible and we abandoned the day when both teams were hit by a small avalanche. With the weather continuing to be poor from the South we spent the night in Leysin then headed into the Grand Muveran massif and traversed the Arete Veirge AD to refuge Giacomini at Anziendaz. We finished the week making an East to West Traverse of the Argentine AD+ in superb conditions.
The candidates are to be congratulated for their efforts and enthusiasm in very difficult conditions.
I was working for Mont Blanc Guides this week on their 6 day Mont Blanc Program. We started the week from the Albert Premier hut climbing the Tete Blanche. On Tue we traversed the Valley Blanche finding some interesting crevassed terrain on the way to Italy. On Wed we headed to the Tete Rousse hut then climbed Mont Blanc in perfect weather on Thursday.
I was climbing with Stephen and Jacqueline from Hong Kong for the last 2 weeks based from Chamonix but travelling about a bit to get the best weather and conditions. We started tthe trip by traversing the Crochu, on mon we were planning to traverse the Entreve but the Italian side of the range was clouded in so we went to the Col d'Aravis and traversed the arete Marion which was superb, we were the only people there.
The weather looked a bit mixed on tue so we climbed the Via Corde just getting caught by the rain at the very top. On wed headed to the Petit Aiguille Vert it was amazing how little snow there was, we had to climb a pitch of ice to get onto the ridge and turned back at about half height due to horrible black ice. We had a day off on Thur then traversed the Cosmiques arete on Friday in very dry but easy conditons, Sat we did some mutli pitch climbing at valorcine before heading through to Zermatt looking for more snow. Sunday was a perfect morning to traverse the breithorn and head down to the Ayas hut w where we climbed Pollox from before heading back to Chamonix. We had a rest on Tue then traversed the Entreve just ahead of the weather on wed, we got caught out on Thur in some really bad weather in the Aiguille Rouge then climbed a superb 12 pitch route at Machaby to finish the trip.