Happy New year Folks
The good start to the winter has continued with a long cold spell and some snow to top things up. We have had to move about a bit to get the best skiing conditions as a Fohn wind in Chamonix has meant that the best conditions have been on the Italian side of the tunnel until Sunday.
Since the last update I went through to Zinal to climb with Graeme Ettle, I hadn't climbed there before and was really impressed, there are about 8 routes in condition, we climbed the Cascade Pas de Chasseur which is a great grade 4. If you are thinking of visiting the area the valley gets closed by the village if there is much new snow after a bad avalanche accident on one of the cascades a few years ago. I was touring in the Italian Val Ferret just before Hogmannay skiinng up Mont de la Saxe which had an excellent North facing descent, on Hognamannay we skinned up to the Gd St Bernard Monastry. New Years day was quite mellow then I climbed the cascade de Lillaz with Kat Congleton on the 2nd. After that the weather wasn't to great in Chamonix being a bit warm and cloudy but there was fresh snow in Courmayeaur so I have had three days through there enjoying some of the long off piste runs. There was about a metre of fresh snow there on Sunday but the weather changed early in the day warming up dramatically creating heavy wet snow and making the avalanche risk increase significantly. The weather doesn't look to cold for the next couple of days but the trend is to cool off again towards the end of the week.
I was climbing with Mark Dearnley this week we started the week climbing at the Cremerie to see how an injured achilles was behaving, luckily all was well with mark leading a coupe of pitches, the most exciting part of the day was getting up the road which required chains to get any where. We headed through the Mont Blanc tunnel on Tuesday to the Cascade Roveneu which we had failed on a couple of years before so it was really nice to clear up some unfinished buisness. We were back in Italy the next day climbing a route near Cogne which crosses an avalanche tunnel then gives another couple of great pitches higher up. All the better for the short walk in. On Thursday we headed through to Zinal to climb the Cascade du Pont, 15m up I placed my axe which gave a huge crack, moving my tool the ice did the same again, after the worlds fastest V thread we were heading for the bar. We finished the week in Arolla climbing the Cascade de l'Usine Electrique, after a spot of luch we climbed an unnamed pillar next to one of the road tunnels.