Back on the ice
Apart from swanning around the Caribbean, 2009 has started in a fairly similar way to 2008, with a drive down to Switzerland. I once again headed to Gryon to stay for a few nights at the Hostel run by Matt Tomlin. I was keen to try out all my shiny new ice climbing gear, notably a pair of all-too-clean La Sportiva EVOs with DMM Predators, and a pair of used Black Diamond Reactors.
<< The view from the Gryon Hostel
Matt had taken me out ice climbing the previous year, and this time I was looking forward to having shoes that fit.Our forray onto the ice didn’t get off to a great start, the first ice fall we got to had melted in the previous few days, so we went exploring an area that Matt had been told about, but had no info on. Driving around we spied an impressive ice fall and made our way to it not sure what to expect. When we finally got the the base, it was clearly not in the best of condition, the first pitch was quite wet. I had made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to do anything silly on the ice, and that I was going to back off if something wasn’t safe. However, it didn’t look dangerous, so I headed on up and apart from one section where the river was flowing below me, separated by only a few centimeters of ice, it was fine up to a section where I had to leave the ice fall to get to a belay on a tree. I found myself on rock and frozen soil with just a layer of snow over it. I had hoped there’d be some ice there. At one point my crampons started to slide down snow-covered rock and I was sure I was going to take a fall, there was only one thing to do, I brought an axe up and slammed it in as hard as I could, hoping to avoid rock. It stuck, fortunately, though I don’t know whether I hit frozen mud, or whether I hit rock and was swinging with such desperation as to stick to it.
Matt lead the next pitch, and brought me up to the base of another, intimidating pitch. I knew Matt was planning to get back to his work in the afternoon and I played that card but he was having none of it, so off I went. I must have taken about an hour to do maybe twenty metres of fairly steep, complex ice, but did it. Matt said he reckoned it was a grade four.
>> Me, climbing the second pitch of Geronimo
The following day I drove down to Geneva where I picked up Audrey. We headed down to the Écrins where we had arranged to rent an apartment for a week from Jerry Gore at Alpbase.com. Conditions were a lot better, though still a bit too warm for comfort. We started off with Easy Rider (WI 3) at Ceillac, we went to look at Vermicelle (WI 5+) but it had fallen down. A couple of days later we returned to the crag to do Les Formes du Chaos (WI4), which was a great route, though incredibly busy and we hardly had to swing the axes at all! We finished off the trip by doing Geromino (supposedly a WI5 but felt a lot easier than even grade 4s I’ve done) at Freissinieres. We also had a day on some snowboards that proved Audrey is good at pretty-much everything and that I still can’t snowboard.
I’m in the south of France now, working on this guidebook that had got a few people’s knickers in a twist. I’ll have some more to say about that in another post.