So I wrote this a little while ago, but it has been trapped on my dying computer for the past week! I can only apologize for the lack of useful condition reporting; snow changes fast.
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| Sunrise hits the slope and at last we are clear of the initial gendarmes. |
Good snow climbing in July seems like an
unlikely pastime but this is an unlikely year! Although the daytime
temperatures are much more like summer at last, the snow up high is still
pretty climbable. Having heard reports that the Kuffner Arete on Mont Maudit was
in super fun condition just now, I was pretty keen to get on it in the good
weather last week. Heading up to the hut on Monday with John, we were pretty
surprised to find only one set of tracks up the snow couloirs to the Fourche
bivouac. Looks like we were definitely going to get beds for the night! We were
even more surprised to find out that the other occupants of the hut weren’t
going to do the Kuffner the next morning. We had a slightly odd conversation in
French between the four of us before John and I made a poor attempt to be
extremely quiet over dinner whilst the others slept. It wasn’t until the middle
of the night when the other two were setting out, that we realized that we were
all actually English....
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| Long way down! But a surprisingly long way horizontally too. |
The route itself was pretty fun, although very
long. We had to trailbreak for the first section, which resulted in climbing up
into a few dead ends and then reversing. Eventually, at sunrise, we joined the
tracks from the Torino hut and life got a bit easier! The tracks weren’t
entirely accurate though as we followed them across a snow traverse that turned
out to be very thin and fairly sketchy. This lost us a lot of time as we
realized that we had gone off route and could have got around it fairly easily.
Oh well, it was absorbing climbing! Once again the day ended with me being
totally beasted and struggling back up the arête to the ice cave. It just
doesn’t get any easier but at least this time we weren't rushing for fear of missing last bin.
Thursday was another fine day for
adventuring of the Midi. Ally and I decided to do the Contamine-Mazeaud as a
nice first summer alpine introduction. Ally is by no means a newbie to
alpinism, he’s just never been here in summer! Once again we managed to get
lost twice on the route somehow and had to backtrack an unprotected traverse
that I hated! Fortunately, climbing it the second time felt a bit easier. Luckily the
snow is in very nice condition on the whole, really solid and not at all slushy,
just a bit aerated in sections. However, the calf-burn from front pointing the
whole route was pretty bad! I enjoyed the mixed scrambly climbing at the top of
the Triangle a lot more than the steep snow slopes. Still a typical Scottish
mixed climber it would seem!
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| Ally starting up the initial ice slopes, surprisingly easy to get waylaid on this route! |
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| Nearly topping out... |
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