 - Top - Aiguille-d'Orny -
 - Above - the Miroire
My trip started very badly – I get dumped by my partner and spend a day miserably thinking I won’t go. Then I get it together again and decide that climbing in the mountains with the girls is the way forward and 2 days later, I’m dropped off at the airport for a 6 am flight out of here. A brief foray into southern England convinces me that the climbing there is crap and the English are mad. They get all excited about old quarries – bits of rock we wouldn’t give a second look here, ugly sites with appalling rock and crap belays are apparently much more appealing in a tiny over populated country. Also, they really do drink warm flat beer, and it tastes like watered down vegemite. Or the half bottle left on the table from last night. Besides, it rains a lot. Actually, it rained a lot everywhere in Europe this summer. After two days in London, I decided it might be a much bigger, older city than any in Australia, but it’s still just another western city and not really that interesting and I fly into Geneva to meet Enga. We get lost finding our way between the French and Swiss sides to the airport and somehow end up going through the same passport control I came through off the plane and laugh our way through baggage collection again thinking we’d be shot as terrorists for doing this in an Australian airport.
Heading to the Swiss Alps, the weather is pretty bodgy and we’re stuck in the lower valleys for a few days till before we could get up into the mountains. Our first big alpine route was on the Miroire d’Argentine, a 500m limestone cliff with a massive smooth slab at one end of it, the Grand Miroire after which it is named. We saunter up to the cliff (read struggle up steep gully of scree) at 7am, and it was a bloody good thing we got an early start, because we needed it to get lost in. We were viciously sandbagged by our guidebook, which doesn’t mention that it doesn’t describe the original start to our route. So we get up there, and there’s the name of our route painted on the rock. It doesn’t look quite like the topo, but it says it’s the route, so let’s go. It’s definitely not it. It’s hard. Still, the belays are good and we can always rap off, we’ll find the route again on the slab if we just follow this thing for a while. So off I bound up the next pitch. It’s desperate, I’ve really not done much on limestone before, it’s very cold, slightly wet, I have my comfy shoes on and we’re both carrying packs. It’s very disconcerting not knowing how hard the climbing ahead is, and I’m having a wail, pulling on gear everywhere, then the gear runs out and I’m blethering up some slabby stuff, running out of rack, tossing a rock in a crack and slinging it and eventually arriving with much relief at the belay. This was about the second time I thought I was going to dies that day – the access to the base of the climb was also a thrilling experience. Still, survival mode works well, it even seems less petrifying in the next pitches and we arrive at the slab, climb into the sun, and everything kicks back. Beautiful climbing and we get the pace up enough to maybe get up the thing in time. At the top of the right end of the slab is an overhanging headwall. We’re getting pretty close to it, and I still can’t see a way through it at 6b (21). By the base of it, we figure it’s got to be the chunky line that weaves its way through the roofs and overhangs, and it’s wild. Standing on the lip of a roof at the top of a 500m cliff that’s already a long way above the bottom of the valley is an amazing feeling. I score the very last pitch – an easy scramble to the summit, but the rock’s crap and there’s no gear worth placing. I throw the rope around few boulders held in by mud and think about jumping over the far side if I have to. We’ve even got a few hours to get down, which is always a fun experience in the mountains. We traverse along the top for a while, pretty scrappy with a steep slope of the back, but it gets worse. I scramble bleating in terror around a corner to see Enga almost at the bottom of a steep scrappy gully, and some choosy rock that I have to solo across to get to it. I yell down I’m going to die if I come off this and she yells up falling off is not an option! I blether into the gully and find slithering down mud, grass and scree strangely reassuring after that. We arrive at a tourist path at the base and I have never been so happy to be on a path in my life. We scamper along it for ages, and never find the way leading down the descent gully. Still we cross over the col and spy some huts we know are on the long path down, so we bound past them with relief and spy refuges in the valley. We hug and laugh and dream about the beer awaiting us. Only they’re not our refuge! That’s 45 minutes further down the valley. We stagger into our refuge eventually and are sculling beer by 8pm, looking at the other guidebook and swearing at ours – we’d been doing 6c (23) on those lower pitches.
Crappy weather kept us on valley crags for a while, and a lot of that is sport. The Swiss love their bolts, perfect cracks with a line of bolts on them. Despite the taste for bolting, there were many frustrating moments on mountain routes where there’d be a bolt next to a perfectly good placement, then a 10m run out slab. I could only conclude the Swiss have no idea about gear, and in fact, there were some scary practices all round – one guy who belayed of a quickdraw threaded around a rusty piece of mank from and old railing might have had us wondering about not bothering to do his screw gate up, but considering is was clipped into a single snap gate, it was all a bit pointless. We did some nice stuff up to 8 pitches long, and it’s funny how your perspective of a big routes start to change – 8 pitches is an easy half day now, whereas I would have said it was huge before I left Australia!  - Top - typical-crap-weather
 - Above - the-hoards-on-Motorhead
Europeans also have different attitudes to smoking to us. Way more people smoke, it’s more socially acceptable and non smokers right don’t seem to have caught on. Smoking was allowing in restaurants, airports, railway stations … and so many people smoked at crags that you’d be on a crux high up the cliff, take a deep breath and get a lungful of smoke! I have decided that Australia’s quite a forward thinking country – the use of resources, in particular plastic bags and packaging in Europe was much higher – we had a few arguments in Swiss supermarkets that we did not want our veggies put in a bloody plastic bag, but they insist on putting each and every one in a bag with a sticker on it. We made them put stickers on individual items of fruit. Recycling isn’t so common either. Veggie food could be hard to find and really shitty. Actually the best veggie food I found in Britain was in a little country pub in Bosherton, south Wales. Some mountain huts had loos that just dumped everything over the cliff – 200 people a night shitting over the cliff! Even in the better set up huts, they haven’t worked out decent composting loos and they have pits that stink. No rain water either, they divert from creeks low down, catch melt water higher up, cart water in some places. Lots run very low on water.
A brief foray to Sanetsch was deluged in miserable weather, although I’m told the climbing is fantastic, we didn’t get to do any big stuff. We drift over to the Bernese Oberland, which has stacks of amazing big cliffs with minimal or no snowy access. El Dorado is a big granite lump just beneath the Grimsel Pass overlooking the Grimselsee, which is a very pretty name for something which is really just a big dam. The glacier is supposed to be beneath the cliff, but warming has meant it’s out of sight around the corner. We bivvy in the car park of the luxury hotel perched on an island in the dam to get an early start. We’re up the first pitch before the hoards arrive, but soon 3 parties are on the route behind us. Then 4. The first lot, 2 German boys, are on our tails. We’re moving quickly now, having got our stuff sorted out better, as well as the advantage of being on route, in the sun, and prepared for hard climbing. Despite hooning up this thing, these guys are constantly on our hanging belays and it’s really annoying. So about 9 pitches up, we stop and hang out to allow them to pass. We have lunch, take some photos, eventually they’re leader climbs by. Waiting a bit longer, we notice their rope is taught, the 2nd has fallen off. We get the shits with waiting and simulclimb 2 pitches to get a decent way ahead. We don’t see them again til we’re back at the car park. They must have run out of steam – takes girls to keep up that sort of pace all day! The climb, Motorhead, is lush – slabs, corners, cracks, really varied. Very exciting. Big run outs. Found myself doing 5c, 6a (16-18) moves 10m out from gear, and that was with Enga leading the worst pitch! Still, I’ve got my head around this mountain thing by now. It was a bit of a shock to discover I really am an Arapiles coddled baby! In fact, climbing in Australia generally is simpler and safer then the Alps. But I loved it – no one would have believed that inside wussy old me was a mad alpinist waiting to get out! Thought I was going to die at least 5 times a day at first, but somehow, it all becomes normal …
The weather craps out really badly, and there’s huge storm cloud over the whole of Switzerland for a week. We run screaming to Italy. I really like Italy – the first place in Europe I’ve felt at home in. Britain just doesn’t do it for me at all. Switzerland is beautiful, the mountains amazing, but it really is just like a story book or post card. Green valleys, cows with bells, little and not so little wooden chalets (building regulations require building traditional housing, so you see really modern ones looking really cheesy) snowy peaks … I expect to see Heidi and hear the sound of music any second. It’s all very neat and proper, and so are the people. All nice normal, law abiding, and quite horrified at my bare feet – I have never got so many strange and dirty looks for not wearing shoes! All over Europe people commented on it, but they looked most offended in Switzerland. Politically, Switzerland is quite interesting – they have lots of referendums, so the people vote on major government decisions, and frequently make altruistic and open minded choices. I do suspect they hide their social problems away however – it’s not cheap to live there, but I saw no obvious signs of poverty – they either have some great social services, kick everyone out who can’t afford to live there or have a very big carpet somewhere. They do however make the most divine yogurt in the world, and I gorged on chocolate chip, truffle, kiwi fruit, pistachio … the most amazing range of exotic flavoured yogurts.
Italy on the other hand, feels lived in. It’s messy, raucous, real. The people are really friendly, lively, the food is great, so is the coffee, the gelati, the red wine … and it’s cheap! We’re at Arco, a sport climbing area, loads of limestone cliffs. It’s warm, there’s a massive lake to swim in, the crags are so accessible, we do a few routes, retire for coffee, a swim, pop out and do some more routes, retire for red wine … I’m beginning to think I could get used to this kind of climbing holiday. But sport climbing only interests me for so long,the limestone so polished it’s like porcelain and a few days later, I’m bored of it, and I’m off on a train back to Switzerland to meet Zoë.
 - ...on-the-Aiguille-de-Perschel
 - and the Trient-Plateau
The weather’s still fucked (noticed a theme yet?) but it’s forecast to get better, so we take a gamble and head up to the Trient plateau. The convenient abundance of lifts in the Alps helps us up to 2000m and we trudge through rain then sleet then snow as we climb up to the hut. Zoë assures me it’s the most beautiful walk, but we can’t se a thing. The next morning downs beautifully clear and we get a relaxed start, waiting for the climb to get into the sun. The Aiguille d’Orny is a cute little rocky peak at 3100m ( see first pic on this page). The last few pitches are stunning, Zoë gets a 6a roof out in the middle of nowhere, then I get the continuation up a very funky arête. No thoughts of dying at all today. After relaxing at the base for a bit, we prepare to head up to the next hut. I get onto a glacier for the first time in my life! It’s completely snow covered, but there are people jogging around on it unroped still. We decide they’re dumb, and Zoë gives me my first lessons in glacier travel. Sun’s made it extra slushy, and it’s hard work up the glacier, but we puff and pant into the hut with time to rest before tea. The view over the plateau is stunning – a pure white bowl with a ring of aiguilles circling it. Our plan for the next day, the Aiguille de Perscheller, 3400m, is a rocky point opposite us.
We go for the early start the next morning – 5 am – and it seems like the whole hut is with us. It’s really busy. We set out across the glacier and there are trains of people everywhere, like little caterpillars. Most of them are heading up the snow plod, the Aiguille de Tour. The last slopes up to the climb are quite steep, and we get out crampons – first time I’ve warn them – and Zoë puts me on a short rope. I’m looking at this arrangement and asking what happens if I fall. She plants her axe and steadies me. And if she falls? She doesn’t fall. But if she does? Ice axe brake. OK. I know how to do them in theory … but even now, much more experience later, I’m not so convinced on this short roping thing. It’s caused the death of quite a few guides.
We get up to the base of the climb, and Steve’s already got clients on the route. The first pitch is north facing and chockfull of ice. Steve’s clients are having a shocker of a time – falling off and throwing snow and ice out of the crack willy nilly. I’m not very keen on getting close behind them, but Zoë wants me to hurry. I move up a bit further, a pair of boots dangle in my face as they fall off again and I come back down a bit insisting I’m not going anywhere until they are out of there because I don’t need to take a nasty fall because someone else has knocked me off the cliff. I jam my way up through the ice once they’ve gone. We’ve put all our gear in one pack so the leader doesn’t need to carry one. Bad idea. It weighs a ton. We’re dragging a pig up the route with us. We divvy it out a bit more, but the poor seconder can still barely climb with it and much aiding is involved in getting up each pitch. Still, the leading is great fun, we pop onto the summit ridge and the drop down the north face is stunning, with views out towards France. I get the summit ridge, a series of little towers, bridging across the abyss between them. We rope up with Steve and clients and run all the way down the glacier past the first hut, a mad pace for my short little legs! And we’re back in Steve’s chalet in Leysin drinking red wine and eating fresh food that night.
My last night in Switzerland, we head out to the Yeti for drinks. I’m on a mission to find climbing partners, because I don’t have any for the rest of my trip and feeling a bit miserable about it. There’s been a collection of young boys around for the week, on a subsidised student alpine course. They’re all in the pub, so I join them, plied with much beer later, I still don’t have a climbing partner I’m happy with, but I’ve had a lot of fun. The next morning, much teasing from Zoë and Steve later, I’m abandoning all those pathetic thoughts of heading home early and get on a train for Chamonix. I’ve got a map to get to the shack, a climbing squat in the valley, so I figure I’ll turn up and see what happens. Catching trains around Europe is really cruisy. Unlike here, where there might be one a day, appalling connections, some shitty bus sections and takes days to get anywhere, it took me 6 hours to get from northern Italy to east Switzerland, despite two changes, and 2 hours from Leysin to Chamonix. I was so impressed! The loos on trains are as decrepit as those in the huts however – when you flush it, it drops straight onto the tracks!!
I get into the Cham Valley and hunt out this shack. Introduce myself to a young Irish boy on the deck, chat, ask if there’s any room for me to stay. Sure, I can have the space under the shack. It’s pretty decrepit, dust, junk, an old mattress, but I clean it out and it’s fine. There are 7 boys already staying there. It’s packed. The shack is about 3m square, an attic that sleeps three, a couch downstairs, my “pod”, a tent out the back. After I’ve been there a while, I figure the only reason there was room for me was my sex! Others guys were getting sent away to the camp site, but there’s always room for the very few girls in Chamonix. One of the boys called it the most sex starved valley in the world! I really didn’t see many girls climbing there, and none climbing the sort of stuff I wanted to climb.  - The boys at the shack
 - ...and the holes in my toes
Another girl turned up at the shack a bit later, and I don’t think she got treated with the same respect that I did because I was considered a “real” climber, and she wasn’t! I was also the oldest in the shack by some way. This trip is already starting to feel like my youthful revival after a few years of house building domesticity in Nati. It was so like my early years of climbing, being the only girl in a bunch of young boys. They were all very lovely, lots of laughs, lots of fun, and I felt very welcome and at home in Chamonix straight away. The shack is a very communal place. Someone actually owns it, and after his son died years ago, it was left to his ski bum friends. It alternates between ski bums all winter and climbing bums all summer. You run into town to use the public loos, sneak a shower, water comes from the creek running by. The balcony has a multimillion dollar view across to the Aiguille Vert. By the time I left we’d been inundated by all the climbers in Cork! We had 9 of us in our tiny shack briefly. It’s quite odd not to be surrounded by lush Irish accents after all that time.
I went climbing with one of the Irish boys, Mike, the next day, we got on well, and headed up into the mountains the day after. The weather was crap, but it was forecast to improve, so we gambled again. Hitched into Chamonix, got on the train to Montenvers and it starts pissing. We imagine all the boys back at the shack laughing at us (no one else was going anywhere that day) and hang out at the station for a break. It cleared and we headed out to the glacier. You climb down 200m of ladders to reach the glacier (strange to think of ordinary tourists doing it) and potter onto the Mer de Glace. The boys had assured me it was completely dry (meaning no snow, it was actually bloody wet with the rain!) and really cruisy, you could jog up it in sandshoes. So I didn’t borrow any crampons, and soon found myself sliding around the glacier and bloody petrified of these big blue holes everywhere. I certainly couldn’t jog up it, having never walked on bare glacier in my life. Swearing at those boys, we roped up (Mike did have crampons), hid from some more rain under a convenient boulder, before I found myself crawling along the ridge between 2 crevasses on a doggy leash! Mike took photos of me, but this classic moment was lost to posterity a few days later when he dropped my camera off the Tour Vert, 200m down into the scree never to be seen again. After the glacier, there’s 200m of ladders up, one of them overhanging – all lots of fun with a heavy pack, and great with traffic jams.
Again, we lucked out with the weather and got 2 great days of climbing in – the Envers area has lots of long rock routes facing south, so lots of sun, a nice hut that doesn’t mind you bringing your own food, which saves lots of money, and there’s heaps of stuff there I want to go back to. On the 3rd day, we are 10 pitches up a stunning route, I’ve just finished an exquisite 6a+ (20, typically undergraded and exciting – have I mentioned that about the mountains?) pitch up a quartz seam when a big black cloud comes over the top of the mountain. The only problem with these nice warm south routes is the weather comes in from the north west, and you can’t see it til it’s on you. So we had 10 minutes warning that all hell was about to break loose then we were abseiling madly in torrential rain and hail, our climb becoming a waterfall and soaked through in minutes. I’m getting pretty scared, because I’m really vulnerable to the cold, and even when we get to the base, we have a steep snow slope to descend, and I’ve not had to descend steep snow before! Mike glissades down it at a great pace, looses it, brakes, is off again. I’m plodding down one foot at a time, axe firmly embedded in the snow, half on my bum … very slow, hands freezing, so I stop to put them in my arm pits, only to think now my bum’s freezing … I cheered when I got down to the scree – I don’t like scree, but at least I knew what to do with it!
After the Envers, Mike disappears to Paris for a week. This leaves me sans climbing partner again. Oh well. I dive into the mess of the Maison de la Montagne, climbing partner pick up place extraordinaire. Lots of very scary people I certainly didn’t want to climb with. Lots of people wanting to join the masses plodding up Mont Blanc. Very few people wanting to (or able!) climb what I want to climb. I end up with this German guy who claims lots of alpine experience although he doesn’t climb very hard, and figure at least we’ll get some long moderate routes done. Wrong. He’s outrageously slow. We reach the ridge of the Peigne having only got up the access route to the main peak and I decide we’re baling while we can, because there was no way we were going to make it to the summit at that pace. The next day, his knees give out. We head down. Then I meet a great climbing partner, very safe, very competent, climbs very nicely. We had a lovely day up the Brevant, but then he already had plans for the weekend. I’m supposed to be heading back to England, but I love Chamonix, don’t want to leave and change my flight.
 - Mt. Blanc at sunset
That weekend saw no climbing because we all went to a dance party. Fun, small party, down by the river, great drum and bass, I dance til 6am. Unfortunately, my knees were trashed after this – walking up and down hills with a big rucksack is OK, but dance for hours on hard ground, and my knees are fucked. Almost recovered from our party, Doug and I head up to the Blatiere. Our early morning start is going well, we get to the teleferique station at 9.45 … I cringe at the queue, but Doug says we’ll just walk straight up to the front, alpinist priority! No one will dare say anything … I try and hide behind him, feeling terribly rude, but it works and we’re saved waiting for about 6 teleferiques. We get 5 pitches up our route and get hailed on. Again. I’m beginning to feel jinxed. Still, the climb so far had been great, I’d lead a stunning 7a (25!) pitch, steep, thin, twin cracks, and I only grabbed one peg … We bail off it, and have to rap on some of the biggest mank I’ve rapped on in my life – old pegs joined by bits of tat, single rusty old bolts … The French have a very strange idea of setting up rap stations. Even on their new ones, they put in two bolts, hang a mallion off one and join it to the other by a bit of tat threaded through the bolt! Very rarely are they even close to equalised, and should the first bolt fail, it’s going to shock load the 2nd, but what will probably happen is the tat will give, because it’s threaded through the bracket over a thin edge, or it’s just so old and mank it would go regardless. You carry “ab tat” around – 7mm cord – to replace these, and it leads to loads of rubbish as people just throw the old tat down the cliff. The mank holds, we reach the ground (well, snowy scree ledge you really don’t want to fall off) and the sun comes out again. Spitting. Oh well, all the hail in the cracks would just be melting then. But the slabs have dried off and I bound up the first pitch of one – very exciting, committing undergraded 6b+ climbing, but lovely. We miss the last teleferique down and stay in the old Plan refuge, which is being knocked down for a new luxury one all the tourists can stay in, but in the meanwhile, someone has kicked a door in, so there’s a room open and it’s way better than camping with the hoards around Lac Bleu.
The next morning, it all seems suspiciously quiet. Where are the tourists? The soothing rattle of the cable cars passing? We head up to the station to get one down, very suspicious that something’s gone wrong. The car is 6m further into the station than it’s meant to be and at an unprepossessing angle. They’ve crashed it! We’ll have to walk down. My knees are still stuffed from dancing, our packs weigh a tonne (you don’t economise so much when mechanised transport does much of the up hill for you!). I summon up my best French (which was not so good!) and try to talk up a ride down in the staff lift. To no avail. But they do offer to take our packs. So we run all the way back to Chamonix. It’s a stunning day, the walk passes though beautiful hanging valleys, it’s all down hill (about 1300m of it) it’s actually heaps of fun. By the end, my big toes are killing me and I know it’s going to be ugly when I get my boots off. I tear them off at Montenvers, grimace at the massive holes in my feet, and barefoot across town. I arrive back at the shack daydreaming of the fire bath. I scavenge enough wood and get it started. Throw more wood on. Wait. These things take a lot longer than just turning the hot tap on. I loll around in the bath for the rest of the afternoon. Have a massage exchange. Recovery is pretty good really.
Zoë comes over from Leysin bearing carrot cake. Makes her instantly popular at the shack! The forecast is crap, but somehow we find the motivation to climb anyway and the weather never craps out. We’re on a multpitch sport route in the valley, so retreat is easy, and there are very ominous clouds down the valley. Every pitch we think will be our last, but they hold off. Then we have half the cliff thrown on us by some people abseiling down and Zoë gets hit on the shoulder by a rock. We’re both pretty shaken, but she thinks her shoulder is OK to go on, so we do. It was the first climb I’d finished in a while, and on the day with the worst forecast!
I organise to go up to the Grand Capucin with Pete. Because the lift is broken, we try to approach from Italy. Hitch through the Mont Blanc tunnel, catch the lift up from the other side and walk. We get as far as the French side of the tunnel. Hour and half later, we spit the dummy and hitch back to Chamonix. We get a lift in 2 minutes. I guess people who are paying 30 euro to get through the tunnel think we’re free loading to hitch through it. Or the people who can afford to pay it aren’t the sort of people to pick up hitchers. Weather turns out crap anyway. We get hailed off the Grand Charmoz instead. I tried to climb both these things 3 times and the weather foiled me each time.
It’s taking me 2 months to write this and now I’ve forgotton what I did …. The weather stayed completely instable, which made trips into the mountains difficult. Hung out with Mark (a gorgeous man I met there) having a luxurious time ... way too much good food and wine … swimming in freezing cold rivers … walking up beautiful valleys … bouldering at the Col des Montets. I run away to Ceuse fore 2 days with the Irish boys, 5 of us crammed in a tiny little Opal with a mad rally driver. Loads of people rave about Ceuse, but I just couldn’t get excited by it. It’s a stunning lump of rock, several kilometres of limestone forming a cap on the hill, but I just wanted to get back to the mountains. Too many people, single pitch sport climbs, polished limestone … just not my thing …
 - ridge-beneath-the-Aiguille
 - and Voie-Contamine
On getting back to Cham, Mark and I decide the weather is good enough for the traverse of the Chamonix Aiguilles – 2 days incorporating lots of little peaks on a stunning ridge line. We’re lazing around the house thinking the last teleferique would be about 6 or 7, then we actually look up the timetable and it’s 4. It was already past 12.30, we had to finish packing, drive to Chamonix (15 minutes), get the train to Montenvers (half an hour), run across the plan (1 hour 45). By some great feat we get on the 1.30 train, running out the door with the fish we’d been cooking for lunch thrown in a bag and texting apologies for the state of the house to flatmates. We run across the plan in record time and arrive panting at the midstation. The weather’s starting to look crap. This is the only chance I’m going to get to get up to the Midi, and it’s covered in cloud. We’re on the teleferique heading up through cloud wondering why we were bothering when we pop out of the clouds to the most stunning views. We’re watching the sun set above the most amazing cloud blanket and the Col du Midi is just gorgeous. There’s a cloak of cloud blowing off the Grand Jorasses creating the most beautiful effect. We bivvy in the mid station. I’ve never been this high before and Mark was convinced I’d loose my appetite at this altitude (3815m). No way, me stop eating??? It wasn’t however a good nights sleep and then the alarm goes off at 3.30am …. Argghh ... alpine starts suck … it’s freezing cold, blowing a gale and I’ve forgotten to buy a new battery for my head torch. We head off down the ridge line, a sinuous snow arête at this stage, with a 1000m drop off one side and 300m off the other. I’m OK with it at first, because we’re right on the ridge. Then we cut onto the 1000m drop side and I start to get rather nervous. Then the arête steepens and I’m heading down at 45 degrees with the hugest precipices on either side. It’s not been cold enough to freeze and I can’t get my crampons to stay anywhere and I’m thinking I’m going to die again. Mark suggests we should go climb some sunny rock faces, there were loads up there he wanted to do and it was probably too cold for his fingers … he got frost bite on the Grand Jorasses in February. 10 days on a north face in February … 100m from the top, they got helicoptered out. His fingers are OK, but they are disfigured, not quite full movement and they don’t heat themselves, so they are really vulnerable to frost bite again.
So we trudge over to an old hut which we had all to ourselves, make cups of tea, eat more food and head out for those sunny rock faces. We take advantage of the lack of people since the teleferique broke down to get on one of the most popular routes in the mountains. We start up the original start, a goey little crack that most people avoid now, and someone who was avoiding it zips in front of us from the popular bolted start, then proceeds to be outrageously slow. After hanging around in the belay for an hour waiting for them, we manage to sneak past them. We head up the original finish as well, some good old fashioned thrutching, and we’re having a ball. We rap down the route only to find ourselves behind the slow pokes again .. they’ve abandoned the rest of the climb and now we’re stuck behind them again! We pick a different rap line and get out of there.
The next morning we head for the Grand Cap, again … not quite so obscenely early, and I’m having a great explore of the glacier. The weather’s looking crap again, so exploring the glacier is all I’m expecting to do after a while. We get over to the Grand Cap and the access couloir is in appalling condition anyway. Small comfort I suppose …. Decide the weather’s OK for a less committing route and we head up the Voie Contamine on Point Lachenal. It’s great! Old fashioned cracks the whole way, with the best rap stations I’ve seen in the Alps on it – ring bolts! The fourth pitch was a chunky off width leading to a chimney through a roof … lots of fun … the next pitches looked stunning, overhanging hand cracks up the head wall. Except it hailed. I am the hail goddess!! So we bail. By the time we’re heading back up to the teleferique station, it’s in white out. I just put my head down and motor up. We over take a few people and when we get to the top, Mark comments he’s never come up that so quickly! Here I was feeling a bit slack for getting puffed out of my brain … We catch the last teleferique down, reverse the epic over to Montenvers and down the train … Mark even pulls my boots off to give me a foot massage … what a man, unsolicited foot massage on the way out of the mountains… Had some last beers with the boys, then had to catch the bus first thing the next morning … boo hoo …
I so didn’t want to be in England after all that. I wanted to stay in France or take my poor heartbroken (again!) self back home. Climbed some short grit things and couldn’t believe how outrageously pumped I got on 8m of grit – way more pumped than 500m in the mountains! Started to realise that I wasn’t very fit for short rock routes … you don’t use power much in the mountains, and I had none of it. Grit has great texture, and loads of old fashioned steep lines, but it’s so short! Thrutching my way out of a roof crack, Mike comments on how exposed it is and I had to laugh … 8 m of exposure? Dashed down to Pembroke for a few days, and the climbing there is really lush, by far the most interesting limestone I’ve climbed on, really featured, lots of cracks, steep and atmospheric. All trad, But I was a wreck … I was so tired after 3 months solid climbing, I just wanted a week of rest days. Then I had an epic journey home – 6 hours on a bus to Heathrow, overnight at the airport, 12 hours to Saigon, 14 hours in Saigon, 8 hours to Melbourne, 2 to Ballarat (bloody glad I got out of customs in a hurry and got the first bus or I’d have had a few hours in Melbourne airport too) then 3 to Natimuk…
My life’s continued to be mad since I got home, hence it taking me 2 months to find time to finish this. It’s only because I smashed my ankle bouldering that I’m working on it now! I’ve found some power again, but I think I brought the rain back from Europe with me. And I’m daydreaming of the winter in Chamonix … skiing down the Mer de Glace, mmm … and all the routes I want to climb there next year.
 - Sport on Arco-porcelain
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