What else have I missed?: The Warriors Run was part of the Warriors Festival last weekend and was won by Owen Gahan and Zoe Melling, both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of running internationally with. :-)

The Warriors Run takes competitors from the Cannon Gun at the beachfront in Strandhill to the top of Knocknarea, around Queen Maeves Cairn and back to the beachfront again. For the uninitiated, a 15 Kilometre race might seem easy. Not the Warriors Run! The race is classified as a road and hill race or multi-terrained, so whilst approximately seven of its miles are on paved roads, it is the special three miles in the middle, to the top of Knocknarea that gives the race its bite. These three miles include a 700 foot climb on loose gravel, unsurfaced and grass paths. At its steepest incline on the way up, even the most professional athlete slows to a walk and then brace themselves to face the equally daunting downhill run, back down the often slippery slopes, even in the driest of weather.

Oh and I missed this too: Teams have been selected for the World Mountain Running trophy in Switzerland to be held in a couple of weeks. Join the debate over there about team selection. Controversial….
I’m travelling on this “alpine holiday” as a team official. :-)

Ultra Trail Tour du Mont Blanc has started today! Good luck to TGU’s Eoin, Adrian Tucker, Gary Moralee and John Mc Donnell. You can follow their progress online here and go to ‘Tableau Passage’ and then ‘CCC.’

Cheers Robin for the good wishes, I even got special good wishes from the Irish Ironman himself Alan Ryan. Happy days! :-)
I’m all set now, if I get a chance I’ll update you….

-Aisling-

Image from the Warriors Festival.

SINGAPORE (Team Geared Up) - Ok, so this is part III (see part I Gran Paradiso and part II Castor). This should get you in the mood for the Summer that’s not far away!

We left off in Gressoney la Trinite near the Swiss-Italian border having climbed a great route on Castor. Back in our little hire car, we sped off without a plan - all we knew was were were going towards the French border with the potential of a spur of the moment bivvi on the Dome du Gouter on Mont Blanc. While Rallying down the valley bends flicking through all our insurance documentation and trying to get the hire company on the phone to find out if we were covered to travel out of Italy into Chamonix we managed to get flagged down by some Carabiners (ok, so that’s what we called them - Police) with machine guns pointed at us for speeding. We’d been tailed all the way down the valley by an undercover police car who duly pulled in beside us and the driver went for a smoke in the police jeep. uh oh. After a bit of me talking in English, him talking in Italian and some very stern looks we drove off ticket-less, and yes - I stalled the car.

Deciding that we couldn’t cross the border and the Italian route on Mont Blanc would require an earlier start than we had (with no maps!) we headed for Cervino on the south side of the Matterhorn. This is a view of the summit block of the Matterhorn from our hotel window :-)

With a plan to ski for a day in the Zermatt summer ski area and then climb the easy 4000er Breithorn and ski off the summit the next day we headed up the cable car and hired skis in the mid-station.

The icy blue lakes below due to the glacial run-off were incredible. The Cervino valley is visible in the background.

We checked into the Refugio Guide de Cervino with a spectacular back porch view!

After a quality morning on the slopes getting back into the technique (which shut at 2pm in the summer) we sat out in the sun in deck chairs with some beers, a great meal and a book. Hours of bliss!

We hit bed very early ready for something like a 4am start. Our plan was to break trail and be first on the summit for the day. This was the view out the window lying in bed.

Waking to a cracker of a morning, we set off into the sunrise with a view like this to gaze at as we puffed our way up to the top of the glaciated ski slopes and onto the flats beneath the summit slope.

This is the Matterhorn imposing itself on us, from two angles.

Here’s the skis on Eoin’s pack. Our bags were very heavy with skis and descent boots in them! (nobody would hire us ski-mountaineering boots - they didn’t understand we wanted to ski off the summit :-)

And not before long… we we the only people on the summit…! Which is extremely rare on Breithorn due to the height of the Swiss Cable Car.

And here’s the view looking towards Castor (our previous route).. spectacular!

And… here’s the Matterhorn! We’re a bit higher than earlier now! This is the direction we would ski off - straight over than and curving around the summit to the left down to the glacier below.

It was extremely icy - I took a good tumble with my iceaxe on my back keeping me nice and straight :-) flipping me head over heels - but Eoin got down gracefully! What a great experience!

As a great final surprise back at the hut we managed to get right in under the weekly beer delivery!

What a fantastic 2 days - (note: TGU Blogger Alx summited Breithorn in 2005 and I had done it in 2004).

So that wrapped up an unreal trip to Italy! I wish I was back there right now! Bring on the summer!

-Robin.

KILDARE, IRELAND (Team Geared Up) - Haven’t times changed when I can just jump across to the Mediterranean for a four day weekend of sports climbing?

Flight (Ryanair): €70
Car rental & fuel: €42
Accommodation: €30
Food & drink: €60
TOTAL: €202
When you think about it, it’s absurdly cheap! Still though, not that I was complaining :)

Originally, it was only meant to be myself and Nigel C, however by the time we left a team of six were preparing themselves for some bolt clipping.
Weather forecasts before we went were reporting highs of 16 degrees. Pleasant but not exactly tropical so I took the decision to not even travel with any shorts in the bag. What a mistake…..

Some info on Sardinia: an autonomous region of Italy, Italian is largely the predominant language, however there is the local dialect of Sardinian. It’s about a third of the size of Ireland, however much more mountainous! For more info, check out Wikipedia here.

As ever, the flying bus service (aka Ryanair) transported their plucky herd, sorry customers, into Alghero airport on the northwest of the island. A quick dash for the rental cars with the obligatory free upgrade (rule of thumb, always take your time queuing for the car after collecting your baggage so you’re last in line. They’ll usually have run out of the micro models and supply you with a free upgrade - we ended up in a Peugeot estate for three people :). It’s a two and a half hour drive across the country so you get a pretty good idea of the landscape on your first arrival. Much of the west of the island is agricultural, large swathes of green fields and hillside, however as you traverse east, it grows rockier and more mountainous (up to 1800metres) .
There’s climbing everywhere from what I can see, however a large proportion of it is focused on the eastern side around the village of Cala Gonone (Google Maps link), a small peaceful holiday village set at the bottom of a steep and winding switch-back road (read: I wish I had a sports car!).

Anyway the important bits, what’s the climbing like?!?! What variations! Every crag we visited felt like it had a different style, varying from sea-worn polished limestone coming straight out of the sea, to slabs to short-and-steep pocket pulling covering every length of pitch from 7 meter micro routes to 35 meter whoppers. There’s even the choice of large muti-pitches or trad routes to whet your appetite if you’re keen. The large proportion of the climbing is in the lower grades of 5a to 7b (5.9 - 5.12c), but there is harder stuff for those inclined although not as much, say in comparison to Siurana or any of the other well known crags in Europe. For those strong-armed folks, you’ll have a great trip but if you’re looking to tick some big grades, there’s better places - it’s not that sort of location. In short however, you’ll have a great trip and won’t be disappointed.

On a side note, I mentioned the mistake of not bringing shorts earlier. It was 24 degrees on Saturday and we were climbing right beside the sea on some rock that still seemed to have winter dampness in it. You can guess that one or two people were looking a little red by the end of the day - Irish skin just isn’t used to the sun :)

John H enjoying the 30 meter-plus pitches of the crag, Bucchi Arta. Just for the drive-in over about 15km of single track (poor rental cars :) is worth it alone.

Still though, the whole trip was a success and bar forcing Angela, the other driver to take her car down some of the roads that the Italian Job was filmed on (barely wider than a Mini), the whole group got on fantastically well. John H was proving that there are loads of Irish climbers that have the potential to climb hard if given the opportunity (bolts in Ireland anyone?), Eamon & Matt proved that Westwood climbers are getting stronger and stronger, Angela proved that height really doesn’t make a difference when you’re strong enough, and Nigel was looking ominously strong considering he’s only back climbing again after surgery on his shoulder - watch out for some great news from all the Irish climbers this year I think!

Angela getting to know the local wildlife. Very friendly!

Info:
Getting there: We flew Ryanair. Cheapest price we saw from Dublin was €60 return
Car rental: Relatively similar across all the companies and slightly more expensive than mainland Europe. Still cheap though. You’ll be charged more if you’re under 25, unlike in Spain.
Accommodation: There’s lots of choices from apartments to hotels to eco-farms (help out while you’re there). We paid €188 for 4 days for a 5-bed+1-person-on-the-convertible-couch. Functional with large fridge, tv (not that you’d use it), cooker, hot shower (although the tank was only large enough to support 2-3 showers before having to wait for it to re-fill and re-heat).
Food & Drink: It was late February so off-season meaning lots of shops and restaurants were closed. Supermarkets open 8am-1pm and 1pm-5pm, and closed Sundays. Very laid back! Many of the restaurants were closed but it looks like there’s quite a few choices. There’s the equivalent of the irish chipper but serving pizzas (And good ones at that) if you’re stuck with all the shops closed. Food is cheap, with a pizza costing at most €7. We drank the tap water, didn’t show any bad effects. Main-stream beers are the same price as Ireland, although I’m sure the local brews are much cheaper.

If you’ve any other queries, make sure to post them in the comments!

- Neal :) -

For example, the 51k Trail Blanch Font Romeu gets you one point, while the Bob Graham Round gets you two. The list can be linked from here. There are no Irish events listed and if we were to suggest any to them I reckon it would have to be something like the Wicklow Way or the Wicklow Round. Any other races you’d think would be comparable to the ones listed?

I’m not sure they won’t end up completely changing the spirit of this race. Don’t you think it will end up as one of those races with just serious ultra-heads involved, and no first timers like I was?

-Aisling-

Image from UTMB gallery.

“I was on oxygen from 9,000 feet onwards” said the pilot who had hoped to break the men’s record of 22,00 feet but the weather was too warm.

She holds the most female ballooning world records of 9 and has made a career out of this hobby as she is now Operations Manager of Irish Balloon Flights. Isn’t that just the ultimate dream of any adventurer, to do what you love for a living?

-Aisling-

Qoute is from Evening Herald, Image from my flickr set.

LONDON, UK, (Team Geared Up) - This one wins all the prizes. Forget ascending Everest blind, as an amputee or even running the A-Z of Marathons, this is way cooler. Having tried to climb Mont Blanc myself (and getting white washed off in a snow storm) I have ultimate respect for them lobbing these gas cylinders up there.

These guys lugged a full jaccuzzi to the summit of Mont Blanc, re-constructed it, and then heated it at 4810m.

Check out all their photos on their site jaccuzzi.ch. Well worth seeing what they carried up.

Credit to GoBlog for the tip.

-Robin-

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - This is part II and our ascent of Castor (see Part I: Gran Paradiso). Castor is a 4226m peak located in Switzerland but we climbed from Gressoney la Trinite in Italy which climbs up a long valley from Pont St Martine, the devil town with no ATMs, Maps or Guidebooks. Italy really doesn’t have the same mountaineering tourism as France or Switzerland, and you feel it. On the positive side this means you get spectacularly empty routes - and we were about to experience one of the best climbs of the trip.

We arrived in Staffel at about 11am, and dumped all our kit out of the car onto the road - we proceeded to sort it all back into the packs we’d take up the mountain with us for the night. By the time we were packed we found out the cabel car only ran 3 times a day - and the next one was at 5pm, we’d never make refuge by darkness and climbing to an unknown route with no cable car descent open and no tent is not clever. We’d have to wait for tomorrow… at least we had a nice view! The peak you can see is the hump we would pass over to reach the hut. Castor at 4226m is hidden well behind this and to the left.

We got a room in a B&B and headed to the nearest bar - as luck would have it, it rained heavy and we may well not have survived a night on the hill with no kit, certainly with the thunder storm we would neither make the hut, or the climb in the morning. It could have been disaster. In the bar we were the only 2 people and managed to spend what was probably a week’s revenue for them in 5hrs. They fed us nibbles all night ‘courtesy’ of us buying extra big ‘formidable’ beers at a go. We ordered big pizza’s, it was great - well Eoin ordered two! We ended up ’shouting’ along to a DVD of the U2 Vertigo tour on our own much to the staff’s amusement, and at ‘kick-out’ time we were presented with free hats and a 1ltr bottle of the local spirit! Love it.

Waking very groggy & dehydrated at 6.30am after only a a few hrs sleep, not in the mood at all, we started up the cable car on the 8.45am lift.

It was from here the view just got better…

and better…

and better…!

We started out on the route, and it was a long rock path along a ridge, moving onto snow fields up the slowly rising giant.

The temperature had plummeted the night before and everything had gone into a deep freeze. It was odd for the height we were at as every lake we past was frozen solid. You could throw stones at the surface and not break it.

As we gained some serious height we hit cloud, and during the breaks in the white-out we got some spectacular views down what we had just climbed - we began to feel rather the vertical drops on either side that we’d been oblivious to in the cloud.

We got a fantastic breeze come in and sweep out the cloud around us - the panorama opened up and we could see the final ridge ahead that we needed to reach before we could take on the cabled section and the vertical finish to the refuge.

We eventually reached what we knew from our guide book was the last part of the ridge. This is where it got steep, but fantastic. Suddenly everything we’d seen on the route so far just got amplified and comments started stream out of us “wow”, this was good.

What we had underestimated was the length of the cabled section, it went on, and on! Can you see it running along the ridge below? This was about 1/5th of it.

There were wooden bridges in place to span the big gaps too - wooden bridges I was only just trusting!

In the heat of the moment we were even both caught wearing buffs as a bandana. Practical - but very un-trendy. I regret this photo.

Out of no-where, the hut appeared over the ridge-top.

Fantastic…

3585m, pretty high hut.

Even the first sign of other climbers that day - It had been wonderfully peaceful. Rare.

Toilets too - at this height… squat holes, but with a flusher - so not the end of the world!

Now this is a view to eat your dinner looking at! We sat down and ate a massive plate of pasta each. At about 1 million euro a plate to cover the helicopter fuel to get it up there!

The view of tomorrow’s route & the glacier we would cross before sunrise was clear and the good news was a track was already cut. What we didn’t realise at this point was there was only 4 of us out of the ~30 at the hut who would climb Castor the next day, this just kept getting better.

As darkness set in, we took our last look at the footprints we’d be trying to locate on the snow in the sickly feel of 4am.

The next morning was spectacular - we geared up in the gear room and stepped out onto the ice. It just got so good. I find mountaineering, and especially glacier plods are very much a visual slow moving thing. Your brain races along thinking of things but with your partner 20m ahead of you on the rope it’s a very self-finding experience. I think in this case my photos speak for the climb themselves.

Below is Gran Paradiso, which we climbed in Part I (the days before).

Our ridge…

Some tight navigation was needed!

And then came the summit… pure brilliance!

And the summit views…

There’s the Matterhorn…

And TGU on top! Bonus!

Map:

View Larger Map

Part III next week, with our ski mountaineering descent of the Breithorn.

-Robin-

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - Eoin & myself took a week earlier in the summer to bag a number of 4000ers in the alps. With our rock skills out of practice and our first trip both on together, we decided on a set of easy routes from the Italian sides which we hoped would give us a good base to work from.

While we were looking for quiet ascents, our first was far from it! Gran Paradiso at 4,061m is the highest peak entirely inside the border of Italy. We landed on the RyanAir flight to Turin and picked up our hire car around midnight. The plan was to stop at the first campsite we came to. Campsites & motorways don’t always come together, and so 4 hours later at 4am somewhere near Aosta we pulled over and slept in the car.

The next morning we continued the drive up into the Gran Paradiso national park up a windy little valley to Pont, the trail head for Gran Paradiso. We set off up a dusty track and a few hours later were sitting in the Emmanuel refuge sipping on a Coke and eating Ritter Sport. Mountain huts are such an oasis for climbers - luxuries flown in by helicopter so you don’t have to carry them.

Our strategy that paid off was to continue the climb to reach the edge of the glacier for our bivvi location. This was a prime spot as we got a head start on the crowds that would set off from the hut in the morning. We were unable to buy gas in Pont as we’d hoped. The one we bought was the wrong size and so it was a cold dinner of a baguette and paprika crisps. That said, it was fantastically hot in the sun. Had it of been a wet cold night, I’m not sure we could have managed without a hot drink.

At 2am we woke to the torch lights of other groups bivving near us. We started up the mountain and were first onto the glacier. We roped up, geared up with ice tools, and started one of the longest trudges in our lives. While Gran Paridiso is an east route F/PD- it is not to be underestimated in the physical sense for unacclimatised climbers. While we may have strolled up it later in the week - this was a really hard one you had to dig deep on to keep on shuffling up in crampons. Mind you - sunrise pictured below, really gave us a kick.

The route is all glacier, all day. The only rock section is the summit block, which for us early in the season was still snowy enough. With precautions were needed while balancing on a small ledge in crampons we celebrated in the high winds Eoin’s first 4000er, and then got the hell out of there before the crowds arrived. We’d been climbers 5 & 6 on the summit that morning out of a potential 100 summiteers. We climbed down the dodgy bits and anchored into the snow in freezing conditions in the shade. Wrecked and barley able to point the camera, we got some good shots looking back up to the summit and across Italy.

Here you can see the crowds forming a summit queue as we began a very long tiring descent into the thicker air!

We hit the valley that afternoon and sorted our gear out from the bivvi. Were were hit by a massive storm and other than sitting in the single pub/hotel eating pizza, we sheltered in the tent.

The next morning we drove on towards the direction of Switzerland to find what turned out to be the best climb of the trip, and how much better it is without crowds.

Part II and my log of ‘Castor’ will come later! Watch this space.

-Robin-

I’ll be getting text message alerts throughout the weekend letting me know how Tony is doing so I may update you then! This service is available here if you wish to track any of the runners. I know how hard this event is as I did it last year with Tony (and gave a very long account of it here! You’ve been warned!)

-Aisling-

Photo is from my Flickr page and it’s Tony and Gary on top of Lugnaquillia.

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - TGU blogger Eoin arrives here in London in 14hrs time. Friday 1920hrs we fly to Turin, the location of the last Winter Olympics to hire a car and drive north. We’ll be laden down with ice axes, screws, crampons, ice-line rope, poles, winter boots, shed loads of gortex, fleece, softshell & ripstop. We’ve 8 nights in the Italian/Swiss Alps planned.

First stop is Gran Paradiso National Park to climb ‘Gran Paradiso‘ (above), the highest mountain wholly in Italy at 4061m. It should be a climb without difficulty if the weather is good to us. We’ll head up on the Saturday early enough to acclimatise over the day, and include a route recci for the low-light dawn start & some refreshers on glacial travel.

Next stop will be Castor (4226m) pictured above and Pollux (4092m), which Aoife & myself aborted in 2004 due to a week of bad weather in Zermat giving us only a window to complete Breithorn (4164m) safely. This year, we plan to complete both peaks in a single summit day, leaving the Sella hut in the early hours of the morning from the Italian side (rather than Swiss) and drop down to the col (joch) in between the peaks before ascending the other. We reckon the second peak will add an additional 2.5-3hrs to get back to first summit before descending.

This still leaves us with 3 free days to play with. We’re keen to open to the floor for some 4000er recommendations if any readers have any (You may have noticed, we’re climbing no more than PD routes on this trip).

In other news today, courtesy of Aisling we appear to have our 7th TGU Blogger soon to begin writing here. The only hint I can give right now is, they’re a very keen Irish mountain biker.

-Robin-

Image Credit: Top photo, Summit block of Gran Paradiso, Italy.