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.

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-

Lowe Alpine have brought out this limited edition bag for their 40th anniversary. They have only made 2000 of them with 120 available to the UK and Ireland.

Review of Lowe Alpine Extreme Attack 20:20
Rated as 5/5 on Aug 13 2007 by robinb

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - Two of us are just back from a European Alps climbing trip so this news hits home. Six alpine climbers have died in separate incidents yesterday when temperature on the high mountain plummeted.

1,2,3,4:

French authorities found four dead climbers on the Bionassay crest, on the French side of Mont Blanc.

5:

Belgian man in his 50s, died in the Italian Alps in the Trentino area.

6:

A person died near Monte Rosa, about 40 km (25 miles) east of Mont Blanc.

Sad Story.

(Image Credit: TGU Blogger Eoin checks the map in the Monta Rosa, by Robin).