Climbing the Frendo Spur (part 2 of 2)

Alpine training summer Scottish winter climbing!

Nice to see Henri and Valerie again and two very contrasting days of pre-alpine training for their trip to Mont Blanc in two weeks time!

Day one sun and dry rock on Fiacaill Ridge Direct and Day two sleet, snow and blizzards climbing Jacob's Ladder as can be seen in the video above!

Henri and Valerie's loved it especially the second day climbing Jacob's Ladder in the blizzard :-)
More details and photos on our Facebook album here

Our Alpine summer update!

 

Having returned from our annual three month alpine climbing trip and ploughing my way through my admin and email backlog for our winter 2013 course bookings it's probably now time for a quick update, for folk that aren't actually on Facebook!

It's been a mixed year weather wise but despite a rather unsettled showery and windy early alpine summer there was still plenty to do. However once into August and September the weather turned good giving us time to explore the superb alpine rock climbing in the Envers des Aiguilles area.

This year we had a season pass for the the Chamonix lifts and made good use of it with numerous high altitude trips and ultra lightweight bivi's up Mont Blanc in the Vallee Blanche. By bivvying up high we avoided paying for any of the alpine huts and the money we saved more than paid for our season pass and a £1,000 profit on the individual lift costs :-)

Another benefit of the season pass was our frequent bad weather acclimatisation trips up Aiguille du Midi for hot chocolate and photos - in fact one of the photos has been very popular and has been shared on Facebook hundreds of times. It's also now photo of the week on UKC! See here and on Chamonix's Facebook here

Rather than spending ages mentioning different routes and climbs it's probably easier to link to a few of the photos on our Talisman Facebook Alpine 2012 album here 

A few more videos such as the Frendo Spur below will be appearing soon too!



Mont Blanc on Thursday....

We've had a good few weeks in Chamonix with lots of personal high altitude rock and mixed alpine routes being climbed as well as the complete traverse of the north ridge of Mont Buet with Lorna and Gerry on our Trek and Climb Mont Blanc course. Gerry and Lorna also completed a traverse of the Domes du Miage with Jonathan and then despite mixed weather and high winds at 4,000 metres Jonathan and Gerry successsfully summited Mont Blanc during a 24 hour good weather window on Thursday before thunder storms and lots of fresh snow arrived on Friday / Saturday catching many climbers out...
We're now heading off to Ailefroide and then later Bregalia for some long alpine multi-pitch rock climbing before returning to Chamonix in late August / September.

See www.marmotte.co.uk/blog/diary.html for more details and pictures.