Milan!

Needing a huge rest and a bit of time away from the mountains, Dan, Owen and I headed to Milan for the last couple of days. Ash stayed and climbed the Chere Couloir with a new friend of ours, Glen from Norway. Milan was super cool but not the mega fashion and glamour capital of the world we were expecting, which is great for us because at the moment i dont think we could get further from fashionable and glamorous. Instead we had a good time wandering through the historical cultural type things. We went into the Duomo Cathedral during Mass and i lit a candle and touch the holy water which for some reason burned me horribly (just jokes...). We also saw Michaelangelo's painting of Madonna and Child and a heap of stuff by Leonardo da Vinci.

Back to the interesting stuff....

I am now in a cafe in Chamonix again and have to run off to catch a train up a glacier as Owen and I are about to try a route called the American Direct on a peak called the Dru. It should take us a few days and will be awsome!

A Successful Few Days

Since our time off Owen and I have had a very successful few days. We have climbed a classic rock spire called the Grand Capucin which is around 450m high and has up to grade 7a climbing but is more sustained around 6b/c. It was an incredible route and we got some great footage on the video camera. We then had a rest day and followed it up with a 16 hour super fast ascent of the Gervasutti Pillar (~800m) on Mont Blanc du Tacul. This was an awsome route with a variety of rock and mixed climbing which topped out onto snow ridges and an awsome summit at 4200m.

The Summit ridge:

A photo of our routes. The large rock pillar in the left of the photo is the Grand Capucin. The rocky ridge leading from bottom right directly to the summit is the Gervasutti Pillar.
A photo of me on the Glacier before climbing Aguille Vert.I must mention Dan and Ash who unfortunately didnt get much done in the mountains as Ash got a bit sick after Mont Blanc. They did go up and have a crack at the Tour Ronde peak but got turned around due to bad conditions.

The Small Cold Bivvy Ledge

I am somewhere in the yellow bag

After our first day the weather turned bad so we spent a day at a local cliff next to the town of Balme. It had awsome multipitch limestone routes in the clouds.

Since so much snow had fallen and the weather was only slowly getting better we the left to Ceuse for a couple of days which has amazing sport climbs on perfect pocketed limestone. The grades are quite stiff and some of the climbs can be very hard to onsight as it is hard to find all the good holds in the pocketed rock.

Me on a 7a+ in Ceuse:

We have since returned to Chamonix and had our first multiday climb. Ash and Dan summited Mont Blanc via the standard route over two days and Owen and I had a bit of an epic trying to climb the north face of the Aquille Vert. The approach we assumed was 2 hours based on no information whatsoever ended up taking 6 hours and the wall we had to climb for the first half of the route was quite long. So we ended up bivvying only a pitch from the top of the rock on a tiny snow covered ledge which was a few meters long and about 50cm wide. We took the entire next day bailing off the route in which we could only do 30m rappels since we managed to drop a rock exactly half way through our rope and sever it. Luckily we found a stuck double rope on the way down which we cut up and used for slings which we placed around horns to rappel off.

Ash and Dan on the Mont Blanc summit:

So now we are all very tired and taking a couple of days off before heading up to the snow again.