No, that isn’t a way to describe ice with lots of holes in it! It’s the ice we climbed today in Switzerland… It was Dec ’06 when we last climbed here; but it’s a super reliable area for ice, so a good bet for late in the season.
To be honest though we were quite knackered from yesterday’s ski tour, and (embarrassingly) I think I had a mild case of heat stroke (or something similar). I had not worn any sun cream yesterday, and today my face looks like a tomato!! I don’t think tomatoes make great climbers, and the heat stroke had sapped all my energy – but luckily Laetitia’s determination to slog up the endlessly steep soft snow slope below the route got us there in the end. That snow slope made for an ace bum-slide after though! 😛
Dear Pete – we’d love to feature your blog on our site, or ask you to write a guest blog on the subject of climbing?
We’re a travel and activities website and are looking to talk to people all over the world who are doing interesting things.
We’re getting a good number of visitors to our site and climbing is something we really want to feature.
Let me know.
Emma
http://www.ooh.com
Happy for you to feature this blog; just use the link http://www.sterling-adventures.co.uk/blog/
Route looks good Pete……. a couple of variations possible….. ketchup and chutney 😆 😆
HA HA, always ketchup for me please! 😉
Yep, if the route had been well frozen there would be a couple of choices; that curtain to my right in the last picture was detached and running with water. 😯 Whereas above me on the left was a nice corner-groove, although it was a bit thin in places – you can see some (brown) grass poking through in the middle photo.
Did you walk back down at the side there?
Walk?! That rock is just off vertical. We abseiled back down the line of the ice climb, which is pretty normal procedure for pure ice climbs. With mountain routes (like stuff on the North Face of Ben Nevis) it is more common to walk off, but even here sometimes it’s easier to abseil the line of the route or use an established abseil route back down to the base of the cliff…