Learning from the day before that it’s turning cold we picked a location right down on the valley floor today and it was excellent. I’ve not climbed at Yvorne before but I think I’ll be going back. It’s set up above the local vineyards about 20 minutes walk from the roadhead. It’s a great crag with 3 or 4 distinct sub-areas and it’s a real sun trap. I think in the height of summer it would be too warm but in this newly arrived autumn weather it’s just perfect getting the full benefit from the sun.

I’d planned to meet Steve (Mountain River Adventures) at Pierre de Moëlle near Leysin for some rock climbing there but when I arrived it was pretty clear it was going to be too cold to be very much fun. I know the area a little but I wasn’t sure where would be substitute location with some shelter from the weather, an obvious choice was right back down on the Rhone valley floor but it seemed a long way to go back down. But I also know Roger Payne, IFMGA guide and local Leysin resident so I called him and found him at Geneva airport on route for an expedition in Sikkim, he suggested Les Plans just near Leysin which was ideal.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’d not really known this crag was in Vercorin, that seemed odd but it’s not in the local guidebooks and I’ve never heard anyone mention it. When we got there part of the reason became clear, for a start, it’s below the normal winter snow line so I’ve not skied past it and second, the track down to it is around TD which is  deterrent.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just mention that as apparently, incredibly, it’s not something we all find obvious.

We were climbing on the Stockhorn on an easy sport route of a couple of pitches and when I topped out I found a group of mostly young people at the top on the ledge basically faffing around in the way climbers often do. I’d wondered why they’d been a rope draped down the route at the side for 30 minutes with no activity but no explanation seemed apparent. There were two sets of belay chains at the top, one of which they were looking vaguely like they were going to abseil down and the other one of them had clipped his belay loop to, I clipped a a screwgate to the maillon and might have belayed from it but my quick assessment of the situation gave the group about a 9 out of 10 on making the transition from fannying around to being dangerous so I dropped a sling around a less than perfect block as a backup. I’d assumed they might accidentally undo my gear by mistake.

Sure enough, just as I was about start bringing Julie up and glanced around and one of them was unscrewing my carabiner and reattaching it to another part of the chain. I asked the guy what the hell he was doing and got the glib answer it was still perfectly safe. I don’t even know why he had to use that anchor, the one next to it was perfectly OK and he wouldn’t then have been abseiling down the route we were doing narrowly missing Julie on the way down.

Which begs the question, how brainlessly stupid and reckless with other peoples safety can you possibly be? Isn’t other peoples belay gear absolutely sacrosanct? If he’d asked before touching it I could have told him to leave it alone. And was it perfectly safe? Actually it wasn’t, the chains are installed in a particular way with the maillon so there’s no extension should part of the anchor fail, it’s an unlikely event but that’s why they’re installed like that.

Sorry, no photo’s !