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.

Ideal in weather and shelter but oddly competitive for grades, I’m pretty tall but I was struggling to reach on the routes while Steve just dynoed for a couple of moves.

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.

Sadly, it turned out the climbing wasn’t very good either, at least the routes we did. As she’s a novice climber I found Julie a 3C, to be honest I had reservations about this from the start. My experience is that on crags with mostly things in the 7 or 8 range you can guarantee that solitary 3/4 will be awful. This was no exception, the grade was anywhere between 3C and about 6A and the sparsity of gear with a vague and contrived line didn’t really make it too much fun. Predictably, some of the harder graded routes were better but the whole thing wasn’t very special so we didn’t stop too long.

Some great views over the Rhone valley though!

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 !

We found time the next day to visit the Beacon indoor wall, this is amazing. Walls have altered beyond recognition since I last went to one. At the Beacon I was fascinated by a self belay device, basically a tape on an inertia reel that takes in as you climb, when you fall it releases slowly and you’re lowered to the floor. When completing the route you basically jump backwards off and it lowers you off. The next two shots are of me on it, it took me two goes before I was happy to jump off, the first time I couldn’t do it and back climbed to near the floor. It’s the weirdest thing to just let go like that but a great, great piece of kit, I’m not sure if any of the walls at home have this or not.

It’s a nice little crag with a handful of routes spread through the grades although the couple of easy routes we started on were most certainly harder than the higher grade ones we finished on but that’s often the way of these places.

Counting out how many quickdraws we’ll need for the route and about to christen my new 70m x 10.2mm rope.

Cleaning one of the lines we’d done.

A quick trip over the border for some climbing in France. Les Trois-Commères is a nice little crag in the French Jura with a range of routes. Climbing was a little curtailed by the rain but a good day out anyway. It’s classic euro sport climbing, single pitch, bolt protection but quite a high crag needing the 70m rope Steve had rather than needing to mess around with my skinny 50′s

One of Steve’s dogs trying to point out that stick won’t throw itself!

Friday evening was spent on Birchen Edge before a good meal at the “Robin Hood” pub just below the edge and onto Stanage Edge for the Saturday before returning to Birchen Edge for Sunday.

A good day on Stanage for us but someone must have taken a tumble as the air ambulance and rescue came in to help them out.

Up on Birchen Edge in the Trafalgar Wall area.

]]> http://snowslider.net/2009/04/29/peak-district-gritstone/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ http://snowslider.net/2007/09/15/bad-day-on-the-monch/ http://snowslider.net/2007/09/15/bad-day-on-the-monch/#comments Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:52:30 +0000 ise http://snowslider.net/2007/09/15/bad-day-on-the-monch/
Looking back the signs for the day didn’t look so good. I’d arrived at Grindelwald at about 0645 in plenty of time for the first train and sat in the car with a cup of coffee from my Thermos. But, looking up the mountain I was already beginning to think the clouds on the summits were heavy and maybe more than were going to clear during the day. The next surprise was that due to some confusion at the guides office the person I’d been expecting to join for the climb had pulled out earlier in the week and the guide had been expecting just one client. After some discussion we decided to make a group of three but the other client had some concerns about his fitness before we left.The plan was to climb the normal route of the Mönch, that’s the south-east ridge passing the minor summit and then moving on the main summit at 4109m. The Mönch is one of the big three summits of the area, the others being the Eiger and the Jungfrau. Legend has it the Jungfrau, or virgin in German, is protected from the Eiger or ogre by the Mönch or monk.

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To access the Mönch normal route you first head from the top of the Jungfraujoch towards the Mönchhutte and then start to climb the rock ridge just above the path. But, the visibility wasn’t good at all and you could only see a few hundred metres.

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The climbing alternates between rock and snow ridges. I find the steeper rock sections really quite enjoyable but it’s clear that the other client is having some problems.

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By now we’re at about 4000m and the visibility is just awful, above left is a view back down the ridge and with the mist it’s impossible to guess from the photograph then angle of the pitch. It’s at this point that the other client reached the decision he’s not able to continue, by now we’re only a 100m or so below the summit in terms of height but there’s a lengthy traverse along a snow covered arete to come and, of course, we’d need to descend.

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Obviously this means that we’re going to have stop and start our descent. I’m disappointed of course but there’s no way you can carry on if one of the party isn’t able to so there’s no real decision to be made and we start to make our descent. Had the visibility been good I’d have been more disappointed I think but as you couldn’t really see a lot I didn’t think we’d missed much. The cloud did move a little but the window where it was clear on the summit was no more than a couple of minutes and I doubt we’d have hit that.Above left is me near one of the belay points protecting part of the ridge and above right is the guide in a rare minute when a strong gust of wind suddenly cleared the sky.

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Above left, looking at the Jungfrau also sitting in some cloud. Above right, the lower rock sections of the Mönch SE ridge.

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And this is a shot looking down to Konkordiaplatz and the Aletsch glacier, I’ve skied down here and climbed the Lötschenlücke as a ski tour back in the spring.So, sadly my attempt to climbed the Mönch failed this time which happens in the mountains sometimes sadly, but no one was injured and in the end safety concerns have to come first. I’ll just have to return another day complete the route. I wanted to go on (another day) and climb the Eiger and Jungfrau as well to get all three summits but that’s probably going to need to wait until next season now.