Chamonix

A month in Chamonix provided all sorts of highs and lows - some of them in the mountains!

Aiguille de Tour


Katie flinging ropes at me


For the most part it was packing and re-packing gear, lumbering up glacial valleys, getting sunburnt, eating baguettes and ´sausage´ (as the Brits tend to call salami) at 3000m, aching backs and shoulders, carabiners and crampons - all the good stuff.


The low-light was the rather ¨unfortunate incident of the passport in the night-time¨, where bad timing and a small memory lapse left my travel documents and 700pds cash in the hands of the opportunist (say it with a French curl of the lip) who made his way into the team station-wagon. He obviously wasn´t after the passport, (he chucked Neil´s UK one aside) so we hoped he'd dumped it nearby. Sadly, several days of forest and road-side searching only yielded a snapped Airpoints card, a pair of old skis, and all sorts of interesting fungi, besides a new addition to the 'travel drama stories'. The money was a pain, but the real kicker was that we were only a day from heading back to London, and 3 days from my planned 2 week vet trip to Kashmir, India. The logistics in getting new documents (you need a tourist visa to get into India) and the fact that the trip was an ´expedition´ meant I couldn´t join them later. As it was, I was happy to have a new passport in time to make our trip to Argentina!




Camping below Aiguille de Midi



Katie and some random in pantalones

The madness of Alpine metalwork - a ladder system off the glacier - probably as dodgy as any of the routes we climbed..

Alpine Marmot (Marmota marmota) Apparently they may have carried the bubonic plague, which makes them pretty deadly. I'm glad I didn't get any closer to this one.

Swiss climbers. Always very efficiently dressed in the hills as well as being deadly cool. Got rather too close to this one at the previous belay.

Chamonix is a wonderful place to stay, and despite the flood of tourists, people seem to be really friendly there. We had a great campsite with baguettes and croissants on tap every morning. Climbing partner Neil was a great guy and stayed on an extra week so we had wheels and could get some more trips in while waiting for my new passport..