Vallee Blanche Acclimatization

Myself and Ash headed up the Midi lift on Sunday morning after arriving in Chamonix the evening before. We carried up bivi gear and dropped this off at shack that's perched on the spur of rock below the Cosmiques hut. This hut isn't officially acknowledged in any guidebooks or on any maps as far as I know, probably because if it was more well known the actual Cosmiques may loose some business! It seems to have fallen into a little bit of dis-repair recently as the top section of the door is now missing and one of the blankets has been nailed up to cover the hole in a crude fashion, due to this there was quite a bit of snow that had blown inside that we needed to clear. Thankfully it wasn't a windy night so we were ok. Theres probably enough wood lying about under the platform in their for somebody with a bit of skill to fix the door up a bit.

Anyhow after dumping our kit we had a lap on the Cosmiques Arete as Ash had never done it before. I think this was my 5th time on the ridge this summer, and I could probably climb it with my eyes closed now but it is still a good route. It gets a lot of stick of sites like UKC from people that its too busy, not that good and too accessible but I disagree with most of this. Yes there are hundreds of finer routes in the massif but this is one of few that provide what I consider to be a good standard of climbing in such a accessible location. Simply looking at it, less than about 16 hours after getting off a plane in Geneva we were at 3800m climbing, there aren't many places you can do that in the world!

The route wasn't too busy, but a combination of us not moving too fast due to coming straight from sea level and one or two incompetent parties on it meant we took about 3.5 hours which is pretty slow but we took our time, and Ash was able get to grips with the area and back into the whole alpine thing. A quick jog back down the snow arete and across the glacier to the shack and we made are beds an prepared the evenings food.

Pointe Lachanel.

The next days plan was to climb the Contamine-Mazeaud (central route) on the Tacul Traingle however due to the combination of neither of us sleeping particularly well during the night and the alarm not going off in the morning and us getting up late we decided on shorter day so went to go and do the traverse of Pointe Lachanal. The Pointe Lachanel is most famous for its east face which is home to some classic, albeit fairly challenging rock climbing. The three summits can be traversed though, this is given the grade of AD 4a and involves some steep snow slopes, ridges and some mixed ground with a about 60m of rock climbing at the end to the final summit. This was covered in quite a bit of snow an ice when we were there due to it being the end of the season so was in mixed condition, still not hard though probably only going at about Scottish II. Ash led the first section of the ridge until the middle summit where I took over and led up through the mixed section to the final summit. Another steep snow slope led down to below the Tacul Traingle. I actually really enjoyed the route, I'd dismissed it in the past due it being dwarfed by the bigger mountains and harder routes that surround however it was actually quite good fun, not something I'd rush back to do again soon but something I'll keep in mind for a short day or when the weather isn't too favorable. I imagine a good acclimatization day would be to do this and then the Cosmiques in a day.

I'll add some more photos when I get chance to get them off my camera, and get hold of Ash's.