I didn’t feel very good on the walk up to the bivvy below La Grande Casse, I’d left Dover at midnight and driven through the night and early morning to Chambery, being kept awake and getting suitably psyched by the autobiography of Ed Viesturs on my ipod. A couple of hours of mediocre dozing in a motorway services and then negotiating my way through the (surprisingly attractive) centre of Chambery to pick up Konrad at the station before taking the familiar Albertville to Moutiers route and finally the winding road to Pralognan. In fact, I felt absolutely stinking, nearly threw up about five times on the slog up, before settling in to a really well deserved sleep of all of 4 hours.
Alarm at 1.50, the air certainly felt cool enough, a brief moraine bash and then a monotonous crunch up the glacier to the Col de La Grande Casse. The only light piercing the night was a lonely piste machine grooming the summer skiing above Tignes. We were now standing beneath the north face of La Grande Casse, at 3850m the highest peak in the Vanoise and easily visible from the crowded slopes of the Val d’Isere and Tignes. Having skied in the area for most of the last 20 years, I’d looked up at the face many times and since I’d started climbing had harboured designs on it. The classic route we were going for was the Couloir des Italiens, a D+ that traverses under the seracs before climbing up past them, topping out on the summit ridge 50m from the top. We weren’t really sure what condition the face would be in, it’d been done 2 weeks previously in supposedly good nick, and a brief call to the guardian of the Col de la Vanoise refuge the day before had revealed that it should be ok, but in recent years it had been out of condition by mid June and it was by now the 13th July. There were no tracks on the initial traverse, obviously no one had done it since the most recent snowfall and the initial going was slow in knee-deep powder, meaning we spent longer than we’d have liked wading under the seracs. The moment we reached the left edge of the face however things turned to perfection; lovely crisp squeaky neve or 5-10cms of snow covering lovely squeaky neve. No need for a rope, we romped up the face as dawn broke, passing the seracs as they were turned pink by the rising sun, with views across to the Himalayan bulk of Mt Blanc’s southern faces. Avoiding the cornice on the left we ambled up the final ridge, our unaclimatised (and in my case unfit) frames feeling the altitude. Still, we topped out 7am, a respectable 3 hours for the 800m face, to ‘endless vistas’ (© V.Scott) stretching from the Matterhorn to La Meije. The descent down the Grand Couloirs was also in great condition and soon we were sweating our way back to the car and the prize of an unopened and still cool bottle of Irn Bru. A cracking start to an alpine campaign.
We decided to stick around in the Vanoise and headed to Val d’Isere where there was another route I’d had my eye on. Despite being about twenty miles as the crow flies, we had to wind our way back to Moutiers and then all the way up the Isere valley. As we passed St Foy, every single layby had a caravan stationed in it. Then came a sign saying the Tour de France was due past in a couple of days. Now I can just about see the attraction (just) of watching the race, but sitting waiting for it for 3 or 4 days in your caravan by the side of a busy road just seems incredibly perverse (but then so does the idea of owning an RV). What was even more funny was the sight, on arrival in Val d’Isere, of portly, moustachioed (and probably German) men, the wrong side of 45 dressed up in replica pink T-Mobile kits cycling up the main street in a wannabe peloton. On our first day we climbed a 300m Fr5c on the Roc de la Toviere. It had enough grass on it to make a first rate winter climb, wandered around a bit, had a fairly unbalanced crux and was situated above some attractive roadworks with views over the ‘beautiful’ hamlet of la Daille. Despite these handicaps it was actually a reasonable route, which ended with the aforementioned bottle of Bru exploding over the car and me.
In the evening we walked up to the reason we’d come here, the Paroi de Bazel. This is a huge 400-500m high cliff, very Dolomitic in appearance. The route we were going to try was the 480m Pilier Sud (TD), the first put up on the wall and opened in 1970 by two guides Albert Bozon (who was unfortunately killed in an avalanche in the 1970’s) and Jaques Dupont. Albert Bozon was father of Laurent Bozon, who taught me how to ski properly and who I’ve known for about 15 years and I’d met Jaques Dupont at the Prariond Refuge a couple springs previously, before a rather scary Genepy fuelled ski down a decidedly out of condition Gorges de Malpasset. I’d heard the route was a classic and was therefore keen to do it. The walk up to the bivvy site was pretty grim, unrelentingly steep in the Stob Coire nan Lochan mode and my new boots were giving me considerable gyp, still we saw some chamois very close up. 
The route itself was brilliant, it was equipped about 10 years ago which is a bit of a shame as there are plenty of opportunities for natural gear but the bolts are sensibly and sparingly placed only where you need them, often with 10m runouts between. The rock is wonderfully clean, steep and juggy mountain limestone and I can only remember about one loose hold the whole way up. After an awkward 6a pitch to start in the cold of morning, nothing was harder than Fr5c with particular highlights being a couple of overhangs on massive jugs, some very steep rock near the top with great holds wherever needed and the final pitch which traverses the top of the pillar with 500m of air beneath your feet. I can’t recommend it enough and the climbing is definitely up there with anything I’ve done anywhere. It just goes to show how much good climbing there is in the Alps away from the honeypots and also in areas that have a reputation for dubious rock, it’s definitely stoked the exploratory fires in me. The descent was round the back down a vast glacier into Italy before a col takes you back to France. Konnie had decided to do it in trainers, we had visions of a local newspaper headline along the lines of “tourist dies after slipping off side of Ben Nevis clad only in trainers” but in fact it was fine as the glacier was covered in a 4 foot deep layer of heavy slush, slow going in the afternoon heat.
With dubious forecasts further north we headed south to the sun of the Ecrins. A couple of days of lazy valley cragging on the excellent granite of Ailefroide followed. We did Snoopy (currently the subject of an interesting debate on whether to de-bolt it and return it to its original state) and Les Orages des Etoiles (both D+/5c). The former was varied with slabs, laybacks, cracks and corners whereas the latter was constant slab padding. I have to agree with Chad here (sorry) that slab padding can get very monotonous and when they’re bolted they lose most of their edge. I can hardly remember a single move on Orage and was rather underwhelmed when I got to the top, Konnie enjoyed it though (but then he does maths and computing so is probably rather into constant monotony).
The guidebook did warn us that the route was only really included for historical purposes but it did point out that it was ‘obligatoire pour un grimpeur attaché a la bonne connaissance du massif’. It sounded like a ‘classic outing’ and those words are effectively a red rag to me, second only to statements like ‘tweeds obligatoire’ or ‘one for the serious body contact enthusiast’. So we made our way up the moraine of Glacier Noir to the Pilier Sud (TD) of the Barre des Ecrins (4102m) – there was also a bit of shameless 4000m bagging involved in the decision too. We started in the afternoon and had a guide and client for company, which helped the route finding throughout the rambling lower section. After a bit of squirming under and through the bergschrund, we soloed up the first 600m to a bivvy site. The climbing was fairly pleasant but nowhere harder than V.Diff and never sustained. As we gained height the rock got steadily looser and the area we bivvied in was rather slag heap-like. Despite chilly feet, the night passed fairly comfortably without sleeping bags, one of the highlights being Konrad stuffing lukewarm water bottles down his pants (the mind boggles, probably a Polish ‘tradition’ along the lines of potato stick). It would be an exaggeration to describe every hold as loose, probably only 95% were and the following day was certainly an adventure. I’d only taken big boots along (unlike Konrad who had rockboots) and managed to slip off a traverse, which proved tricky in cumbersome footwear and fingers frozen from belaying. This led to a rather large pendulum and the loss of significant portions of skin from my left thumb and right index finger, after rigging a backrope and having left lots of blood on the holds I finished the pitch. I managed to patch them up with compedes and they weren’t too painful to prevent me continuin leading. We eventually topped out of the steep bastion section and after a bit a faff loosing the way on the final rocky arête and snow gullys, we topped out. The clouds looked a bit menacing so we quickly soloed down the ridge to the glacier, with Konnie deciding to avoid the last 30m of downclimbing by throwing himself down the snow slope and over the bergschrund (6.0 for technical execution, 0.0 for style). If anyone has ever been up the Barre, they’ll know it’s a very long slog back down to the road at 1800m from the summit at 4100m. What was even more worrying was the fact that we might miss the pizza van at Ailefroide, despite a very rapid jog down we missed the van by all of two minutes (he really does shut at 9pm). I then had a major tantrum and drove around the towns further down the valley in search of hot food, every place was ‘desole mais…’, in the end it was crisps and beer at the campsite, ho-hum.
Just had a couple of days resting in the valley letting my fingers heal. They’re beginning to feel ok again so we’re off to La Meije tomorrow for an attempt on the Pierre Allain route (TD) on the south face followed by the traverse of the arêtes. Going to be a looong day…
Postscrpit
Just found a wifi place: Walked in to the promontoire hut, bad weather forecast, snow afternoon etc, managed to do the normal traverse in very windy (60-70kph) conditions. Snow afternoon and night at Aigle Hut (3500m) 10-15cms, back in La Grave now. More details to follow.
