A couple of summers ago Hazel and I nabbed a nice little first ascent here in the Chamonix valley. We climbed the front face of the rock spire the Aiguille de Saussure.
It was a bit of a faff to get to, involving some serac threatened traversing (which we did our best to avoid as much as possible), then quite a long abseil to reach the tower.
The tower is on the flank of Mont Blanc du Tacul, and the Aigulle de Saussure summit is 3839m in altitude. Despite the altitude we got warm temperatures on the rock face. I was climbing in just my Driclime windshirt and a base layer. Fortunately this meant a comfortable bivvy, unfortunately the warm temperatures did mean the ice couloir was a stream, check out the video.
It was a great little adventure, a beautiful bivvy, and nice to bag a new route right above Chamonix.
Anyway, with a lot of time on my hands on my recent trip to Patagonia I revisited the footage from the ascent and decided that there was enough half decent stuff to put a short video together.
Here it is:
Climbing with Hazel is always really great fun and I am looking forward to doing some sunny limestone sport climbing with her this spring.
- Here is my original blog post about our ascent: Findlay Geldard Route Blog
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[…] Up next we’ve got a video from former Climbing Daily presenter Jack Geldard, following him and Hazel Findlay as they make the first ascent of the front face of the Aiguille du Saussure, here in Chamonix. After a difficult approach through seracs and numerous abseils, they climbed 500m of technical ground, with the crux weighing in at a weighty E5, or 7a in sport terms but with pretty poor protection. The route then finished with several hundred metres of mixed ground with difficulties up to M6. Sounds quite the adventure, here’s the video — http://jackgeldard.com/2014/03/05/video-alpine-first-ascent-with-hazel-findlay/ […]