After the pictures with the Madonna we still had a few more meters of snow arette to climb. As you can see, there is a fair amount of fresh snow here as well. Some people say that the Alps in summer are as rough as the Pirinees in winter... and they are right. I have endured –17ºC temps here in August!
The three of us in the summit (it is one of the only two or three pictures we have together in the whole trip).
Another Bladeforums tribute!
Ever heard that the dumbest accidents and biggest screw ups always happen after someone says YOU DON’T HAVE THE BALLS TO or I DARE YOU TO...? It is true. It happens. All the time.
This is Manu and me earning our free dinner. The other climbers in the back thought we were nuts and were loughing their asses out. After that they asked us to take a picture with them but please, not naked!
DISCLAIMER: Any mod feels this picture doesn’t belong here, feel free to remove it, no problem.
Instead of going down through the same arette, Manu and Iñaki agreed it was way safer to go down through the snow slope we spotted while approaching the Pollux.
Once we reached the cable car station again we had some free time before the cable car arrived so we decided to check out the ice museum they have up there. It is a number of galeries digged out in the permafrost inside the glacier. I didn’t like it at all, but hey! It was free! The whole thing seemed like unfinished with tools all over the place, no security and a bunch of turist stepping out of the non skid rubber mats to touch the ice sculptures and take pictures with them. Nah... this didn’t seem Swish made at all!
After taking the cable car with a bunch of tourist we came back to the camping. We had something to eat and rested all day.
This is two of us having something to eat. In the back you can see a VW California T5. That is the newest model there is. Mine is a T4, the previous one. The one in the back was also 4WD but less suited for off road driving because it didn’t have diff locks.
As you can see, even with the van equipped with a double lpg stove, we try to cook very little inside (smell, spillings, etc). When weight is not an issue (like in this case) or we intend to melt a lot of snow (multi day winter climbing) gas is the fuel of choice. I use a Primus Omni Stove. It is one of the only two multifuel stoves in the market that allows you to regulate not only the amount of liquid fuel that flows to the generator tube, but also the amount of gasified fuel that spits out of the nipple. The other stove that allows this is the MSR Dragonfly but it is bigger and bulkier. Better suited for base camp cooking for a lot of people. With this stove I can really cook, not only bring water to a boil. Anyway, you have to be carefull with this beast, you can easily melt alumminum pots. It truly is a blowtorch!
It is supposed to run always on white gas but... I just use the cheapest gas I can get in gas stations. You need to clean it once in a while but it doesn’t blacken the pots that much and it is dirty cheap. White Gas (Coleman Fuel) is almost as expensive as LPG so you don’t really save any money using it and it is a lot messier. I just use it in winter when you can not afford to dissasemble the thing to solve clogging. In the picture you can also see my Canadian Camp with a good patina.
This is an old picture of my stove melting tin foil I guess... Manu took it during an ice climbing trip last year while I was not watching!
Back to the trip. Now it was time to go back to Chamonix to do some more climbing so we packed our stuff together and drove away...
Once I upload the new pictures to Imageshack I will post them here. I hope you like them!
Mikel
welcome back...:thumbup: that was a great tribute to BF WSS too...
