Politicians lie!

Came into work this morning to get on with stuff and Cham was like the beginning of Vanilla Sky where Tom Cruise wanders about New York but there's no-one there. Was very weird.

So anyways, Chris pitched up a wee bit later and told me that it was a french national holiday. He rather humourously pointed out that Nicolas Sarkozy (new French President) had based a lot of his campaign on getting people back into work and working more than the 35 hours maximum they do here. Ironic I guess that his first day after victory in the elections happened to be a national holiday. Still, it's to be expected most likely.

I rightly had a look about to see what was the cause of this lack of activity and general siesta-ness and it's VE Day. Awesome stuff! So in true style have been reading up about WWII and the Battle of Britain. It's amazing how much cool stuff is out there in the ether available from one's own arm chair and I had a trippy few minutes digging around archives and finding bits of black and white video and photographs and articles and web pages. It's incredible what's gone online and the wealth and depth of information available.

(Housemate) Andy's just downloaded the recent "Have I Got News For You" and it's kind of getting me into this whole "keeping up with current affairs" thing. I always look over various news websites and subscribe to loads of news RSS feeds but now I'm kind of craving a newspaper morning every once in a while. Maybe I should just print out the Telegraph website every day and read that? Still I guess it's good enough to keep on the internet for a while and save the planet the the extra trees for my newspapers.

Rather funkily I also found out the word "news" originates from the Middle English "newes" as the plural of "new". I always used to think it was an acronym for "north, east, west, south" but apparently that's incorrect. Learn something new every day eh? =) I love words, me.

German bomber over London in WW2

End of the Season

So today's the last day of the season - officially. Les Grands Montets ski area (the highest in the valley) closes its remaining open lifts and the continuing shutdown of Chamonix will be complete. I've been roped in to do some house-sitting and dog-sitting and I'll make a mooch back to blighty at some stage during the interseason. To be honest it's very quiet here and it's easier to focus on work and i'm enjoying knuckling down at the moment.

May powder day

It snowed a bit 2 days ago and the whole of the top of the Grands Montets mountain (highest point the Aiguille Vert - 4121m) was closed. The subsequent night it was raining down in the valley and freezing level had dropped to around 2100m. Meaning snow - and lots of it higher up. So gorblimey, we had a full-on powder day at the beginning of May. After having had the "no more snowboarding this season" talk with various friends over the past few weeks it was just too much to resist.

I got a call from Mark at All Mountain Performance who I could hear grinning down the phone and he said he'd meet me at the bottom of the Grands Montets mountain to have a bit of a session. Mark's good, very good, so I was a bit nervous but we've ridden together a bunch before and to be honest it's just a buzz when there's powder on the ground and blue skies.

We pitched up to Les Grands Montets to an extremely quiet car park and jumped straight on the cable car. A swift change of cablecars halfway up the mountain to get to the very top was in order and with all the tourists gone it was only locals on the hill meaning lots of friends to bump into. No queues whatsoever anywhere on the hill but waiting in a cablecar Mark bumped into Jan - a french pro skier he knows who was James Bonds' skiing stunt double for The World is Not Enough. Alrighty - very cool. He was a really nice guy too and we ended up talking for quite a while.

The top station at the Grands Montets - not for the faint-hearted.


The top of the Grands Montets was really good - dropping into untracked powder, jumping the cornice at the top, fast turns sending up curtains of pow. An awesome first run. The good snow was only really at the top so we went round again and got to the top cablecar seeing friends littering the mountain all whooping and cheering with glee much like Mark and myself.

When we arrived at the top and walked down the metal steps, we saw that no-one had yet climbed the Petit Vert, the second summit of the mountain. It was a pure white powder field sitting on top of the glacier. There was no discussion, we got straight into mountaineering mode and I strapped my board to my rucksack and got some liquids close to hand took off my jacket got ready for some hard work. We set off up the snow slope carefully walking around the shallow dips that often give away the presence of crevasses underneath.

It's hard hiking through thigh-deep snow at above 3300m (10,827 feet). But we made good progress looking around in wonder and awe at the amazing landscape we were hiking through. We were gutted to have forgotten the camera but luckily a mate, Kevin, had arrived with his at the bottom after we had climbed up and started snapping away. All the photos in this blog posting are his from his Flickr account so thanks, Kev!). This is the first photo he took with Mark (on the right) and I sitting down underneath the bergschrund (the snow wall behind us). We spent a while just simply admiring the view having a drink and some chocolate.

We're quite far away so you might need to click on the photo to see it properly. You can see our tracks leading up the left hand side.


Kevin managed to get a close-up of us under the bergschrund (Mark on the right).


It looks cool there, but being up there was just incredible. We're both pretty fit so we recovered from the climb quickly and were looking out at the view, plotting the lines down in a completely untracked powder field.

Here's the sequence of photos coming down. I do disappear behind a ridge in the middle however.











Kev even managed to get a photo blasting down the front face a little further down the mountain.


Incredible day really. It was good to ride well and make the most of it - Mark commented a couple of times how well I was riding - praise indeed! Lower down the mountain I threw a load of 360's and landed every one solidly. It really lifted me up and I've been hammering away at work today, it's really lifted my mood and got me being productive and focused. The whole thing was just great both physically and mentally and will stay with me for many years to come.

Climbing at Gaillands

This is a pretty old blog posting that gets a lot of hits off the searchy enginey things so thought I'd update it. Here's a link to all the recently: climbing I've done at Gaillands - including photos.

I've been getting into climbing quite a lot recently and the other day Mark the Chef, Chris and myself went down to Lac de Gaillands which has a large rock outcrop next to it. The lac is just outside Chamonix's eastern edge. It was fantastically hot and the climbing was pretty difficult but we got up all the pitches we tried (even one with a seriously gnarly overhang!) and it was really good fun.

The old arms ached a bit when I was climbing but that's just from the changeover from snowboarding to climbing - different muscles you see!

So we turned up to the wall and picked out a pitch that looked appropriately funky:



Then proceeded to limber up it like 3 happy monkies. Mark managed to grab a photo of me abseiling back down after getting up:



We even had a look around for something really funky and ended up climbing this pitch:



The photo's not taken from any weird angle (as shown by the tree growing vertically upwards in the top left). In fact the pitch had a bit of overhang and was technically quite difficult. It was definately the hardest pitch I've ever done, but really satisfying to get up to the top and look out and down over Chamonix and the valley.

All in all really good fun, there's loads of climbing here - it's one of the best places in the world to climb! I've currently got the Jones' for mountaineering and climbing books and it's really weird to read up about all these guys like Joe Simpson (Touching the Void), Chris Bonington and Joe Tasker writing extensively about mountains and walls that I see daily and accept as part of normal life. Andy and I were looking at doing a traverse of The Grandes Jorasses (it's one of the Great North Faces of the Alps) at some point. We need to do a load of practice climbs first but it's a decent goal to work towards.

So all in all, pretty nifty really and looking forward to some settled, sunny weather to be able to start getting up those rocks.

Grandes Jorasses

The Arve river

You can really feel it's the end of the season. The Arve river which flows down the Chamonix valley being fed by the glaciers and snow fields in the mountains above is really flowing strongly now from the increase in temperature melting the ice and snow.


The Arve river flowing through Chamonix.
The picture is taken just 5 seconds form our office.

It's weird, even as a kid I've always been interested in how nature changes and why things work and what happens when climactic conditions vary. Being out here I've learnt lots more about the science of snowpacks (and therefore avalanches) as well as rock and glacial formations - for safer mountaineering, climbing and backcountry. It's cool because you can see it all happening around you rather than just having it pointed out in a book in a classroom. You actually feel the weight of the snow on the mountains and are amazed by the impressive stature of the glaciers all around. It's really inspiring to pay attention and learn.

So the river's evolved over the course of the season from the start - an icy trickle with boulders covered in snow - then slowly shaping up to a small torrent and subsequently building up into a full flowing alpine river. Its character changes almost daily and I always find myself walking across one of the many bridges in town looking down at the river and trying to work out how much of the snowpack has changed to make it swell or if cold has made it reduce or if there are other underlying meterological conditions. We went through the Col des Montets towards Switzerland the other day - a small valley that leads from Chamonix towards the border. There were crystal clear alpine streams from the meltwater running through and I couldn't help but be reminded of living in Germany and going to the Austrian Alps as a child and still feeling the same peaceful happiness now as I did then when looking at their fast flowing tendrils down the valley.

Merv the Swerve

A while ago I bought a white Renault van called Merv (Merv the Swerve to give him his kennel name) and have been using him as transport for myself, friends and boards around the valley. It's actually pretty necessary to have a car here as although the bus services are pretty good they don't exactly run to a perfect schedule nor do they last very late in the evening. In fact you could easily get stranded somewhere in the valley!

The day after my birthday I went riding with Fred and Pierro up to Brevent/Flegere and drove everyone up there in Merv. It was a fantastic day with incredible weather and was really good to get some of the final riding of the season in.


Pierro standing next to Merv.


Loading up with boards and people (taken over my shoulder).


About to head out of Les Houches in beautiful conditions.


Looking back to the Les Houches ski area.

Pierro even brought a little camera with him for some video moments:

Me popping a tweaked grab.

Happy Birthday!

So a few days ago twas me birthday and we had a very nice day indeed. Started off the previous evening in Le Delice with Fred, Katy, Chris, Andy et al and then after a brief snooze continued with full english breakfast chez Katy and Fred.


Katy in the kitchen.


Sarah and Chris waiting gleefully for nosh.

After we had something to eat, there was a general concensus (due to hangovers!) to leave the skiing/snowboarding til the next day. Instead we decided to have a barbeque at the farm where Andy and I live with Chris, Pierro and Mark the Sepo. Chris did sterling work preparing the food and I cooked it on our funky big barbeque.


Our funky bbq.


Andy waiting for food outside the farm (the satellite dish isn't ours!).


Chris putting the food ont he table, Mark in the background photographing ants.


Everyone tucking in happily.


The view from the table, the Mont Blanc massif stretching down the right.

All in all it was a really nice day. Really memorable for the warmth of the friends and general relaxing amusements. We all piled into the house and watched a dvd when Sarah joined us - Bear Grylls survival, my and Andy's current favourite, then nipped down Le Delice for a drink.

I even managed to speak to all the family which was great and got contacted by a few old friends in the valley. Awesome stuff.

Open mouth, insert foot

The other day a mate, Andy Crampons, was doing the Vallee Blanche (riding down from the Aiguille du Midi) - he was with 3 mates doing a variant route down rather than the Classic Route. The Vallee Blanche is a well known 22km off-piste run mostly down a series of glaciers. When doing it, if you don't know what you're doing you should definitely definitely get a guide and you should really have all the proper equipment - harness, crampons, rope, climbing/rescue devices as well as all the rest of the bits and bobs. After traversing across one of the glaciers that you ride down, they happened upon a guy standing with no skis on next to a 1m hole.

The guy was standing there, apparently talking English to himself. So naturally the boys stopped and inquired if all was OK. The guy's son had fallen into a crevasse but the father said he was happy about pulling him out by himself with the rope he had brought along. What had essentially happened was that he and his son had been skiing along down the glacier and decided to stop for a picnic in a spot that looked safe (!! - on a glacier that's covered with hidden crevasses??). Dad took off his skis and promptly put his foot straight through a snow bridge (a bridge of fallen snow over a crevasse that can be 1 snowflake thick or maybe tens of metres thick or even more) which collapsed under the weight of his son and thence he fell. Monkeys.

They had some of the gear, but Crampons et al were in no mood to argue and put their crevasse rescue training to good use and promptly hauled matey's son out of said crevasse whereupon he grabbed hold of his Dad's leg and starting shaking a bit - understandable under the circumstances really.

Matey's lack of skis were a bit of an issue really, what with being stranded in the middle of a glacier with collapsing snow bridges all around. So they called in the rescue chopper and got him and his son lifted off the mountain.

Weirdly enough, Crampons went for a quick beer after skiing in Le Delice, our local bar/restaurant run by Katy, an old school friend of mine and her partner Fred. Crampons saw matey and son there enjoying a calming ale after the near-death experience of the day. He obviously said hello but by all accounts they were both a little sheepish and thankful to still be together so he left them to it and arrived up at the farmhouse (he lives below Andy and I in the lower section of the house). He came up and told us about his exciting day and how he came across this pair and yanked them out of trouble.

A little later and my housemate Andy and myself whisked ourselves down to Le Delice for a beer. Fred was working behind the bar and as Andy and I had been talking about what had happened on the VB today, I immediately turned to Fred and in far too loud a voice said "HEY FRED, I HEARD CRAMPONS WINCHED TWO F***ING IDIOTS OFF THE VALLEE BLANCHE TODAY". A rather pregnant pause later, Fred says quietly "yeah, it was those two in the corner" and pointed to a young guy and his dad obviously still in the bar trying enjoying a bite to eat. Bugger - the monkey strikes again. They didn't stay long.

Maybe it was a little harsh to laugh about their near-death experience but to be honest everyone's got stories of monkeys on the mountains. Guys with little or no clue or experience about where they are and what the environment is really like. We laugh about it but in all honesty if you don't you're likely to go mad. We're all careful about where we ride and what the conditions are like but by the same token we've got more than average experience in the mountains and have all done courses in crevasse rescue, climbing, avalanche awareness, advanced skiing/snowboarding. Many of us have a speciality area as well with extremely good climbers, off piste riders, experienced mountaineers and more making up the groups. Plus we wear the right gear when riding serious backcountry or whenever there's the idea of riding above extremely low risk terrain.

Saying that though, I don't think it helps when some monkey takes the piss after nearly binning it on the mountain.


The walk from Aiguille du Midi to start the Vallee Blanche.

Going for a beer

Slippers, Andy and myself chose to go for a pint yesterday. Here's the photos!


Heading off through town admiring the alpine architecture.


Slippers walking through to the Place du Mont Blanc in the heart of Cham.


Beer in the sunshine outside of Chambre Neuf.

Moved House

So I've moved house a couple of days ago! And thought I'd post up some photos of the new place as well as say hello.

As mentioned in my previous blog posting, I've moved to Les Houches - a small village just outside of Chamonix. The house is an old farmhouse high up on one of those zig-zag country lanes that rise up from the village, in fact we're about 1200m along the road after it leaves Les Houches to climb upwards. We live at somewhere around 4,500 feet above sea level!

The farmhouse is actually owned by a mate who's rented the top half out for some time now, and luckily my housemate and I have managed to secure the place for the next year - banzai!

So here it is:

The farmhouse.

Inside there's a few bedrooms and quite a lot of space - it's pretty big. Unfortunately there's no real central heating so much of the heat comes through the wood burning stove in the lounge and there's a few electric heaters around the place. It does get a bit nippy sometimes but foraging down into the lower reaches of the duvet soon sorts that out. There's currently no washing machine either so often I'll find Andy's washing in the kitchen sink! Good news is that the landlord's going to stick one in and Andy and I can put our cash together and buy a dishwasher.


The kitchen.


The living room with wood-burning stove, Chris in the far corner, Jonny Slippers (both paying a passing visit) and Andy's legs.

My room is pretty damn cool. It's got one of the beams going through it that support the house. I'm pretty stoked to be honest as the whole thing is wood-pannelled as well. Really mint - looks like the inside of a sauna! I've also got a tv with an XBox/dvd player so I can watch movies and play games. The whole place has got a 10MB wireless interweb connection as well.


My room with TV, XBox and a couple of boards.


The rest of my room with the balcony and pillar support. More boards on the left!

The best thing about living there is the remoteness - away from everyone and everything just being able to live a pretty minimal peaceful existance. There's balconies all around the place, and this is the view from mine.


Looking up the valley towards Chamonix with the Grands Montets mountain the most prominent. Mont Blanc is just around to the right.

We've even got a dog, Digby, roaming around on a lead.


Digby the Dog.

All in all, very cool. Along with Merv the Swerve, my P plated white Renault van, all is going better and starting to really settle in here. I've been recommended for a contract that I can work on out here by a mate in London which is ongoing development work for a dance music website as well as another contract for a local produce ordering website. With these under my belt that will provide really quite a good standard of life out here. Everything seems to be coming together now. Really stabalising and in a couple of months time I should be settled in properly and will be awaiting the summer with relish.

I've talked a lot with Andy about doing the Haute Route - 180km high-mountain walk from Chamonix to Zermatt in Switzerland. Essentially from Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn. It's a pretty serious undertaking but in good weather the views and rewards will be fantastic. I guess it's a legacy of my Dad taking us out to the Alps when we were kids. I remember walking around the mountains surrounding the Ossiachersee in the Austrian Alps when I was young and it was loads of fun. Admittedly I'm carrying a little more weight than then, but I've lost around a stone and a half since I've been here and feel fit and pretty lean. I'm sure that I'll slim down even further in due course with the summer sports calendar that's rearing its head. For the moment, though, I've found I'm noticably fitter than most of the people I hike and ride with and it's always pleasing to look fit and healthy.

So all in all I'm a pretty happy bunny. I've only had one real low period since I've been here and I hope with all the fresh air and activity both mental and physical as well as not living in a manic ski resort anymore it should mean that those times will be few and far between. I certainly hope so.

I'm working on a mashup of GPS tracking and google maps at the moment so you can see information and routes plotted onto an actual map in real time. It's pretty cool and we're extending it up so that we can get all the information for Chamonix and the surrounding area on there as well. It's looking really good and it's great to be producing some really cool stuff. I'm hooking it into our advertising model as well so it'll be another part of the revenue stream and we've more people joining us to sell the advertising too so all in all, it's looking very healthy for the future of chamonix-valley.com our flagship business here. Game on!