Blog Posts in Category: Winter Climbing

2022 in 100 Photos

Thankfully 2022 was a more normal year than the previous two years, and our first full year with our new lifestyle living an hour from the Alps. A high point of the year was the number of visitors we were able to host, for skiing, walking, paragliding and climbing. We certainly made the most of living near the alps, with most weekends spend in the mountains one way or another. Winter Our winter was fairly dominated with piste skiing, where Becky progressed from tentatively skiing easy blue runs to confidently skiing red runs with the odd short black run as well! This was great to see and I am looking forward to her continued progression this year. Despite the focus on piste skiing we also squeezed some paragliding in and I managed to get 4 days of ski touring as well. General Through the winter we managed to squeeze in some paragliding, and on one of our final days of skiing of the year, I am managed to combine a morning skiing with my first proper cross country flight on my paraglider which was a very memorable experience, as I. Read the full article…

Ice Climbing & Langlauf in the Reintal

For Becky’s birthday weekend we had optimistically booked a weekend in the Reintal in Südtirol, Italy. We were staying at the lovely Jausenstation Angerer gasthaus, which was situated just below the main ice fall. In the week running up to the trip the temperatures were really low, so despite being late in the season it was still possible to ice climb, however the days were fairly short due to the impact of the sun on the ice. We had hoped to do a multi pitch on the other side of the valley later on in the weekend, but we didn’t manage to do enough climbing to be confident to head out on a multi pitch route after a few years without doing any ice climbing. The routes we managed to do before the sun made the ice too soft to climb were really fun, and it was great to be back on the ice! Thankfully it wasn’t an issue having to finish the ice climbing early, as the Reintal is also brilliant for Langlauf (or XC skiing). We had never done it before so decided to give it a go,. Read the full article…

Hidden Chimney

It has been a few years since we winter climbed in Scotland, mostly due to injuries and conditions. This year we decided we wanted to get back into it, but unfortunately conditions were making it difficult. The option with the safest approach seems to be the Mess of Pottage at Coire an t-Sneachda in the Cairngorms. We decided to climb hidden chimney again as a suitable re-introduction to Scottish winter, unfortunately so did a large number of other people. The walk in was surprisingly easy given how much snow was on the ground, and by the time we had arrived in the coire the cloud had lifted and showed us an excellent view of the crag, and the army of climbers in front of us. Thankfully not many teams had already approached Hidden Chimney. We started the route behind out friends James and Jon and had a very enjoyable climb. It wasn’t too cold and the conditions on the climb were excellent, and very different to last time we climbed the route. There was some very poor crag etiquette going on with a team climbing over us and the team. Read the full article…

Aonach Eagach

With an excellent forecast, combined with the outstanding late season conditions we decided to head up to Scotland to climb Aonach Eagach. Aonach Eagach is a ridge which I have done before in summer and winter, however it has been on Becky’s list for quite some time now. When I last climbed the ridge in winter the weather was very good, but it did not compare to the weather we had this time. The snow underfoot was mostly firm, the ridge generally had a good covering of snow other than some of the steeper rock sections and the weather was outstanding with a mixture of sun and cloud all day, without a breath of wind. We made the most of the clocks having changed and the longer daylight and enjoyed a relatively late start to miss the bad weather early in the morning, which was a good decision based on the amount of rain as we were driving towards the ridge. The initial climb doesn’t get any easier with successive attempts at the ridge, and felt as abrupt as ever, but thankfully it is over fairly quickly and once it. Read the full article…