A climber in an orange jacket stands on a rocky ledge with a vast mountain range and cloudy sky in the background.

Climbing the Alps

A summer of alpine, trad and sport climbing in the Alps as told by Oscar, our product copywriter.

From Chamonix to Pfalz: a summer on the rock

My love of adventure and the mountains is what landed me at Ellis Brigham, where I’ve been for just over 18 months. It’s the mix of adventure, self-reliance and that visceral feeling of exposure that keeps me coming back to climbing again and again.

The goal for this trip was simple: spend a month alpine, trad and sport climbing, mostly in Chamonix, the epicentre of European alpinism. What we got was soaring routes, frozen cable cars, a tumbling cooking pot and a winding Alpine road trip in search of some of Europe’s best rock.

Climbing the Frendo spur: an Alpine classic in Chamonix

We were on the Frendo Spur, a 1200m Alpine classic on the North Face of the Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix. We’d climbed most of the route the day before and bivvied high to catch the final ice pitches in the coldest morning conditions. The strategy worked. We swapped climbing shoes for boots, crampons and ice tools, shouldered our packs and kept moving up.

Alpine grades are tricky to translate to UK grades because of changing conditions and route length. We estimated our conditions to be around HVS 4c on rock and Scottish Winter Grade III on ice and mixed sections.

Perfect conditions are rare. If the ice is good, the rock cracks tend to be iced up. If the rock is dry, the ice is often thin. We hit the sweet spot, with dry rock and good ice.

Our climb of the Frendo Spur was the high point of our Chamonix trip and the route we’d set our sights on. In the weeks before, we’d tackled classic mountaineering, ice and pure rock routes, but a forecast of storms made timing this climb a challenge. The stars aligned, and we completed the route in 28 hours. We’d have been faster if frozen lift cables hadn’t delayed our start.