Alpine Assesment
Paul Warnock on the traverse of the Argentine
This year’s assessment was convened by Terry Ralphs with Bruce Goodlad working with him for the week. Pete Rowlands, Paul Warnock and Phil Ashby were on the full assessment with Tim Blakemore and Hannah Burrows Smith joining us for some of the week. We met in Kandersteg on the North side of the Bernese Oberland hoping to escape the poor weather to the south.
The team headed to the Frunden hut on Sunday morning where we looked at teaching Ecole du Glace and the boys demonstrated there ability to perform a crevasse rescue. As we returned to the hut the Guardian asked us if we were able to rescue 4 climbers from the Gallet Grat which we did. Unfortunately for Tim he arrived at the hut just as we were preparing to head up the hill. You can find a bit more about the rescue here. The weather was very poor overnight with 5cm of fresh snow as we had not made it back to the hut until well after midnight we had a short day on the Frunden Horn which gave very testing conditions. The forecast was still for poor weather so the following day we left the hut early walking to the valley then driving to the Gastlosen, we traversed this superb limestone ridge AD+ in sunshine while we could see bad weather to the south.
On Wednesday we were in Saas Fee to try and look at some ice climbing on the North Face of the Allalinhorn. The weather was terrible and we abandoned the day when both teams were hit by a small avalanche. With the weather continuing to be poor from the South we spent the night in Leysin then headed into the Grand Muveran massif and traversed the Arete Veirge AD to refuge Giacomini at Anziendaz. We finished the week making an East to West Traverse of the Argentine AD+ in superb conditions.
The candidates are to be congratulated for their efforts and enthusiasm in very difficult conditions.
