Monte Rosa – Part 2
Clinging to civilisation for a bit longer, our planned ‘first lift of the morning’ start turned in to a savoured hotel breakfast and more of a 10 am-ish lift. Our plans for the day weren’t too ambitious – lifts to the Indren station, ascend to the Mantova Hut to set […]
Monte Rosa – Part 1
July is summer in the northern hemisphere – news to this Antipodean once as a child and then again more recently on Monte Rosa. I’ve since checked once more. During a two-week stay in Les Houches prior to this climbing adventure, rain had been the recurring theme in continually unsettled […]
Chalet des Anglais 2014
Firstly, I’ve added an email subscription form. If you’d like an email to let you know that I’ve blurted out some more words and posted more photos then jump on board. There’ll never be more than one email per week. A bad case of PhDitis has made it a bit […]
Alpine Summer – Preview
I’m sitting in Hôtel-Refuge du Prarion in Les Houches and for the 3rd day in a row it’s a complete white-out. That is, I can see barely more than 5 m in any direction. If the Chalet des Anglais delivers endless fun when it’s sunny, it must be said to […]
Alpine Summer – Alpinism
Our (Mikey and I) adventure on the Monte Rosa Massif… To be clear, The Matterhorn is not on the list, and in fact the peaks we’ll be doing are best classed as ‘snow plods’ with one exception. Despite the lack of technical climbing, this trip is going to be a huge adventure […]
Alpine Summer – Chalet des Anglais
To break up the 3 year old nostalgia for a bit I thought I’d lay out my plans for this summer in the Alps. It’ll be the third year running that my summer has looked like this, and while that mightn’t seem very adventurous with the rest of Europe on my […]
Carnarvon Gorge
Being back in the office after two and a half months of holiday in the US proved to be testing. This was off the back of 14 months without leave so it was one extreme to the other… and back again. Australia’s newborn utility solar industry, where I had been carving […]
Yosemite National Park
Yosemite gets its own post simply because it’s one of the best places on earth. Its granite walls have inspired people like Alex Hannold (CLICK THIS!) and Ansel Adams, climbing and photography legends respectively. There’s a risk that watching Alex’s exploits in Yosemite will make our little adventure shrink into tedium. […]
Canyons; Bryce and Zion
Bryce Canyon is a really cool piece of landscape to walk around. This lines up with the advice I was given in advance which saw us spend a couple of days there. It’s a lot smaller than the Grand Canyon, which makes it more accessible if not a little less… grand… […]