Adventure Magazine

Chris Davis on the famous snow arete section of the Frendo Spur on Aiguille du Midi, high above the town of Chamonix
"The top section of the classic
Frendo Spur, on Aiguille du Midi,
had already deteriorated to
black glacial ice instead of much
friendlier snow névé, which had
already melted. "
As rockfall became more and more ubiquitous,
Chamonix-based climbers looked to objectives that
didn’t involve crossing a glacier. The Sala Athee, in
the Charpoua area, was one such climb, but we were
hesitant after having watched a massive avalanche
sweep down towards the gully that leads to it.
We decided to head up to the area anyway and seek
the local advice of the guardian at the Charpoua
Refuge, who told us that there hadn’t been any
activity in the gully since then. Several parties had
also climbed the route in the previous week, including
the previous day.
The next morning, pre-dawn, was a still, chilly
atmosphere as we approached the gully. It was slabby
and slippery, as expected, given it had been glaciallycarved
eons ago. Rockfall was thankfully absent as
we scrambled up to the base of the climb.
Nerves around the descent were always going to
centre around down-climbing the gully. A mountain is
generally a lot more unstable in the evening, after its
features have spent several hours in the warmth of
the day. We did what all alpinists do when confronted
with unavoidable objective hazards: we crossed our
fingers and hurried through.
It seemed a fitting metaphor in these warming times.
There will be a time in the not-too-distant future when
classic routes are no longer what they were, or may
have even fallen down altogether. For those that are
still there and are safe enough to climb, there’s no
time to waste.
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Sala Athee starts with two warm-up pitches before
the wall steepens into a technical slab, an awkward
chimney, and then a series of splitter cracks that
climax in an exposed step around an overhanging
arête. The top-out, too, is suitably glorious: a flat, wide
and spacious platform that wing-suiters, in the right
conditions, would happily launch from.
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