First (very nice)pic really puts things into perspective in terms of size!

Secong pic:
I was not expecting that.
Went to high school for a couple of years a few blocks behind the cable car you see in the pic. You're a well travelled man Spud.

Hedge-fund in Grenoble... Hmm Still doing ok in Tokyo, but the thought of working a couple hours from home is a very pleasant one.

Ya bet I went fly-fishing. A bit early in season for dry flies which I prefer, but still managed to land quite a few nice raimbows/browns/chars.

By the way, there is a Spud on the CampToCamp forum, is that you as well? You are ubiquitous indeed !

Unfortunatley I did not take that Grenoble picture. It is from the internet.

Did you eat the rainbow trout with sliced almonds?


ps - nope, I am not on camptocamp. In fact, I am not on any other snow sites (although I tried on a few years ago)

Two person roping:

I haven't done any crack rescue , but done a fare bit of caving.

The knotted-rope idea seems like a good way to arrest a fall in a crevasse, but obviously makes extraction hard.

In caving we always carry a thinner (9mm) STATIC rope, in our packs which is light and necessarily NOT bulky (e.g. squeeze points, etc).

If they're not used for pack hauling, etc, they can be used as an emergency extraction rope. Admittedly, 9mm is a bitch to prussick on, with or without mechanical ascenders.

(ALWAYS use a STATIC rope, otherwise prussicking can be damn time consuming and tiring.)

Sub - nice to hear from you. Its too quiet around here and my office desk is failing to keep me stimulated. I wonder why.

Caving must get pretty scary. It kind of interests me, except that it is going in the wrong direction And caves have strange slimey spiders in them. And yellow worms.

Spud, I did not eat it, I do not like fish.
SubZero, did not know you were a caving buff. Caving is fun. (I have done it only a couple of times). Remember going through a rampling which is basically a very thin horizontal strata missing in the middle of other strata. Could not help thinking about what I would look like if the top would collapse. It takes a special breed to enjoy caving. SubZero, have you ever done cave scuba diving?

Le Spud:

Thanks.

I've never found it scary - just need to remember that every shadow can conceal a hole, and every hole is potentially many metres deep, so, don't go wandering blindly without being connected to an anchored rope.

Breaching (back against one wall and feet against the other) a long slot unroped is always fun - particularly when the lower caverns are flooded and the flowing water echoes through the darkness - that's disconcerting!

As for cave fauna, yes, there are some weird and wonderful sights - some amazing, like translucent spiders; or sitting in a tunnel waiting for others to navigate a flow-stone, feeling a strengthening breeze and hearing a high-pitched beep, then being engulfed by a colony of seemingly supersonic little bats. They're acutally quite cute.

Some weird shite too - standing on a narrow gravel bed within a large cavern and seeing a shallow stream emerge from one solid rock wall, bubble up a few centimetres in depth, then disappearing at the opposite wall.

Funniest thing I experienced was when we entered this huge cavern in a seldomnly visited recreational cave system. It had a big pile of mud in the middle - a mud fight ensued, after being covered in the stuff, and resting exhausted, we discovered it was a big pile of bat-shite from a colony witnessing the event from above - yuck.
(Thankfully our bats don't carry rabies)

SerreChe:

A mate was a mine surveyor who witnessed the result of a strata of coal falling on miners - basically, there's not much left. He described the remains as 'jelly'!

Unfortunately haven't done cave diving - very specialist field needing experience in scuba diving with exotic gases and lots of back-up.

I'd give your left testicle to learn and give the Nullabor Plain (Cocklebiddy Cave) a go - 6km of scuba dive caving would be fun.

Think we hijacked this thread?

That was a good read, cheers.

Although I don't want to meet a transparent slimy spider, I wish I had experienced and learnt about these things when I was younger.

Being in France I can understand that. In French, fish is poison

yes, exactly. Wonder how many will know what u mean tho when reading this thread?

Nice report and pics cheers.

SubZero, A bat-shit fight ! Never heard of that one done before. I hear it is good for ur skin. There might be a niche in cosmetics. Yes cave-diving is very specialized and is one of the sports with the highest % of accidents. Some of those cave systems have some amazingly clear waters. The only cave diving I have done is in the ocean, including Chandelier cave in Palau. Wonder if anybody else been there on this forum. Quite interesting spot. No worries about thread highjacking, no rules is the only rule.
Oblivion, thanks.

I have just noticed that SnowJapan is well-liked by google. If you type "dome ecrins", this TR comes in 6th position on page 1 and is the first one in english. It is not the 1st time I notice SJ popping up well in google.

I have found that too, SerreChe, when a search took me back to my own post. What google doesn`t find are the images.

We are hoping that this will be changing in the near future with some changes we are implementing with photos.

It freaks me out a little. I do a google search and see something semi-personal that I wrote on the SJ forum. Nothing wrong with that other than it always comes a surprise.

Interesting. If SJ's pics can get picked-up by google then will get more exposure. Good stuff. I am wondering how google decides which link goes 1st, second, etc... in the search result

We're hoping that will be the case - we're doing what we can with our updates to make that happen.

Just to get back to the original topic, this is a pic of the "Hotel" Tuckett where the famed climbers tucked himself away in his failed attempt to climb les Ecrins after being caught in a storm.



They then built nearby the first mountain hut (can see the "hotel" tuckett just behind).



Later on they built the refuge du glacier blanc and then even later the refuge des ecrins.

A couple of weeks ago, the bottom of the glacier blanc spit out an airplane wing. Turns out the airplane had crashed on the upper section of the glacier in 1954, had been covered by snow and engulfed by the glacier. It took the wing 52 years to make its way down with the glacial flow. They are expecting the cockpit and the other wing to come out in the next few weeks.