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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