This was an early waky waky day. The plan called for doing the North Ridge and Traverse of Grand Pic de Belledonne. I lodged 4 people in my humble abode establishing a new record. We started hiking at 3:30am, with the idea to be at the beginning of the route by sunrise. The new detail was that it has "snowed" up there. This was nice as it really changed the panorama, in many ways. The good side is that it was gorgeous and beautiful up there. The variant, was that we decided to leave that route for another day.
Instead, we traversed over the Pic de Grand Domenon, and la Grande Lauziere, then down to the meadow. This still involved moving over rocky terrain although the ropes would rest in the packs to train our shoulders and back. Getting down the meadow was interesting as the terrain was steep and at times there was only grass to hold onto. Once at the meadow, JC and me decided to go straight up to the Grand Colon and scramble up the tales and rocks, only to find out as we summit "it" that we had gone up the wrong summit, fortunately we see down to our friends which are going up to the right summit and join them.
At the real real summit we are all together and we share a second lunch and relate the stories how sometimes footwear suck. I would have loved to have my approach shoes and not my 1.2kg (per shoe) heavy mountaineering boots.
On Sunday, I took a rest day and Aude and JC went up the South Pilar of Dent de Crolles. I took advantage of this situation to simulate "Grindelwald." That is I followed them using my 60X scope (remember the one I bought for the ski recovery mission). In the last two pictures, you can see them on the wall and on the summit.
The stats are something like D+: 2000m and 13h car to car.
