Our lovely pebble

We have a house bunny called pebble. Here are some pictures in the garden:

Twins!

Edit: We now know they are girls...

Recovering from a stressful week

A good way to avoid being on the road during rush hour and to relieve the stress of last week: climb Tryfan! Never mind the weather.

An hour after parking the car, I was at the top.



Walking down on "heather terasse", I was sheltered from the wind:



As I arrived at "the cannon", a lovely rainbow appeared:



Somehow, it doesn't look the same with the timer:



Strangely, the weather cleared once i'd made it back down!



A good evening stroll, before driving home.

IML "summer" training week

For our hill walking day, we went to the Ogwen valley and climbed the goat track:



In cas you're wondering about the weather, here's a view of the devil's kitchen during a break in the fog:



Shame the movement of the cloud blown down the col is not visible on the picture!

If you think this all looks familiar, maybe it's because you remember this

Ski de rando - Dolomites

4 mois sans nouvelle sur le blog - trop de stress, trop de boulot, la ca va mieux...

En avril, Guigou m'a emmene dans les Dolomites faire du ski de randonnee. Il faisait mauvais, sauf le dernier jour. Notre hote nous emmene faire une journee extraordinaire:



Depart dans la foret



Et quelle foret!


Guigou en plein effort


On rigole moins: les peaux commencent a se decoler. On est sorti de la foret, bientot le col et la premiere descente


Et c'est parti!


Un chien en ski de rando, c'est genial: droit dans la pente...


... ca rassure de la voir courir, pour l'etat de la neige!


On n'est pas rendu: on doit traverser a flan pour rejoindre un autre col


Il faut se battre. Une grosse avalanche a applati la foret, et du coup on doit skier a travers, par dessus, les branches! Les peaux n'ont pas apprecier, les miennes vont bientot lacher...


Voici d'on on vient: le premier col, le couloir que l'on a skie et la traversee de la foret applatie


Et voici le deuxieme col. On va skier la meme face a la monte et a la descente.


Une derniere photo car mes peaux viennent de lacher pour la derniere fois. Plus de toile adhesive, il faut marcher. A pied, j'ai de la neige jusqu'au cuisses!


Le sourire avant la descente. Je vais avoir des crampes aux jambes, donc pas de photos de la descente


Celle ci, je l'ai prise a la monte. On doit skier le couloir, puis la foret et pour finir 1 heure de marche pour rejoindre la route.


Vue de la vallee: Le premier couloir et au milieu, le deuxieme est situe dans l'ombre entre la dent de droite et celle au milieu de la photo

Une superbe journee. Je dois rajouter les noms dont je ne me souviens pas, la trace GPS, corriger les fautes mais apres 3 mois d'attente, il etait temps de montrer les photos!

Les autres photos sont sur flickr. Cliquez ici

mud

Campervan weekend in the Yorkshire Dales. Bit of the problem this morning: with the blinds in the rear windows, I didn't see this pole when reversing out of the field:



I couldn't drive forward as the ground had gone soft overnight and the wheels just kept digging themselves in. I tried with the mats, with stones, just getting deeper.

In the end, I got the snow chains out:



Not much fun. My fingers got nearly as cold as if it had been snow, and a lot dirtier. In fact, it was harder work on mud than it is on snow!



We got out in the end... Not the most glorious first use of the van's snow chains!

snowy Wales

Last weekend, I headed up to Wales in search of snow and ice. Up very early on Saturday, I picked up Rob and headed for Tryfan.

There gullies were not in good condition, so we did the classic north ridge traverse of Tryfan. On the picture above, we climbed the mountain from left to right.

Rob was reasonably cheerful at the start:

We had 600m to ascend, and soon we felt we were having a proper winter day

Not much of a view from the summit:

Still, there was some fun to be had on the way down:

On sunday, we helped Moira and Jeff look for a glove he'd lost the previous weekend in a gully near Ygarn.

There wasn't much snow left, so most of the search party went back to the Ogwen cottage for tea and cake. Liz, Michael and I walked to the summit ridge then completed the traverse over Ygarn.

Soon after we'd reached the summit ridge, we came across 2 walkers who'd missed their descend path from Ygarn. They were looking for the same path Louise and I used in the autumn, and it's not easy to find. They had to walk back 2km. Here they are at the start of their descend:

Summit picture. Snowdown, behind us, is lost in the cloud:

Looking back at Ygarn and Michael taking a picture:

The final descend was down "Devil's Kitchen". This proved untertaining:

Finally, here's a panoramic view from the top of Ygarn:

If you want to see the whole set of pictures, click here

At last! I've climbed some English ice!

Last saturday after work, i drove up to the lake district to join Michael, Russ and Liz in the hope of breaking the curse of ice climbing in England.

On Sunday morning, we woke up early and went to Carrock Fell to climb/play on the icefall. Russ turned back before we made it to the car park. We were the first ones. Here is Michael:

We only had a 10 minutes walk from the car park. I led the most obvious route, to set up a top rope using trees as a belay:

Then Liz climbed the route:

Followed by Michael:

We climbed 4 routes in total. the ice was very good, plasticky. In places, it was thick enough to take 19cm ice screws! It felt like we could have been in the Alps. We even climbed an icicle:

We finished the day with tea / hot chocolate at the Lakeland pedlar cafe. What a great day!

To view the full set of pictures on flickr, click here