Sorry for the long delay since the last post, time seems to just be flying past. It only feels like a few weeks ago that we last put up any news but I just saw the date and it has been way too long. One problem that seems to be recurring throughout our lives is that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. We have been furiously organising and training for our next trip which leaves on August the 16th. I know that the project itself hasn’t been released but there is a very good reason for that… the website (www.rivers-of-ice.com) and marketing isn’t quite finished yet. I had hoped to have it online by now but as with all expeditions, everything is running slightly behind schedule and we are seriously pushing to get everything up and online in the next two weeks. In the mean time you can speculate on the expedition based on our training out in Chamonix this week.

I had originally hoped to spend 5 days on the Glacier D’Argentiere but found that it was closed and so we opted to climb from Chamonix back up to the Aiguille du Midi via the Mer de Glace. At 20km it’s not exactly ground breaking distances but it was an incredibly useful excises. The main purpose of the trip was to test out every last piece of equipment that we will be using on the expedition to make sure it could hold up to the job. There are a few little pieces that need tweaking and there will be a full breakdown on the website when it goes live, but on the whole I was very impressed with everything and I am now extremely confident that we have the best kit we could possibly hope for. Sadly this means that it pretty much comes down to use now and whether we can hold up to the challenge!

That said we have learnt some valuable lessons this week such as how to abseil and manoeuvred in and out of crevasses with 32kg packs. I expect some of you have tried this before and have found that it’s quite easy to end up upside-down on the rope with such a heavy pack and that really makes life difficult. As a general rule crossing large fields of crevasses isn’t exactly a humorous affair but Katie did manage to make me laugh when after having crossed a precarious snow bridge she triumphantly (and slightly cockily) returned to its edge to take a photo of her exploit when the wafer thin 3 meters bridge of snow promptly collapsed into the depths of the crevasse and she came running past me exclaiming that it was time to leave.

The total ascent was a little over 2 vertical kilometres and as we neared the 4000m mark Katie started to feel the effects of the altitude and progress became incredibly laborious. We are taking 2 days off to recover before heading back out to finish off all the training we didn’t get round to last time and I’ll post again on the long drive back to England on Thursday.