It’s not often you get a professional photographer to accompany you on a route and take photos of you – unless of course you are Greg Boswell.
When we were at the Torino Hut last week we bumped into Ingo Rasp. Ingo is writing a book on climber’s experiences and motivations for climbing in the alps. He meets, interviews and photographs climbers – and is his book should be published this year.
So, Lee and I got chatting with Ingo in the hut, and we were going to head to Tour Ronde and Ingo asked if he could tag along. Of course, we said yes. The forecast for the next day was a bit mixed. We awoke the following morning at 3.30 am to heavy snow falling outside. Tour Ronde was off – two days before we had headed up on a day of less snow fall to hear avalanches streaming off the east face, so we were not going to head up Tour Ronde. At 5am after a longer then usual breakfast the three of us headed out to “have a look” – it was snowing pretty heavily and we estimated about 20cm of snow had fallen. We headed up the glacier for a walk, but it was clear these were poor climbing conditions. As we moved over the glacier – we had an idea. The E ridge of Aiguille de Toule gave a safe rock scramble. Why not do that? So off we headed. It gave 200m or so of easy, snowed up rock – very much in the character of grade II winter scramble back in Scotland.
(Summit cairn of Aig. de Toule; looking down on Aiguille de Toule dwarfed but Mont Blanc)
Poor Ingo had to put up with our bad chat the whole way up the hill and and then back to the hut – and in the hut he interviewed both Lee and I for his book.
One of the amazing things about climbing and mountaineering is being in amazing places with good company. The route wasn’t hard, but the company made it a special day.
Check out Ingo’s web site and keep and eye out for his book when it is published.