Well the obvious answer is winter. In formal climbing terms the UIAA calender tells us its winter until the 21st of March. So if you are shooting for a winter ascent time is running out. But in the southern Alps its more summer than winter. I’m not joking, its about plus 20 degrees Celsius and its soon going to be way too hot to climb on the south facing crags. This past week I spent a few days climbing in St Leger and its perfect conditions there. And still possible to climb on the huge south face as the wind is blowing gently through the gorge.

It was almost empty with only five or six teams around and every route is dry, that is really unusual this time of year as its usually rains quite a bit. Now all this can change as spring is still a month or two away. But right now it is great in St Leger. I will try to get the most out of the good conditions and spend some time in St Leger until I hopefully can get a weather window to do a big alpine winter route done.

Not having climbing that much rock lately and having had way to sore knuckles from the ice climbing I have not been on the MOON Board in a while so I was quite surprised how well I was climbing. I jumped on a great looking 7b+ called Chute de Chevre on the warm up and that proved to be a bit to enthusiastic but it went down second go. I then climbed a few classics on the south face I have never had the opportunity to climb as they always have a long waiting list.

Being slightly lazy I could not be bothered putting up my draws on my project Coloscopie 8a the first day so I opted to try a Raku a nice looking 8a+.  It sure is a hard route but the second day I got through the first crux and up to a big rest. I will be back for that one and see how I progress on the rest of the route.  I also tried my project I worked on last fall, Coloscopie 8a and that went way better than what I had expected. I think I need about eight to ten day of climbing focused and doing some fingerboard training and I will be stronger than I ever was last year.