We said goodbye to Luke and Laura yesterday and with a favorable weather forecast we decided to try to cross off one of our biggest goals of the summer, the Frendo Spur (IV, D+, AI4, 5c). The route can be completed in one or two days depending on the parties and the conditions of the snow on the route. Considering it was going to be our first time, and we lost two hours on the day because of the changes to the tram schedule, we decided to carry bivy gear with us and do the route over two days. We started day one with a nice hike from the Plan de l'Aiguille tram station up to the glacier. Bucky and I slightly disagreed about how to best approach the climb. I thought we should go straight up the gut of the extinct glacier trough to where the snow began and then straight up from there to the rock. Bucky,
however thought the best route was to go around up high on the trail and traverse across the glacier to the beginning of the rock. We went with Bucky's preferred route in this case, and in this case we both agreed it probably would have been a little faster to make a more direct approach. The route we took necessitated crossing a heavily crevassed section of the glacier with sketchy snow bridges. At one point, while Bucky was crossing one snow bridge we heard and felt the glacier whump and crack below our feet. Bucky looks at me, startled, and says, "was that the bridge I am on?" I said, "I think so, you should probably hurry!" Luckily we made it though without having to use any of our crevasse rescue gear, but it was a little time consuming. The bergschrund at the base of the rock was filled in very nicely, which was a big change from the way it has looked from the tram all summer. Once we got to the rock we continued moving together up a 4th class diagonal ramp up the cliff face. We continued to zig-zag through class 4 and easy 5 terrain while moving together until we came to a corner where the route description said the "real" climbing started. We exchanged our boots for rock shoes, extended the ropes to full length, and started pitching it out. We soon came to see that none of those precautions was really necessary, but better safe than sorry. After climbing two pitches we decided
that the terrain was easy enough that we could go back to simul-climbing, which is not quite as safe, but it is much faster. After about six hours from the tram station we came to the crux pitch of the rock section (5c, 5.10a). Both Bucky and I breezed through it, even with our heavy packs, and agreed that it did not seem like 5c. We continued to pitch sections out after the crux as the climbing became much steeper and exposed until we arrived at the bivy site after about 9 hours of climbing. Even though the day had started out with glorious weather, when we got to the bivy site the wind was whipping and the clouds had descended so that we couldn't really see anything. Since we had about two hours of daylight left I was thinking that maybe we should just push through to the Aiguille du Midi and sleep up at the tram station instead of bivying out in the rain/snow. Bucky said he would rather sleep out on the sweet little bivy platform than in the tram station so we started setting up camp. I had just bought the cheapest bivy sack I could find the day before, and I wasn't too convinced about it's waterproofness, so I was sincerely hoping the rain/snow would hold off. Unfortunately we were not so lucky. Just a little before sunset we could look down into the valley and watch a massive thunderstorm going on. I have to say, it was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Hanging out
on a mountain, above the clouds, watching a thunderstorm below you is sweet. As the sun went down the clouds came up, and although the lightening and thunder stayed down in the valley (thankfully), the rain did not. It wasn't a torrential downpour or anything, but it was enough to make sleeping very difficult. Not to mention that the thunder was so loud at times the entire mountain would literally shake. I don't know if it was because of the thunder, the warm temperature, or a combination of the two, but we could hear avalanches tumbling down the mountain all around us. At one point the ledge we were sleeping on was shaking so much from the thunder I was a little scared that our ledge was going to start sliding! After a night full of tossing and turning and intermittent rain, I was very grateful to see the sun rise. When I got out of my sleeping bag and pulled it out of the bivy sack I noticed it was very wet. Luckily none of that water soaked through to the inside of the bag and I stayed warm, but I am not sure how much the bivy sack helped! After a quick breakfast we began the snow and ice portion of the spur. The beginning is a really exposed, really beautiful S-curving knife ridge. Enough people have climbed the route through the summer that the ridge is very stepped out, making it easy enough for Bucky and I to move together. After moving up
the ridge for about an hour we came to the base of a gendarme and where the real climbing (80° ice) starts. The route was very stepped out, even on the ice, making the climbing fast and fun. We were also ascending next to the rock so we were able to use a combination of ice screws and rock pro. As we were topping out the final (near) vertical pitch on the ice the clouds decided to make another appearance, but luckily we didn't get rained on. The last pitch was an easy traverse across the snow to where the cornice at the top was virtually nonexistent and we were there! We shortened our ropes back up and hiked the ridge up to the Aiguille du Midi. We arrived at the tram station in about four hours, making our total climbing time about 13 hours. In hindsight I was very grateful that we didn't push for the summit. The climb up the ice took a lot longer than I was expecting. We would have been climbing for about two hours in the dark! We arrived back at the Plan de l'Aiguille station about 27 hours after we had left it the day before feeling very satisfied. The Frendo Spur was the last of our three major goals coming in to the summer (the other two being the Mont Blanc summit and the circumnavigation of Mont Blanc via MTB) and we got it in just under the wire! I would have to say the Frendo spur was one of my favorite routes of the summer. The rock was all very fast and easy climbing and the ice was elegant and beautiful. When I come back at some point in the future I can't really think of a lot of routes I would want to repeat, but the Frendo Spur is certainly one.
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