Supercouloir winter in Mont Blanc du Tacul

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Bastien Gelinotte Jon Murua • Supercouloir, Mont Blanc du Tacul • 4,248m ED M6 • Winter ascend on a day of this fantatic mixed route of 800 meters. • Attack in unusually good conditions, covered on snow/ice. The rest of the gully was in rather dry conditions. • Extreme wind in altitude and issues with the rappels. • Date: 4.1.2020 • 8:50 Telecabine Aiguille du Midi • 11:00 Rimaye • 18:00 End of difficulties / summit • 19:30 End of rappels • 21:45 Refuge de cosmiques • Gear used in the route: • Crampons: Petzl Dart • Boots: La Sportiva G5X • Ice axes: Petzl Nomic • Harness: Mammut Zephyr Alpine • Gloves: Simond Cascade Black Diamon Soloist finger • Helmet: Petzl Sirocco • Ropes: Mammut Twilight • Camera: Go Pro Session 5 • • Transcript: • Beautiful!One single word to describe this route.Beautiful! • It all started last year when we followed the conditions of the Supercouloir closely. We would check blogs, reports and all social media in the search of any information. That year the route did not get in conditions. • This year however, while free soloing the North face of Tour Ronde I saw that the attack was full of ice. We only needed a good weather window... • January the 4th was the date. Yes! • We racked up all sort of rock and ice climbing gear and we got one of the first lifts to Aiguille du Midi.The strategy was to climb the route on the day; make the summit by sunset and descend to the unguarded Cosmiques hut in the dark. • The approach is easy, but we immediately stumbled upon the first difficulty: the rimaye. M4 I would say. • The first 2 pitches are gorgeous!Steep ice and mixed terrain, easy to protect. What a pleasure! • The exist of the 2nd pitch put my skills to test. The overhanging snow mushroom was made of... Snow, not ice and the ice screws or axes wouldn't hold. • Once in the gully, without much hesitation, we kept going through some sketchy mixed terrain. • There wasn't much ice. Ice screws would touch the rock half way through. 10cm if we were lucky. They were relatively easy pitches, but full concentration was necessary. A fall of 10 meters would be painful to say the least, if the ice screw held. • Further up, the ice was thicker. We climbed up smoothly until the last fantastic ice pitch. Vertical and sustained, grade 5. • So far so good, all as planned. • In mountaineering, we say that the summit is only half of the route. • The wind was extreme up there and it got dark as I climbed the last pitch. • No time for celebration. Head torch, rappel line and descend. • We were tired, cold, hungry and thirsty when... • Still 300 meters to descend, what to do? What would you do? Write down in the comments what you'd do in this situation. • We eventually managed to get to our skis. • To finish off, what was supposed to be an easy one hour skin up took us ascot 3 hours.The skins would not stick to the skis and we had to improvise different techniques to progress on the snow. • ... • Descending La Valle Blanche is magic, specially at sunrise. All these mountains... all these routes...It's specially satisfying after having climbed such a beautiful route like the Supercouloir.

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