My ice climb season

This post is about the activity in leisure time of Tito, one of the members of the ma team.
My ice climbing season started some days before the mountain academy stage in Argeiter la Bessiè, by climbing some icefalls in the Valle dell’Orco. After that we went to the stage where I could climb with my fellows, the guides ant the athletes and have fun on the ice for one solid week.
Thanks the training and the experience I got during the stage of mountain academy I had a wonderful winter full of ice climbing. The mountain academy gave me good motivations to spend two months with ice axes in my hands.
Soon after coming back from the mountain academy I did some ice falls in Valtellina, but the conditions were not so good because there was too much snow, characteristic of this strange winter.
After the ice conditions improved I did some very nice ice-climbing around the alps. I found good ice in different places, for example in Val di Cogne and in Val Daone, in Trentino.
I found the best conditions this winter in gole di Gondo, below the Simplon pass in Switzerland. It was great!. The large quantity of water and the low temperature allowed the formation of all normal the icefalls, and also other ones that did not appear in the last 8 years. I went there for two weekends. In the first weekend I climbed the “Buon Compleanno” with my friend. It was very nice indeed. What I also liked a lot was the casualty of choice. In the morning while having coffee in the bar of the climbers we read in the log book that somebody climbed the “buon compleanno” the day before and found it in very good conditions. I and my friend did not say anything, we just looked at each other smiling: we were thinking the same thing. We went there right away.
The ice fall was only 3 pitches, one better than the other, with in the middle one beautiful and delicate free standing.
The following weekend my friend and I went back to the gole di Gondo, because the conditions were so excellent. This time we did the "Titanic". A wonderful icefall with a long approach of 3 pitches. Titanic is less thin but more vertical than “buon compleanno”: three tough pitches very vertical, but the ice was so good that we could put some very good ice screw. Normally the exit of this icefall has a dry tooling pitch, but we found a very big ice candle that we climbed. I like a lot this icefall because is so long, there are 3 pitches of approach, where we did not find good ice; after that the real icefall starts, 4 pitches not so easy for me. When I finished the last pitch I was so happy because my arms were totally dead. Moreover, the descent trail was not easy to find. In this day the ice was soft because there a little warm wind, it was the last day to climb the titanic before the temperature become warm making the ice dangerous.
I finished the ice season in val Daone on “il sogno del gran scozzese” a pleasant icefall with a dear friend, in a very beautiful sunny day, but we were in the shadows of the north side, far from the sunshine. The ice and the gloves were totally wet, a sign that the season is near to finish…
Now is time for goulottes and rock climbing and to train for Morocco!!!
Tito