Last week our WhatsApp climbing group was packed with messages as I woke up. I checked the group to learn that Abdul, whom we had climbed Denali in Alaska, had just died on Everest. Reading from the news, Abdul summited Mount Everest, raised the flag that he was carrying and died on the way down. […]

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315am wake up, breakfast at 345am, at 4am we are out the door with our headlights and off for the final leg of the climb: the refuge to the summit at 4065m It is a beautiful night, the half moon is extremely bright and we can see stars and mountains around. We are one of the […]

This is the first leg of the climb, the trek from Pont to the refuge. It’s a beautiful day, sunny and warm. We trek from 1900 to 2700 in just around 2 hours. We grab lunch at the refuge and have to wait until 3pm to get the bed allocation. It’s a container with 3 […]

Wake up in our beautiful hotel Lo Fleye in St-Pierre, near Aoste. Breakfast of desserts, cakes and bread and amazing cappuccinos. We have decided to go trekking and hopefully find some snow around 3000m altitude to rope in, put on crampons and practice our skills before the main climb. We head up the mountain to […]

After months looking forward to some time
In the mountains we are finally here for our Gran Paradiso climbing weekend

    9 September 2014 Grand Paradiso national park, Italy Trek: 2h11′ Altitude: 1900m to 2776m Weather: cloudy and rainy   2 hours drive from St Gervais, going through the 11km long Mont Blanc tunnel, we are  now in Italy for 2 days for the Grand Paradise summit. We have lunch in an old renovated […]

Picture taken by Peter de Jong | Photographer. Friend of Xavier who happened to climb Denali twice at the same time as us I 2017 & 2019. On that day, Peter was heading down and returning to Denali Base camp. Check out his site for more Denali pictures: www.pdjphoto.nl

A very nice picture taken by Kai Girard on our final descent after attempting a summit push on the same morning. We were embarking on a 5-6 hours down-climbing day. About 1-hour in Kai stopped briefly on the ridge and took a shot of us down-climbing. I was leading our rope for this part of […]

Snow city cafe is our place of choice for breakfast each morning for the next 3 days. Large portions of hash browns, home-made biscuits, 20 ounce coffees. Our expedition stomachs can swallow it all! We do our final shopping at REI and AMH, the specialised mountaineering & climbing store. We climb Flattop mountain, a beautiful […]