Andrew Councell reviews five gloves from Black Diamond that bridge the gap between skiing and mountaineering. “The average ski glove emphasizes warmth and is subsequently bulky, but Black Diamond has been producing ski gloves that can actually climb as well,” he writes.
This week we are re-posting Kevin Mahoney’s account of Arctic Rage, (WI6+ R A2, 4500′), from Alpinist 8. Mahoney and partner Ben Gilmore climbed this new route on The Mooses Tooth in March 2004.
Angie Payne, a multi-time national bouldering champion and the first woman to climb V13, recently took a break from bouldering to go on an adventure with expedition climber Mike Libecki. Together they climbed her first big wall, the 3,264-foot rock spire called Poumaka on an island in French Polynesia.
LIKE A LIGHTHOUSE DOMINATING the sea…. The Sea of Ice. The Drus seem to have conquered the Mer de Glace and stilled its waves, until the glacier no longer dares defy their steep mountain walls. Large pale stains, signs of recent rockfall, gleam like salt crystals deposited during some earlier epoch when the Sea of Ice flowed powerful and high, before it began to die down and to draw back, slowly and gently, leaving behind only vile shores of scree. Tourists arrive in uninterrupted floods to view Mont Blanc–merely to find its pallid summit drowned in a mass of satellite peaks, the Dome du Gouter and the Mont Maudit. The Drus, on the other hand, visible from nearly everywhere in the valley, their shape so easy to describe, are unmissable. You might say that a good portion of our planet’s inhabitants has seen them, if only from the seats of cars.
This season, DMM enters the fray with the Switch. With dual offset grips and a radically curved shaft, in essence it references the Nomic. But, put the two tools side by side and you’ll quickly notice the first difference: Though both are marketed as 50cm tools, the DMM is clearly almost 2cm longer. Obviously, a longer tool offers a longer reach, which sounds nice on paper, but I wondered both, “Why these dimensions?” and, “Does the added reach compromise the swing?” Taking the tools out for a first spin on Grand Illusion in Smugglers’ Notch, I quickly reached the twin conclusions, respectively, of “I don’t know” and “Maybe.”
Last week we posted a piece about Mike Libecki and Angie Payne’s ascent of 3,264-foot Poumaka on the island of Ua Pou in the South Pacific. Here, we interview Libecki to find out more about the expedition and his personal background.
IN 1952 A SPIRE of monolithic granite presented a high challenge to the climbers of the day–a dare that the setting sun outlined each evening, illuminating its burnished slabs with a red flash that no alpinist could ignore. The West Face of the Drus had a reputation for invincibility. “There, in any case, is something that will never be vanquished by man,” declared Pierre Allain, who had observed the 1000-meter wall during his first ascent of the North Face in 1935.
