Mountain Lifestyle: Pyramide du Tacul - East Ridge Ridge Route AD+,5a***

The exit from the ice tunnel top of the Aiguille du Midi station onto the famous snow arete, never fails to impress. This morning at 7am was no exception.

Once down on the main glacier, we left the world behind and hiked off across the crevassed plateau, towards the Rock Pyramide of Mt Blanc du Tacul.

It's downhill all the way, but at this time of year, without skiing off down the valley, that means it's uphill all the way back.

En-route, we passed by the enormous granite cliffs, that Daragh and I had climbed some seventeen years ago.

After nearly two hours and a good bit of crevasse dodging/jumping, we arrived at the base of our climb (the right hand peak in the photo below), where we exchanged boots and crampons, for rock climbing shoes.

The climbing was fantastic and relentless. Immaculate granite with perfect cracks and positive holds. Once on the ridge, the guidebook descriptions were of little use. We just climbed up the ridge

as far as we could, before bringing the second up.

A quick swap of gear and we'd continue.

Climb, belay, climb, repeat. When we were belaying (paying out the rope), the surrounding vista was memorising. A visual geography lesson. Huge peaks, glaciers, crevasses, thundering rock falls in nearly gullies were all we could see. Every now and then we spotted a team passing by on the glacier far below. Black specks on a white canvas.

Every time the summit felt in reach, another sections presented itself.

Shortly before our agreed turn around time, a whoop from Barney confirmed that the summit was within our reach.

The top really was a pyramide. I crept past the final belay to tag the summit. It had been a long and exhausting journey. 'Well that's half way' Barney reminded as we had a quick bite to eat.

Before setting off down, we did spend a few minutes, open mouthed, surveying the ground around and below us.

Then, conscious of the time, we began the first of many many abseils.

It was difficult to find the exact belay points at first as the face we descended had lots of old rusting tat dotted around us. Using the full length of our 60m ropes, we nervously set off down unknown ground, eyes peeled for the next available anchor.

Each time we pulled the ropes through, we held our breath and hoped they would not get stuck on anything. To loose a rope here would be problematic to say the least! The descent took much longer than anticipated, but only because the ropes insisted on twisting into big knots of knitting each time we threw them down a pitch, but eventually we reached our boots. Now that the day had warmed up, we moved even faster to cross the now soft snow bridges that led back to the glacier.

The sun beat down as we walked away to a safe spot out in the glacier. Here we had a quick bite, drank some water and got ready for the journey back up to the cable car. We calculated that we should still comfortably make the last lift, but didn't hang around long, just in case.

We picked the safest way back up the glacier. Where there was no snow, just bare ice, the cracks were easy to see - some just a fracture line.

Others were much bigger. We had jumped this one on the downhill journey when it was frozen solid. Thankfully these two climbers decided to find a better way than try to follow our footprints over the now soft overhang!

After half an hour or so, I looked up to find that the skies had suddenly filled with clouds. A few snowflakes fell, but the end was now in sight.

The final few hundred metres was tough work, to gain the station. We'd been on the go, virtually non-stop for over ten hours and only once we'd climbed back through the ice tunnel into the throngs of bewildered tourists, could we drop our guard and afford to properly relax.

At the lift exit, we were greeted with crazy scenes - the place was packed with people all waiting to go down and a schedule was written on a white board at the entrance. Maybe because he knew what we'd been up to or maybe he was just being kind, but the lift operator stopped us and gave us a numbered ticket for the very next lift. People we being told that they had at least an hours wait, as we pushed through to the front and packed into the cabin. We felt very grateful indeed.... What a day.