How many hours in the day?

Oh how forshortened she is! The ground was absolutely solid from the car onwards

One of the direct starts taht leads into the 'normal' route up Observatory Ridge

 

Well, precisely 72 minutes less than everyone else if you use the watch that I had yesterday! I'd wanted to measure what my heart was doing over the day - the monitor actually slipped down after a couple of hours (sure there's a pun there about heart in the mouth or some such...). Fortunately, the consequences were good: all day I thought we were on the brink of dusk and impending weather, resulting in fairly frantic climbing all day and a reasonably early top out. Lou and I headed to the CIC and left for Observatory Ridge at about 8am so that I could get a good oggle of it before we started.

I certainly feel a bit more in touch with winter now. We climbed with 60 metre ropes and I went more than 60 metres for at least half of the eleven pitches. For the final 'few' (four) we scuttled in to Zero. conditions in there were fairly typical early season I guess - axes not holding on that much, a whole lot of digging should you be into that kind of thing and wonderfully quiet. We only saw two other teams - Richard Bentley heading for Number Two (I think) and a team heading for the same area around mid morning. Tower Ridge looked beautiful. 

The first two thirds of the ridge was brilliant - great moves and what a situation. I'd like to return to do the top section when there's a bit less swimming involved. Once the initial steepening of the route eases off and the ridge turns more ridge-like the snow became a little spooky: very deep soft snow with a thick icey crust. During the day we did here several loud 'whomps' but I couldn't spot anything. Despite all the beauty of the route we both felt pretty relieved to see the plateau, and doubly so that the weather was so benign. We were back for a cuppa at the hut by 4 - bliss (thanks Richard! - always good to have a man about for tea advice and the like).