Cogne Ice Opening

Cogne Ice Opening

From 16.12 to 19.12.2016 Jakob and I went to Cogne to start the ice climbing season and to join the Ice Opening festival. On the first day we attended a nice dry tooling course with Jeff Mercier, showing us a few tricks on dry tooling routes up to D7. In the evening at the movie night François Damilano, Matthias Scherer and Rudi Hauser presented some awesome movies and discussed on the past and the future of ice climbing. The next two days we climbed on our own two ice falls: Patri de gauche (WI 4-, 250 m with 3 main pitches of 70-75°, 85°, and 70-80°) in the Cogne valley and Loie (WI 3+) at Lillaz. The ice condition are currently decent for ice falls above 2000m. Lower ice falls (i.e. the Casquade de Lillaz) are not completely formed but should be climbable in a few weeks.