A sometimes account of some things I do and think. Also strava.com/athletes/23711365
Ski 30: Double discipline
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Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Today Crystal took Felicity downhill skiing on the magic carpet at Fortune while I did a cross country loop from P10 to Champlain and back along the 1.
Straight off the top, we didn't complete it. We did about 150 of the 170km, although we did get in 9600m of elevation gain (and about the same of downhill). There were a few reasons for this: (i) we had to dodge thunderstorms on day 1, greatly curtailing that day's plan; (ii) we were cooked by day 7 and there was no way we were ascending 1200m from the valley floor after a 15k hike; (iii) we should have start/finished in Les Houches to minimise the extra elevation involved in getting on/off the trail; (iv) we are old and weak. That out of the way, this was an awesome hike! A week of splendid scenery, hard, hard hiking, at times challenging weather, cozy refuges, local food, full immersion in everything Alps and hiking; a real feast. The generally accepted timeframe for hiking the TMB is 10-11 days which would give you around 17km and 1,000m of elevation change per day. Sounds just about right to me! The record for running is 22 hours...
Day 6 - Barcelonnette to St Dalmas, 123 km (76 mi) Cols passed: Col de Cayolle (2326 m), Col de la Couillole (1678 m) Despite the brooding skies we left Barcelonnette cheered by dry shorts, confidence that we were within touching distance of our goal and enjoying the atmospheric effect of the wispy mist, high clouds and soft sunlight. Our hopes for the newly adapted route were met and surpassed as we wound our way up a stunning gorge towards Col de Cayolle. Despite a brief hailstorm as we approached the col we stayed dry and enjoyed a pit-stop and blankets amongst the snow pack on the col before negotiating over 1500 m of patchy wet descent to Guillames at 793 m. The high Alps now behind us we climbed back up through the ski resort of Valberg and on to the Col de la Couillole up at 1678 m and rolled back down to 500 m where we expected to spend the night. Our ever-supportive support team had other ideas however and let us know by way of text message that they had found a fantastic ca...
Feb 5th - Sometimes travelling is hard, and I have moaned a bit about how covid has made everything harder. But sometimes it's just pure fun. Not to say that everything about our day out rafting was plain sailing. To begin with we had to get everyone on board (have you ever noticed how many of our idioms come from nautical activities? Ask me sometime about freezing the balls off a brass monkey...). I enjoyed the water as a kid but I never went white water rafting until I was a fully grown person. I can see how it could be intimidating. We found Natexplora who said they ran kids trips and that was enough to sway the doubters. The fact that we ran the same route as the other six adult-only rafts on our trip was fortunately lost in the joy and thrill of the moment. There is a project to divert water from the Maipo through a hydroelectric tunnel. Apparently, this will reduce the flow of Maipo by 90%. We had heard of this scheme, and we saw these signs, although the ...
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