Deep dive

Night dive

Nice to get out. Dad and Fred on shore admirering my shenanigans.

Nice session with Soeren

Morning session

Snow kite - awesome

At last I felt ready to go to the north sea. Amazing ride.

Superb and brilliant flat water spot discovered

In the search for pancake flat water I went out in pure off shore wind at a place where the water gets deep quickly and in really cold water (only just finished April). Eventually I fell over and could get the kite back up in time before the water was getting me really cold. I decided to quickly emergency release the kite (which wasn't trivial) and swim to shore. The kite took off on its own on the water. I drove to the nearest harbour and chartered a boat to go out and rescue the kite. Quite an epic afternoon.

16m2 kite. Old school

Just as I thought I was getting comfortable with it all Allan phone me up with a last chance before going back to CPH to try towing. I said yes and got towed up to 300 meters height and then released my thingy and had a mad mad flight down to earth. It was absolutely mental and I was just screaming and giggling the whole way down. Awesome kick!

Brilliant session with lots of top landing and take offs. Managed to stay from the beach the whole time and was generally pretty much comfortable with everything. Great fun.

Another great session at Bovbjerg. This time top starting and just enough wind to keep on hanging. It required care with the flying and I ended up on the beach a few times. Biggest tick was a couple of 100% self supported take-offs from a remoter spot and flying back to the others gaining height. Super satisfying.

Awesome session learning to beach start. Quite tricky and also a notch up on the danger scale. Really good fun though flying low over the sand dunes and taking off and landing constantly. Also went with PP; <7> flying all over to the lighthouse which was a great trip.

The tick is in the bag! Ever since the first session in Toftum this place remained number one on the ticklist. Great session feeling really in control all the time. The new school wing is really comfortable and launches and handles really smooth. Did 3 succesfull top landings and 2 beach landings. The wind picked up in the end making the last run a bit epic.

Fully self supported with Poul on the ground obviously. Had some crash landings which I learned a lot from. Landed with my bum on the top on the slope (controlled) and in a fence (not controled).

4 runs at Venø with last run unsupported. Sideways winds. Crossed brake launch.

Ground control. Crossed brake launch in stronger wind. Hard work.

3 runs at Bovbjerg. Forward launch.

Ground control. Crossed brake launch technique.

Joined the yearly parafun meet. Awesome to be back in the air. Happy I hadn't forgotten. Brilliant to be back with the club.

It was so good we had to do it twice

Excellent Via Ferrata in Gorges du Tarn

Axel on the Grenoble via ferata. 9 years old. At the limit. The yoor made it happen.

Lunch time climb. With skateboard.

Excellent trip to Mont Blanc with Mark, Sean and Mark. Got to 4000 something and returned.

Successfull ascent.

900 meters from the top.

Picked one of the big ones. Long walk in and an absolutely knackering climb up to the base of the ice fall. We started the first pitch but were drained after the walk and hill climb. We bailed.

Good conditions throughout. Had the route to ourselves.

Frits fell in the lake on the way in.

John in his element. Linking two lines on Gausta making this one.

Absolute beauty. Climbed with head torches at night.

Sean dropped 4 of my ice screws on the route! Even so, we had a great time.

Brilliant route. Lovely walk in, route and walk out.

Half of the climb.

Introduction climb for Frits. The ice was the best I have climbed so far. One blow and the pick was placed.

Good ice all the way. Highlight of the weekend. I found the second pitch pretty steep and sustained. Top belay was in-situ slings with maillon around a block (as opposed to the guidebook bolted belay) and the half-way belay and abseil point was to in-situ bala-threads without maillon. The guidebook description is odd: we walked up easy slope to the what we would describe as the first pitch. Did then a full rope length (50m) on quite steep ice and then a second 40m to the top with some bridging out of the left rock wall.

Nice long and easy for the grade I thought. Abseil on trees all the way down on the right facing the waterfall. Worked fine on a 50m rope.

Everything I hate about ice climbing in the alps. Long walk-ins, queues at the routes and unpredicatable avalanche conditions. We bailed mid-way due to disagreements on commitments.

Better day than the day before. Finished with festive snowball attack on Richard and Tim.

A stunning line in perfect condtions. For some reason Paul did not want to finish the complete climb

Evening roadside ice.

Super hard finish to a great weekend.

Excellent lead from Sean. Proper outing.

Sean kicked off the weekend of ice with a steady good lead up the right hand gully. Ice wet but good ice

Just brilliant. Precarious climbing up the free hangin pillar. A peak of my sport ice climbing career

Easy lead, steep but with steps all the way.

Good route with a steady flow for the grade

Ticked this awesome classic of the crag. Great climbing all the way

My first WI5! intimedating looking from below but the wall training had me totally fired up for this sort of job. Super route.

First WI4 lead from Sean. Inspiring lead from the old hatter.

Great route climbed with my best friends

Managed to squeeze an ice climb out of a visiting German friend. We didn't do much but it was worth it.

Excellent route. Super festive glissade down to the valley afterwards.

The classic of the crag. Excellent snowblade descent afterwards.

600 meters of pure ice! We ticked all of it although it took us 15 hours! (and then 3 hours to get down). Quite a day out.

Initiation ice climb for James. He did very well. The finishing top is quite unpleasant.

Lots of fresh snow made the ice climbing less pure. Still a good initiation climb for Celine who did very well.

Climbed with Pete from the internet. Meeting him was a fun story. Hooked up prior to Facebook and all that - internet was more a forum for nerds (like me). We met at a bar in BourgdOissan and Pete was a travelling ice climber just like I was at my trips to Chamonix before I moved to Grenoble. So he was carrying _all_ his gear and was fairly random in general. After we had climbed he kept sticking to me and came to my flat at Valentines day walking up the stairs in ski boots. As I was courtisating Celine at the time (we had just met) I was a bit in a dilemma inviting him in. The dilemma was a lot of fun.

Excellent route visible from the valley below. I found this dude who was keen to climb and it worked out nicely.

Self toproped because I'm such a sad lonely git down here in France. Excellent stuff though - did it four times for some proper forearm training. Selftoproping worked really well with the Petzl Traction. Ice conditions are *superb* this year.

Very atmospheric climb. Good bit of spin drift on the second pitch steep (85 degress) and quite remote.

Superb settings. Full sunshine perfect ice.

Less ice than two weeks ago (more delicate) but colder (better ice).

First ice climb in LG. Excellent stuff.

My first proper iceclimb. Good stuff although a bit thin and delicate at places. Released a huge rock which thundered down the gully which was packed with 4-5 other teams. Not good! Nobody got hurt luckily.

Straight 50m pillar

Axels first visit to the Yorkshire caves

Axels first SRT trip

We got to the down climbs.

Axel and Elias did the drainpipe.

Excellent digging trip to dig 9. Also saw the Corkscrew Chamber which was found the day before.

13 hours spankotronic. With John Stevens

A visit to the digface in Grolsch Passage. Managed to make about 2 meters progress removing 22 trays of spoil. The whole passage is really impressive.

Continuing the dig. Excellent burly trip. I enjoyed being at the sharp end much more this time. We've hit a boulder section.

Digging trip towards Daren. Excellent team effort hard work but good fun. Digging is not for the claustrophic amongst us.

Brilliant rig. World class. The subsequent connection was an ultra burly bit of caving. I was particularly traumatised by the gravel-stream squeeze that nearly caught me on the return. Next time I will remember to turn my head the right way. Good effort from Martin leading this bit and not drowning while reversing in the sump. Double black helmet.

Highlights: sucessfull use of heyphone wading through bonzai streamway pushing to Aquenos Choke. Exit series felt hard.

Two-nighter into Dweebland (the end of the cave so far). Excellent trip. Flawlessly executed. We let off two smoke bombs (one failed) at the end to see if there's a draught towards Aggen Allwed. There is. Get your crowbars out!

Trip to the restaurant of the end of the universe

Fred's first rig in the Vercors unmedium. The pendulum was as festive as ever and worth noting is that we managed to get up that climb in the end (fairly committing) taking us all the way to the bottom.

Excellent cave - easy in all respects (rig and walkin). Martin regained his unfire with a steady lead to the bottom. All bolts overtightened subtracts a star good photoshooting and muddy fun adds it back.

Nice trip with Paul which regained his interest in caving. A great easy cave.

The Pot 2 attempt - Grosvenor style. Martin lead down to -80 meters. To be continued.

Tried out my new caving radios which works extremely well on these long vertical pitches.

Full on caving. Included a dangerous 25 meter pitch lead in Wellingtons with only a sling and my bolt kit (thank god for that) as protection. Fantastic cave - highly recommendable.

Great initiation trip for the new speleo recruit. Messed up the logistics by forgetting one descender at the training wall back in the hut. We managed nevertheless and bottomed out the main shaft in style. Good effort from James it being his first real vertical cave.

Desperate. Approach was as hard as ever and the amount of ice in the cave was worrying, although on the same time ultra festive. Martin fired up an inspirational ice-stal-chopping session as we were stopped but an almost complete blockage of ice in the entrace tunnel. Reaching a depth of approximately 100 meters we eventually decided that this was a black helmet danger zone. Huge television sized blocks of broken off ice was scattered around the shaft, and after a quick statistic calculation on when the next bit of ice could be coming down, we decided to blow retreat horn and hurried out after exhaustive cold caving session.

Excellent job to the bottom. The route finding to the last pitch is a bit tricky until you realize you have to gnarl your way through a hole in the roof (upwards) with the festive aid of a spit/stal sling. The squeeze to the beginning of the last pitch is not as bad as it looks - go in feet first and you can stand up half way (not imidiately obvious). Yoor!

Really easy when you've already done it once (but not all the way to the deck). The approach was definitely the crux walking in thigh/waist deep snow to the cave. A festive day. Good effort from Andrew who hadn't caved for 10 years and was srt'ing on a rather made up and minimal rack.

Long trip with an overnight camp in the Hard Rock Cafe. The further speed trip to The Microns was a seriously burly piece of work. Good effort from Martin doing the car shuttle on foot both ways and for the amble lager refreshments in the Hard Rock Cafe and Royston for the very inspirering bit of cave leading in the Rock Steady Cruise.

Went up to have a look. Couldn't resist. Went in. Normal way too wet so I opted for the highlevel dry fossil way which was much longer than I expected and with some pretty nasty (but polished and obvious) squezes. Good training but cave soloing doesn't feel very clever.

Solo with ground support (making tea).

Lateral Shaft. Superb rig avoiding most of the water of the main shaft. Mindblowing

Main Shaft. Wild decent. Although the water level was low we ended up right in the end waterfall which is serious stuff and very scary but excellent adrenalin fun at the same time. The tick is home!

Excellent sporty rig.

Fantastic trip. Made it to the Bonsai Streamway and back.

A job needed to be finished. We wanted to finish yesterdays objective of getting to Smiths Armery but the area was in flood now and we made it past the traverses into OFD3 and reached the roaring streamway which was fantastic to watch but a certain deathtrap to enter. Great trip

We did an unplanned round trip due to some tricky navigation in the Shambles. On one of the many tricky climbs Tom lobbed of and fell around three meters but luckily landed on his feet and not on one of the sharp boulders. He sprained his angle badly and we abandoned the trip and got out safely.

Jesper's first caving experience. Another team was already in there which unfortunately took the edge of the scaryness factor and it was really plain sailing. Still enjoyable.

As festive as caving gets. This huge and relatively easy cave is guarded by a big lake which we crossed in my new rubber dinghy. Seriously festive approach. Followed by a 6 meter steep climb directly from the mooring spot and then a 30 meter high leve traverse with some fairly serious exposure. Great cave.

Good SRT initiation trip for David. We went down the 40 meter pitch and then up again. Got through most of the SRT curriculum including a helping hand from above once or twice. It was raining heavily the whole day but the cave stayed dry.

Went back for a further exploration. Annabel announced her disgust of the un-rock but David is keen on more. This cave is massive. Over 50 kilometers of known passageway with numerous through trips under Dent de Crolles. The mountain is basically completely hollow and will be the focus of activity in the near future. As with all Grenoblois speleoaction it requires a fully equipped SRT team to explore.

Walked up the Dent de Crolles. Nipped in to a huge cavity with our c-rack. Massive draft coming out of the cave. Will be back for further exploration.

Absolutely superb SRT trip. Beautiful lines and an amazing 40m drop from an overhanging speleothem. Easy and highly recommendable. Approach - 8 seconds from the car.

Long day out. 13 hours including the walk. We got back to Grenoble at 4am in the morning. See map

Beautiful walk-in - quite long. Descended amazing looking shaft (140 meters straight!). 10 meter down bolt ripped. Mission aborted. Glad to be alive. See map

Beautiful cave - lots of little lakes and excellent formations. Perfect rig as well. See map

Desperate trip. Got back up to the surface at 12'o'clock at night after a long day in the darkness. Our friends in Grenoble was getting well worried and had started phoning the local police etc. Luckily they sensibly held back any rescue attempts as we were perfectly fine. Glaciere de Scary!

Excellent cave ends in a big lake which goes of in the distance. Next time we'll bring a boat and explore further. This time we both put the double amount of clothes on and was relatively warm. See map

Massive cave shaft - starts with a 120 meter (360ft) drop of a bridge - straight down in to the void. Desperate trip - quite wet and extremely cold. See map

I decided to postpone the UK underground retirement for one more trip - I couldn't say no to a trip down Manor Farm with DG and MB. I wasn't disappointed. Dave now goes under the nickname 'Mr. President' (president for the HPCC) and I had the great pleasure of pushing through some really dodgy loose bouldery bits in the far end which was rewarded with a huge chamber which almost certainly had some further continuation. Dave and Martin unfortunately didn't reach this glorious chamber as they reckoned the boulder bits were too unstable.

Did it! RR went with us for 10 meters and then decided to back out after a worm attacked her in the entrance. We'd seriously misproportioned the whole cave - the entrance crawl and chambers beyond was much bigger than expected. We forgot the map which ment we couldn't make it further than the Great Chamber

Did the full through trip. A great evening out with TW and DG - possible the last for a long time now that Fred is going back to Denmark and Mathias is going bigger voids in Grenoble.

Brilliant trip. Laerke's first ever caving trip and she was so on for it that we decided to do the full Goaty - into the letterbox and back. It's f*cking scary in there - sort of smells of evil and it was a stupendious effort from the girls.

The Rhoades sisters had an unsettled bill in the sump of this fine system. We went all the way through Cambridge Grotto to the Red Room. Good to be back.

Oh baby! This hole had been on the ticklist for quite some time and still is! We had to turn back approx 350 meters in through the 530m crawl that guards the cave. RR had some bad equipment and was freezing and we decided to go back before it would be too late. I have the feeling we will be back - soon.

Fine trip. Dave pointed out a number of challenges which we should attempt soon.

We got as far as the 'very narrow tube' and despite Mathias' attempt of squeezing through in underpants only there was no way it would go. Good trip.

Our sister Henriette went to Bristol to figure out why her brothers like caving. She didn't find the answer but found out she is definitely not desperate to get underground again. Instead we went on an epic trip on the narrowboat

A hidden gem. Excellent rig. The line is just pure beauty.

Long walk. Long rig. Well worth it. FW rigged the hole thing.

Such an amazing hole in the ground. It was raining and there was quite a bit of water.

Great little Saturday afternoon adventure. It was/had been raining a reasonable amount and there was a sizable stream entering the cave. We managed to do a nice round trip

Excellent trip. Did a 'double' abseil simultaneously next to each other and swapped over in the bottom

Very pretty cave in the Fairy Quarry. It's normally locked so you need an official guide for this stuff. Impressive formations

We did the Latheral Aven pitch. But we missed our honoured caving mentor DG Grosvenor who unfortunately had other obligations this Friday evening

The second big SRT trip after Rhino Rift to do in the MD. We did it in three pitches - excellent stuff. We will be back soon to do the big 200ft single pitch

A job needed to be done and TW and I went in to finish the Fairy Cave business. We reached the 'Red Room' which is in the connected Hilliers Cave and is the furtherst reach of the system. Quite an amazing system and very well worth it. Recommendable

Not an ideal trip. I forgot to stock up on carbide and didn't have a lot of juice in the batteries. So we went in as far as the duck and probably partly because I was nervous about the lights Mikkel didn't fancy the duck and we blew retreat and went out. Shame because I would have liked to show Mikkel the Red Room.

Awesome trip. We did the round trip which has some extremely challenging routefinding speically on the return. We were very pleased to get out

Great evening out in the MD. GB has some really awesome formations and some quite entertaining squeezes

We were back to complete the round trip that we had attempted with Peter three entries down. This time the mud sump that we had rushed through was filled to the roof with water and after an hour or more of pumping water with no noticeable effect we went to explore the Black Hole Series instead. This ended when we arrived at a 40 foot pitch. Good day out. We were both exhausted

We got a hold of the key yet again. Tim rigged and I de-rigged

We went in with Dave Grosvenor on a good trip in to the wonders of Fairy Cave. A surprisingly muddy experience. Some good technical obstacles to keep the wriggling techniques uptodate. A Grosvenor Special.

An excellent trip! We went into the St. Poul Grotto Series which included some very low crawls and passing a mud sump. Peter did well in this -not- a beginners section of the cave. We didn't manage the through trip though since Peter started having more than enough. We didn't realize that this actually was our probably one and only chance of ticking this sought after Swildon's collectors piece. Bummer!

Good Trip. TR and RR both did Sump 1 in freezing cold water and in a very uninviting condition. RR even managed to become a 'Son of The MD*' as she fell into one of the pools twice. *) Read the guidebook for a further explanation

I took Lars and Helene down Swildons Hole for a grand caving trip. Unfortunately the mission was aborted shortly after entering the cave due to too much 'noia'

After the failed attempt in Swildons we went for the Goatchurch instead - objective: to go through the drainpipe. We got to it after some persuasion but that was as far as the party wanted to go. Drainpipe 2 - Lars Klammer 0

The yearly 'Insult DG' trip was as festive as ever. Sparrow treated us with several muddy squeezes and a good selection of pretty formations

Tried a 'canyoning rappel' technique for the abseils. Worked okay but figures of eights and doubling the rope is preferable

A bit of a project. Check out the Trip Note with a little drawing

We finally managed to get all the way in to the 'letterbox' - the furthest end of the classic cave. The letterbox is an extremely tight squeeze section very awkward specially on the return

Mathias negotiated a tricky entrance to a cave with a waterfall coming out of it. Ended in some muddy dig business

Some interesting exploration but we didn't go down the main shaft where it looked really interesting. No SRT kit. Very visited

Huge short cave. Explored some galleries but no interesting passages

Through-trip Big cave little technical side passages. Very visited

Big tube with mud and good formations second level round trip with somewhat technical climbing and crawling. Long. Very visited

Big chambers bats spiders lake with potential river lots of potential side passages one easy squeeze. Total virgin experience. Only very few traces of humans. Unique. FW managed to catch the 'Bat Disease' or Histoplasmosis as it is apparently called - pretty nasty lasted for weeks but he survived. Only he nows sleeps hanging from the ceiling

Psycedelic praying with candles etc. reentry with smoke and strange sounds. Photos

Bar Pot. Possible my best caving trip so far. Interesting SRT'ing good deal of route finding and a long section of tunnels. All rewarded with the inconceivable main chamber of Gaping Ghyll. Photos

What a cave! Massive 60 meter free abseil down the amazing shaft

Excellent through trip. Hard. Wet. Had to swim several times. Massive cave system

Katerina did the Drain pipe. Well done. Photo

Practicing SRT for our Gaping Ghyll project

Dihetheral Way. Too wet too scary. We will be back. Photo

Wet Entrance. My first rig - brilliant stuff. See map . And here are a few good photos

Dry Entrance. Good SRT practice. See map

Main Shaft. 50m down. 50m up. 6 dead rabbits in the bottom. See map

Simpsons Pot to Kingsdale valley entrance. Excellent through trip featuring a spectacular 25m abseil. Photo

Ancient Iron Mine. Bow to the Ham

Very wet conditions

The guys had visited me all the way from Denmark to see Britol Rovers play against Oldham Saturday the 21th of February. Having arrived already Thursday night we were looking for something to do Friday. With Keld and Frede Firsttimer

An extremely beautiful cave. With Andy Sparrow

Jakob did the sump 1 of Swildons. On sight. Photos

Started caving at 11pm!

The entrance of Otter Hole has an exiting feature. The river Wye is tidal so the entrance is only open an hour or two during low tide. When the water comes in the entrance (and exit!) closes for about 10 hours which means that once we enter we are comitted for the whole day. Read the whole Trip report

Entertaining trip. Went all the way past the Drainpipe and up in the letterbox

Our first cave ever. Excellent trip. Photo

Dangerous SRT

Got the randonee skis out and revisited the Grande Jorasse basin where Fred and I had been 7 years ago. Went up to Refuge Lascaux (2450m) and headed back. Brilliant trip. 6 hours

Definitely the last run of the season. Lovely day, lots of sunshine but quite desperate snow conditions. I was almost caught in the biggest avalanche I have ever seen - I was completely alone on the whole Vallon side just catching my breath right under La Meije. I hear a crraaaackk, look up and boy oh boy oh boy, the whole serac fall is coming down. Absolutely mind-blowing to watch. It was just getting bigger and bigger in classic avalanche style - you know, developing this huge cloud of snow thundering down toward the valley floor right where I was standing. I waited a few second admiring the spectacle and then I was okay, that actually looks like a bad job and I started the engines and got further away while I could. I stopped some 500 meters further down and looked up again. Like some big disgusting animal the avalanche ate its way down the face and 30 seconds or so later engulfed the place where I had been in cloud and debris. Eventually it reached where I now was but was now a mere wind of snow. Absolutely fantastic to see. All other stuff was very avalanchy as well, but nothing as major as that baby. If only I'd brought my camera. I switched to my skiis midday but changed back to the gun after one desperate run.

Brilliant day. Worked on trying to jump the big serac thing on the left of the drag lift in the top. It's a massive drop and the landing is not very steep so you really gotta go for it all the way. I was there a couple of times but didn't do it. Even Tigers has limits. :-) - I successfully did my usual cliff jump on the left of the telepherique which is always amazingly adreanline pumpy.

Woke up. Looked at the webcam. Looked good. Headed off. Scrounged my way to a free lift ride. Conditions was pretty desperate actually. Fresh snow but very cold and the base was rock solid (not good for the big air landings). Also the avalance risk was quite obvious very high and I was glad to reach the bottom in one piece

Superb day. Excellent big air jumps and some really pumping carving. Absolutely shagged afterwards also partly because of heavy drinking at the previous night with Martin, Christian Holst and forty bottles of bottles of Christians vodka

Gnarled around a bit to figure out what the best descend would be with the access to P2 being unskiable. Perfect weather and only few people

Plenty of untouched snow, but weather a bit unstable. Good fun

Yearly off piste race of festive proportions. Came in 84th in the my category - time 12m33s

Steep aaaaand deep. Did my favourite left side (facing the mountain) exclusively. Lot of queing in the lift unfortunately

Did some excellent cliff jumps. Visibility was poor but due to heavy snowfall

Despite quite crazy conditions (fluffy snow, sun, fog, snowstorm, rain, slush - all in a day) we managed to get some good stuff done. Good jumps.

David and Annabel joined me for the evening and we had a good day skiing/boarding. Still plenty of deep snow

It had snowed a lot the previous day and we arrived to a perfect morning. Perfect snow, lots of it, no people

Ice climbed Saturday and it then snowed 30cm during the night and Sunday was a real treat on the gun. Excellent cornice surfing on the Vallons side. I think I've found my favourite line in La Grave. If only the lift didn't close so early (4pm). I was the third one down the slope in the morning though!

Still powder left from the day before and an excellent snowdepth, soft and perfect for trying some festive jumps.

It had snowed in the morning, and the bastards closed the top bit (avalance danger) so I was confined to the piste. :-(

First time in the local ski resort. Good potential

Only fresh powder on the very top section - really good stuff. The lower parts was icy and tricky on the Powder Gun

Bought a Swell Panik Magistral board and had the most amazing day in La Grave. 10-20cm of fresh powder under clear blue sky.

It changed from rain to snow mid day. We should have stayed one more day

Highlight of the day was the lunch in the Marmotte Restaurant

Spend the New Year break in Alpe D'huez the closest big resort to my new home in Grenoble

A week to check out the powder in Chamonix and La Grave. Great trip together with the skiers Jesper Ritzau and Lars Klammer. No trip report. No photos. But we have a fully edited movie (9 MB!)

Did the Col de Palet to Champagny run (alone!). A bit irresponsible in retrospect. Desperate on a snowboard

We only had three days as the following days was ear marked for Christmas purposes. There where a lot of nice offpiste riding

Spent two months in Chamonix, one week in Serre Chevalier (and La Grave) and one week in Val d'Isere. The off piste conditions in Val d'Isere was unbelievably good.