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| Sunrise after a painfully early start (3.45am) and a lot of power walking to overtake the hoards and get ahead of the pack. |
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| The power walking turned to power sliding when we hit the compacted icy snow - a rare photo of Tash stood upright! |
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| Power crawling! |
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| ...the only ones between us and summit glory. |
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| But it didn't take long until we'd burned everyone off and we were storming ahead. |
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| More power crawling on the final summit slopes - a long way down to the valley below! |
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| The final rocky ridge section to get onto the summit proper - Pas de Mahoma. |
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| 9am and we were first on the summit! |
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| Sliding back down on our bums in trainers (with me kitted out in gaffa taped trousers), we passed the first of the properly equipped "true mountaineers" - complete with winter boots, crampons, ice axes, head to toe in brand new shiny outdoor gear and roped up to their mountain guide! |
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| We decided to go down a different way to make a circular walk so we went down the south side (which turned out to be a 45degree ice slope that I had to try and kick steps into while using rocks as axes - Tash wasn't too happy!) |
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| After several hours of painstakingly slow downward progress, we finally made it below the snow and Tash could smile again :-) |
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| Heading down into the Valibierna valley |
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| And after a very long and boring stomp down the forest track in the valley bottom we walked back into camp ready for a cold beer. 3hrs up and 6hrs to get down! |
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