Nick Bullock and Andy Houseman have made a rare repeat of the 1975 Gabarrou/Picard-Deyme Grand West Couloir on the West Face of the Aiguille du Plan (3,673m) above Chamonix.

After a snowy winter, the pair found the c700m route in very icy conditions and completed it in just nine hours: early repeats required at least one bivouac. However, they then took more than half this time to reverse the Midi-Plan Arête to the Midi téléphérique station.

First climbed in its entirely over five days in December 1975, and then repeated the following summer by British alpinists Terry King and Gordon Smith, the Grand West Couloir featured a fair amount of aid on pure rocky sections.

Despite being the most direct line on the face, by the standards of the day it was without much character, or for that matter ice, and was considered to be rarely, if ever, in good condition. For these reasons it failed to gain the popularity of other steep couloirs in the range and as time went by became largely neglected.

A couple of years ago Frenchmen Thomas Faucheur and Didier Jourdain re-discovered the line and climbed it in 'modern style', dry-tooling up to M6 and using aid (A1/A2) on only two short sections. The little ice they found proved testing at WI 5+, but they felt that, overall, the route was excellent, with several very mixed pitches and many short technical steps.

It’s not widely known that much of this couloir was first climbed in October 1947 by those redoubtable French legends Louis Lachenal and Lionel Terray, making a 'second ascent' of the 1946 Gréloz-Roch on the rocky Central Pillar to the left. They traversed left out of the couloir in the upper section, after having found the climbing below incredibly exposed to rockfall. They avoided the direct start to the couloir by a gully on the right.

Gabarrou began the climb by following a mixed buttress directly into the bed of the couloir, and this buttress was one of the two sections that Faucheur and Jourdain were unable to free (M6 and A1).

Bullock and Houseman avoided the original buttress by what they felt was a more logical approach in the vicinity of the Lachenal-Terray start (used in 1991 by Christophe Beaudoin and Andy Parkin to climb 600m Fin Givré at V/5, 6a and A2). They climbed a tricky mixed pitch to access a diagonal snow ramp leading back left into the base of the couloir.

Bullock and Houseman then climbed to the summit completely free at WI 5+ and M6. In the autumn, this pair, supported by the MEF, a BMC Expedition Award, in the case of Houseman Mountain Equipment, Black Diamond and Scarpa, and for Bullock DMM, Mammut and Vasque, will attempt the impressive North Face of Chang Himal in East Nepal.

« Back