Late to say i’m sorry- Aiguille Verte

As skiing conditions were poor Tom Grant and i decided to see if a route we had wanted to climb for a while was in condition. We got the second bin to the top of Grands Montets with Late to say im sorry as our target.

Leaving our skis at the bottom of the couturier couloir we make quick progress moving together up the calf burning 50 degree romp and intial two easy mixed pitches untill we reached the crux. It looked pretty tricky and was initally given a grade of A2 5c, but we had heard from other partys the roof can be drytooled at M6 and then an iced corner a few meters left of the origional peged up crack climbed at M5 for a free ascent.

I headed off on lead and managed to free the roof after spending a bit of time fiddling gear in, as i pulled round the bulge i saw above that the corner had no ice in so i would have to climb the origional crack which had also been freed but at M7, a little hard for me with no bolts! I tried to free this but got a little scared and pumped and had to rest on gear a couple of times.

The following pitch was pretty thin and had some tricky mixed climbing to but Tom dispatched of it easily, which just left us with three beautiful thin ice gully pitches to the top. Once we topped out we decied to rap off and not go to the summit which is bad style but a good call as an avalanche had come down the Couturier as we were climbing so as the light had gone by the time we reached the bottom finding our skis took a while!