Climbed most of Bourgeau Right yesterday with Sarah Hueniken. It isn’t often that this route is in good condition without significant avalanche hazard both on and above the route.

We turned around due to a need to meet the school bus by a certain time but the route is in quite good shape. The ice has suffered some sun affect from the warmer afternoons and can be quite aerated in some sections. Lots of hooking on good tool and foot placements while some sections seemed a little hard to find ‘perfect’ screws.

We used a mix of 13cm and 19cm screws with no real need for stubbies (the last couple of pitches also looked like they would take longer screws).

There are fixed bolted belay/rappel anchors all the way up however some can be a little tricky to see as they are set quite high for years where there is more snow on the ledges.

There was a party ahead of us when we arrived and we made the conscious and somewhat calculated decision to follow them given the ledge nature of the route. The reality was that due to the limited snow on the ledges, falling ice was travelling pretty far and we had to time our leads carefully to avoid being too exposed on some pitches.

Have fun,

Marc Piché
ACMG Mountain Guide