We drove around the to road going to the col D'Izoard, and left it at a village called Cervieres, to follow a mountain road to see how far we could get before we got stuck.
The sun was already eating down and chasing away the frost from the night before, as we walked further up the road past the snow drifts.
We soon arrived at the point where we had to leave the road and start to make our way across and up the gulley that was the start to the route.
There were a number of tracks from the previous days. these were all very frozen and causing some problems for skins that did not like the steepness and hardness.
After sweating up the gulley for a around an hour, with the gulley getting narrower and the zigzags getting tighter, and the slipping becoming more frequent, we had a conflab.
We should have used ski crampons and continued, but in the end we decided to go back down, and abandon the ascent for today. In later years we would have continued.
Back on the valley floor we had to decide what to do for the rest of the day. It did not take Bryon long to persuade us to follow the ski de fond tracks, and do some flat skinning.
It is strange how incredibly harder skining on the flat is! However we had time so we continued up to the end of the flat area in the valley.
At this point we had been passed several times by lycra clad speed demons, just to prove that our skis were not suited for this, but could work.
We made our way back to where we started and wandered back around the track to the van.Then back to the apartment for tea.
Over the next few days we would see the Cima de la Chaarvie in a number of guises from cloud covered to bright sunshine.