Getting ready for our first launch out of Sondrio, we could see cumulus forming above the peaks in classic alpine fashion

There was an area just large enough to fit an EB28 while preparing all our gizmos. Unfortunately it had been recently manured. Fortunately, the sun had dried it out enough that it didn't stick...

It was nice to have 1200m of smooth tarmac virtually to ourselves

The valley breeze effects were quite marked as it was fairly narrow in the area around the airfield with the mountain sides rising up out of the flat bottom

Having climbed away to the east of the airfield, we headed west to the hills on the end of lake Como, where we eventually picked up a windshadow climb

The sky looked reasonable, with 3-4kt climbs to 10,500-11,000' and we worked our way westwards past Locarno

We ended up in the Masera valley but the cumulus were becoming more ragged as the NW wind picked up and we could see there was a much greater amount of cloud towards Switzerland, of the stratocumulus variety

We were discussing what our next move was going to be when the thermal we were climbing in not far from Masera strengthened near cloudbase and put us in contact with a wave system

It looked much better from 17,000', so we made a plan to go in the direction of the Matterhorn, passing Monte Rosa

The wind at 16,000' was NW at 40kts+, so we crept gently round Monte Rosa and the Breithorn, just keeping clear of Swiss airspace on the (relatively) clear Italian side

The strong wind was creating banner clouds on the downwind side as moist air from the valleys was brought up behind the peaks

But there was a fair amout of cloud running up the Swiss side and spilling over the top into Italy

We tried to climb downwind of Monte Rosa but it was rather weak so ran the front edge instead

We were treated to a scenic run along the crests in fairly smooth air

All of the major peaks had there own little cloud forming behind

So we moved round onto the windward side where it was much smoother but with fairly weak lift

Looking westwards, there was a lot of "cumulo granitus", we'd need to get well above that before doing anything else

There was a nice patch of air just in front of the west face that took us to over 16,000' and a view of Mont Blanc, which became our next objective

There was decent primary wave in the Val Ferret behind the Mont Blanc massif

We did a pass of the snow dome on the summit, at 15,783' and 7"

There was a group of intrepid climbers, bent against the wind, nearly at the top

We returned to the hotspot downwind of the ridge line and took it up to FL195

We saw an Easyjet pass not that far above but Robin was too late with the camera!

We eventually returned to the convective layer and the Sondrio valley. The southern side was producing a good energy line and we followed it east until we were just in the Bolzano valley. Looking north we could see the high peaks in the Stelvio national park

The pass Tonale, quite flat on the top, actually has an airstrip on the watershed