Day 14/15 - WTF happened last night?!/Homeward bound

The evening panned out like this: we finished climbing at Rocher Cannon aroun 1900, cooked dinner, m0ved the car to the farthest corner of the carpark and set up hammocks just off the carpark in the trees. We were in bed by 2200 and asleep shortly after. James fell out of his car-crash of a hammock almost immediately and slept on the floor instead. Some time between 2300 and 0000 we were woken up by the sounds of a helicopter circling slowly overhead, getting lower and lower. It kept slowly circling for about five mins and the downdraft from the rotors was knocking the hammocks around. It then seemed to fly away for a min, then return even lower and then land in the carpark next to the car, maybe 30m away from our bivvy!

The noise and the wind and the lights was quite terrifying in the middle of this forest at the dead of night. Chris and I had swung out of our hammocks onto the floor and put shoes on, expecting armed police to arrest us any minute for wild camping (which is illegal in Fontainbleau). The helicopter spent maybe five mins on the ground which the searchlight moving around before it just took off and left! It took me ages to get to sleep after that, every light or sound was a perimeter being set up around us! Best guess is they were looking for someone, checked out our car and decided it wasn't the one they were looking for. I'm sure they'd have seen us bivvying on an IR camera and decided not to bother us. Seriously weird!

Friday morning we were up, fed and packed pretty quickly and got in a few hours bouldering before setting off for Calais. I think were were all suffering for the previous days climbing with aching arms and sore tips so we were on the road slightly earlier than we needed to be and we got an earlier ferry back.

We drove up to my house in Rushden for the evening, had chip shops chips for dinner, a few celebrationary beers and enjoyed our first hot showers for weeks. We've not been able to wash for nearly a week so we all felt super clean afterwards! Sleeping on a mattress felt heavenly.

Final totting up of the ledger shows we spent about £180 per person all in for two weeks. Pretty incredible. Bo)

Day 13 - Boulder, boulder, boulder

Woke up early after a cold bivvy and grooved over to Franchard Isatis and worked through a load of blue circuit problems. I flashed everything we tried which was pretty cool.

Drove into Fontainbleau centre for our final food shop at lunchtime then on to Rocher Canon for more fingertip destruction. All was going well until Chris lightly sprained his ankle landing on a root under the mat and I eventually didn't flash something so we retired to lie in the sun for a while. Got on a few more problems late afternoon before our final dinner of pasta with a ratatouille-type vegetable sauce. We're bivvying here tonight and doing a little bouldering in the morning before driving up to Calais. Tomorrow night we'll be sleeping in beds at my house in Rushden! \o/ I'm going to savour my last night in the hammock though - it's freezing in the mornings now but soooooooo comfortable!

O2 have sent me a text notification that I've spent £40 on roaming data services! =o. Hope you've enjoyed reading!


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Day 10/11/12 Snow/Run Away!/Bouldering

So on Sunday evening Chris and I had scouted the approach to the Trenker Crack on the 1st Sella Tower for a fast and efficient ascent first thing Monday morning. It rained during the night which didn't bode well but we'd chosen to pitch tents because it was getting colder and colder. We drove up to the Sella Pass with big imposing cloud swirling around and the car thermometer reading around zero. We grabbed some coffees in the hotel to see how conditions developed. Then it started snowing, and snowing, and snowing.

Climbing was off for the day so we mooched round shops in the valley as the weather got a little sunnier. The mountains looked beautiful with their dusting of snow but the meltwater on the rock wasn't doing much for the rock climbing plans we still optimistically held! Late afternoon we bought some beers, made our way down to the river and had a really enjoyable, chilled couple of hours drinking beers and building more and more elaborate dams and pools to cool the drinks. I headbutted a concrete bridge a couple of times which left me with a very noticeable lump! It was one of the nicest evenings we've had here, parking around like kids again. =o)

Tuesday we still wanted to climb the Trenker, but when we woke up it was snowing again. Fucking weather! It was obvious that rock climbing in the Dolomites was off for the rest of the week. A backup plan was hatched and we started driving for Fontainbleau - a forest full of sandstone boulders south of Paris. The rest of the team offered me a bottle of gin if I got us to the Font area in a day so 13hrs of driving later we bivvied in a rest area an hour from Font. Everyone was very glad of the earplugs I had stashed in the car cubby holes and we were right next to the main road.

We rolled into the town of Fontainebleau this morning at 0900, and quickly found our plan of hiring a bouldering mat wasn't going to work! =o/ We spent the cash on a mat in Decathlon and bought a French language guidebook and headed for the Bas Cuvier area which James recommended from his Font trip last year.

The climbing here is superb and the setting is stunningly beautiful. We were climbing problems on the orange and blue circuits and I sent quite a few blues quite quickly. I spent a good amount of time working on La Marie Rose with James - the first Font 6A. I got really high, to the very last high move, but couldn't quite pull onto the topout. Working a boulder problem like that is a completely new experience for me and such a different experience to the 400m trad routes I was leading last week but I really, really enjoyed it. I'm super psyched for bouldering till Fri lunchtime now.

Bivvying at Gorges l'Appertent or somesuch this evening. It's warmer up here so back in hammock luxury again! \o/

10% iPhone battery so this might be the last blog post till I return. Will complete the posts and add in all the missing photos. I'm such a n00b for not bringing a backup charger!

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