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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