A Weekend That Wasn't Meant To Be

Sometimes, I get the feeling that climbing involves more than just fighting gravity. Since the Great Meatball Disaster of last year, I've been pretty successful in rock-hugging at weekends. With spring trying its best and the call of a trad multipitch route (very rare in this part of France to find accessible rock without metal bolts drilled into it), I was happy. Perhaps too happy...

Baptiste had called me on Thursday evening. The proposal: climb all day Friday, spend the night with his friend in a mountain refuge for which he had the keys, climb all day Saturday. Yippee! With the sort of enthusiasm that only comes after excessive sugar consumption, I lept on an early train to Annecy.
At that point it all started to go wrong...

I meet Baptiste. Hmm, the rock's still wet, let's wait.
3 hours later: Hmm, looks like rain. Sod it, let's go anyway.
1 patisserie stop later: Ah, so there's still snow up here. Really wish I'd brought waterproof shoes.

We drop off Baptiste's friend to go walking in the middle of a snow field (in Converses) and drive back to the crag.
MERDE! What? Ah, putain! What?! I've forgotten something really important.
My mind races: shoes? he'll just have to climb in trainers; harness? we can improvise one; chocolate? well, I suppose I could share mine.
'What have you forgotten?'
The ropes.
Ah. Yes, that's probably a bit of an issue.

A fruitless visit to the parents of a nearby long-lost friend (oxymoron?) and a more successful return to Baptiste's house later and we're back at the bottom of the cliff. It's raining. We bodge a slippery path over barbed wire fences, through spiky bushes and between trees. We cross two rivers only to find another, even less welcoming torrent of wetness. Simply impassible, as Lewis Carroll would say. Somehow, despite never being further than 100m from the start of the route, we had got sucked into a Gorge of Doom. Steep-sided rock that crumbled if we so much as fluttered an eyelash at it on one side, and an increasingly violent torrent of water on the other side, coming from the rather inconveniently placed, enormous waterfall in front of us.

A very panicky, slippery slab descent (me) and raping by pointy rock (Baptiste) later and we were sat in the car in a torrential downpour, nervously hoping Baptiste's friend hadn't panicked upon returning to the meeting point earlier to find the car distinctly absent. Refuge plans were called off as nobody fancied several kilometres of knee-deep snow with trainers on. Barbecue plans were deemed too ambitious and we settled for a kebab and a DVD.
Plans were made for an assault on a multipitch sport classic on Saturday.

The conversation the following day went something like this:

Baptiste! Wake up! We're leaving in 10 minutes...[faff]...Okay, we're about an hour and a half behind planned time; shall we do something more accessible before the rain comes?
Naaah...it'll be fine.
I don't really want to walk an hour and a half just to be rained on.
Pas de soucis; we'll just walk very quickly.
Uphill? With big rucksacks?!
Oh, stop moaning, you soft Brit!
What about that nice cliff there?
Ah oui, that's nice: a 10-minute approach and some good routes. Should be in the sun as well.
Sounds great!
Nah, I've driven past it now.

Over an hour of slipping around on mud, cowpats, scree and snow (still no waterproof shoes) later, and we arrive at the bottom of the cliff. Baptiste was right; it does look like an amazing line: up the arete of a pillar, abseil down the back, then up a clean slab to the top.

Baptiste touches the rock. It starts to hail. A lot.
Hail turns to sleet to snow to rain on the first three pitches. The climbing is fantastic, but the limestone lives up to its slimestone nickname in the wet and we take it in turns to be freezing. Baptiste leads a stunning and exposed pitch involving swinging round the pillar, and I gibber my way up an easy scramble where the bolts are far too far apart for my liking.
We retreat after the pillar, just as the sun comes out. And stays stubbornly out for most of our descent back to the car.

Bad decisions? Maybe. But I reckon some weekends are just not meant to be...


Lessons learnt
This time it's a pronunciation lesson learnt by Baptiste. I can't remember what we were talking about, but he suddenly came out with the line 'You know, when someone shits on his girlfriend'. Er, no...is this some weird French thing? If so, I don't want to know about it! He tries to explain. 'Like when you shit on your exam paper at school'. Not improving the situation here, Baptiste...

Some (thankfully less graphic than expected) gesturing later, and I'm more than a little relieved to be able to correct his pronunciation: 'cheeeeating', not 'shitting'!