chossclimbers

Go back to Europe.

Having found some cheap Europe tickets, we set our sights on a classic alpine rock route in the southern French Alps over an extended Labor Day Weekend. A week before the trip we started seeing some disturbing trends in the long range weather forecasts which, despite many rituals and sacrifices performed to the weather gods, were not blowing over but solidifying.

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At three days out, we cancelled the alpine hut reservations and set our sights on plan B which would be the Verdon Gorge. Unfortunately that too was not fully trouble free – all days we had allotted to climbing were showing pm thunderstorms. Nevertheless, we decided to roll the dice and give it a go.

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To sum it up: we hardly climbed. We started up a classic (polished) line on day 1 only to be scared off by the rumbling of thunder and bail off. An afternoon thunderstorm followed. On day 2, we ran up a quick easy climb called Arete du Belvedere (5c, 7 pitches) in good weather and then an afternoon thunderstorm followed. On day 3, we woke up to moist and misty conditions and, by the time things started clearing off, we were worried that we did not have enough time before the afternoon thunderstorms arrived. We did some driving around and sightseeing between and during the storms. We drank a shitload of wine and ate some local fare (good in a simple, country cooking sort of way). Think that trying for a quickie alpine fix in Europe in late August or early September is probably not the best way to go: we’re 2 for 2 in terms of failures. Or perhaps it was just time to pay up the weather gods as we had been very very lucky on our last 2 or 3 longer trips…

Photos

Go back to Europe.