We went bouldering with Dave, Sandy and Dylan @ la Berarde today. There were lots of scary black clouds, but as we drove through Bourg d'Oisans, it suddenly and magically got very clear and sunny. We started with crepes
then hit the blocs. I finally did a project of mine from when I first got here.
dave
and dylan got his first taste of bouldering. ALLEZ DYLAN!
Chloe got back from Seattle yesterday after a long day of travel. In order to help her get back on the Euro timezone, I would periodically call her (I was at work) to make sure she wasn't sleeping in the middle of the day. As you might imagine, she really appreciated this and issued an ultimatum that 9:00 was "sleepy time". The announcement was accompanied by as hard a look as she could summon up, considering that she could barely keep her eyes open. I came to bed a few hours later and immediately fell asleep, which was a welcome surprise since I haven't been sleeping well lately. I'm kind of a light sleeper, so things falling, drunks yelling at the whores on the street etc all wake me up without too much trouble. I'm not sure when this happened, because I used to be a very heavy sleeper, and in fact slept through a fire alarm in college and was woken up by firemen at my door! Anyway, I woke up around 5:00 AM and heard a sort of a fluttering noise above me. I started drifting back to sleep again after not hearing it, and then heard the same noise, but much louder. This got my attention, and I started waking up. My first thought was that there was a huge moth in the room, but there was something about the sound that seemed distinctively un-mothlike. It was at this moment that I saw a large dark shape swoop in front of my face in one direction and then the other. This was no moth. Chloe was of course completeley asleep, so I woke her, told her to stay still, and then asked her to reach out to turn on the lamp. This precipitated several events in rapid succession: chloe's realisation that there was a huge bat circling our bed, a shriek, her running out of the room and me being left to watch the bat get very angry and start increasing the speed of its circling. Keep in mind that our bedroom is small and the ceiling is low. If I stood up, my head would be in its flight path, so that was definitely out. As it calmed down, it started flying lower which I did not appreciate. It would periodically try to alight on the side of the wall, but since the moulding is smooth, there was nothing to attach to. The clear choice was to coax it out of the window, but unfortunately our shutter is broken, so it can only make a space about one foot tall and five feet wide. Nevertheless, I pulled the blanket over my head, slid off the bed to the window, opened it, and slunk out from under the newly re-agitated bat (chauve-souris: bald mouse in french). I found that chloe had closed the doors to contain the bat (and me) in the bedroom, and after wrestling it open, found her in the living room with a knit cap on and looking frantically for the telephone number of animal control in Grenoble. I grabbed the camera and got a few nice shots of our friend before he or she finally found the small shutter opening and flew away.
I was reading an article on the neutron bomb today which mentioned a man named Curtis LeMay. I probably should have known who he was, considering that his fire bombing campaign was responsible for destroying my fathers house and most of Aomori during world war two. Anyway, I found a bio of him on Wikipedia and one particularly interesting quote:
"There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders."
Yesterday I went to Monetier-les-bains, one of the Serre Chevalier towns to stay with my friend Francois and his wife Barbara, who have a chalet there. After having to turn back in Vizille because I forgot my @#$@ approach shoes, I finally arrived in Monetier at 8:00 pm. The Chalet is owned by Barbara's family and sees most of its use during ski season (all the children draw up a schedule and "book" it for specific weeks in the winter). During the summer, the main users are Francois and Barbara, Barbara's mother, and Barbara's Grandmother, all of whom were there this weekend. When you add in Francois and Barbara's three charming boys, the place was well populated: four generations of the family under one roof! The great grandmother, surpasses all the usual adjectives for someone who has been lucky enough to be aging slower than everyone else. "Spry" and "Alert" don't quite describe a ninety two year old woman who looks like and has the mental acuity of a sixty year old. She goes by the name "T.G.M.": Terrible Grand Mere, an epithet which she obtained by being a strict disciplinarian when Barbara and her siblings were young. She mellowed in her old age, but loves the title and is quite proud to receive letters addressed to TGM.
I arrived in time for dinner and after Francois and I chose a climb, we sat back and talked about the old piolets (ice axes) which he had hanging up in the dining room and about how he as a child had met all the french stars of climbing: Terray, Herzog etc. His grandfather had been a government functionary in Chamonix and knew all of those guys (some of them missing fingers from frostbite!) and introduced them to a young Francois.
Later that night, they offered my Genepi, an alpine elixir made from a plant that only grows at high altitude, and a small bowl of preserved griottes. Having never really liked Chartreuse, I declined the Genepi, but inhaled several of their fantastic home made griottes within a few seconds of their being put in front of me. A few minutes later I realized that the Genepi was not store bought, but homemade from plants that they had personally gathered. Obviously I had to try it. In spite of my aversion to sweet liqueurs, I have to say that it was excellent. The recipe is apparently pretty simple, although there are some variants and "secret ingredients". The hard parts are finding the plants and then getting ahold of pure alcohol, which they had obtained from a dentist friend. The dentist had initially been reluctant to give them any, since it might be illegal, but after receiving a bottle of home made Genepi he became a major supplier of alcohol in subsequent years. Barbara and Francois had found some of the genapi plants on a climb they did the day before, and were trying to get enough to make some of their own (It had always been made by TGM).
The next day, Francois and I set out for the Cerces to do la deuxieme Tour of the tete noire (???, 300 meters, TD+ ).After a very bad dirt road, and a flat hour long approach, we ended up at the base of the climb.
We were on the center pyramid, on a line that followed the arete which is on the border between sunlight and shadow
a tricky section, 4th (?) pitch
about to get on the amazing arete
three pitches from the top we stumbled on another Genepi plant
which Francois harvested
A team on the first tower
still going
On the last 3 pitches, the weather started getting a little scary, and La Meije was completely shrouded in dark storm clouds. We briefly considered retreat, but decided to press on since the rappels from the summit would get us to the ground much faster and more easily. By the time we got to the summit, the weather was fine again.
summit shots
A panorama from the top
rappels
Heres a big shot of the tete noire from the vallons
I found this page on the guide service for the ecrins:
http://www.guides-ecrins.com/rensei/tarifs.htm
the route chloe and I did last year costs 400 euro for a guide!
After getting stormed off Pecher Mignon last week, we tried again today. Neither of us are very enthusiastic about "Alpine starts" (i.e. getting up really early), being modest sport climbing wusses, but we wanted to try to be the first ones on the route this time. We got up around 5:30, left at 6:30 and were at the foot of the climb by 8:30 or so (it's a 1:20 drive to la berarde from the centre ville, then a ~40 minute walk).
La Tete de la Maye is a modest peak right next to La Berarde which on first glance looks like a huge rubble pile, but it has some nice climbing on it, if Pecher is at all indicative of the other routes.
The route is on the very left hand side in this photo.
Like on our previous effort, the first pitch was a good kick in the teeth with solid 6b/5.10d smearing on slightly crumbly granite. A lovely vertical pitch was next on chunky and featured terrain (6a+/5.10c), then a meandering 5c+/10a pitch which finished with a virtually hands free traverse:
here's chloe resting at the third belay station, looking back towards Les Etages
The next pitch was the crux, and at 6c/5.11b, it didn't disappoint. It was a traverse, but had a distinctive and balancy crux, followed by 6a+/10c climbing. This is Chloe happily cleaning the .10c part after battling the crux
and at the belay
I also tried an experiment: make a panorama looking down of the face and valley:
or bigger(500k)
This last pitch gains you a grassy ledge, then you begin the second tier of the climb, which starts on a big black water streak on slightly slick stone, and brings you to a small roof (6a+/10c). One more pitch of 6a+ follows ( which Chloe managed to get completely lost on) and gets you to a stout looking overhang if you skip the first set of chains. This next pitch turned out not to be very hard at all (10b overall, roof=10a), but was varied and magnificent climbing. Sculpted and solid granite features take you up over chicken heads and onto an airy arete. Just perfect. The final pitch guarding the slabs going up to the summit is a 6b+/11a slab which turned out also to be fantastic, but quite hard. Here I am looking back down at chloe halfway up
and here's the crux
Chloe starting up it
and past the crux
Chloe and I realized how out of practice we have become at slabs during this climb! Nonetheless all leads were done free, and a vue, which I was happy about. Victory kiss:
It took us roughly 4 hours. Because the top of this climb is fairly inaccessible there are a lot of Edelweiss growing wild. I'm not sure how I even knew what one looked like! Maybe from here?. Anyway, I took a picture of one:
The glory of walking up to the summit was somewhat lessened by the fact that there's an easy randonee trail up the back side. Here's a separate picture of La Meije
and Le Pic Boucet
Chloe with the Clocher des Ecrins behind here
Me with awesome hair and La Meije behind me
here's a panorama from the "top". I've labeled some of the peaks in the area. 
I also have a bigger version(836k) of the same thing, and a quicktime VR(3.5 MB) which you can pan and zoom in.
Keep in mind that I haven't actually been up any of these, so I'm a little unsure of what the name of the peak labeled "Clocher des Ecrins" is. It's certainly near the Barre des Ecrins (the highest peak in the Dauphine), but each sub peak has a name, so I'm not sure I have it right. If you look closely, you can see a "window" in the rock where part of a glacier is dropping chunks of ice. Here's a zoomed in version (big thanks to Gail and Kenji for the compact 5 megapixel T3 for this shot!) 
This puzzled me: how could there be a glacier on something that looks so jagged and arete-like? When I got home and looked at the excellent IGN topo map of the area and discovered the answer. What you see from the Berarde side is one part of a giant horseshoe ridge with a massive glacier in the center:
We are looking in the direction of the arrow.
And the "window" allows some of the glacier to escape laterally. Very cool.
You can see that none of the peaks in the panorama are very high (compared with these!), but many of them have important places in the history of mountaineering. The story of the first ascent of La Meije in particular is a fascinating story (well told in Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps by Fergus Fleming).
After some hearty potato and cheese stuffed crepes in La Berarde we drove back to Grenoble and collapsed.
A friend of ours recently saw a ridiculous and completeley avoidable accident: A car, driven at typical french speeds careened around a corner, across a crosswalk in "walk" mode, and over a womans dog (which was on a leash). Last month a similar thing happened to me, but out of sheer luck I escaped with tire marks up my left shin and foot. It made me think a little more about how the speed, aggressivity and carelessness of drivers in france has any effect on the rate of accidents. As it turns out, there is a special government sponsored web site devoted to this kind of information. I started clicking around, and interestingly, the first thing I found was a map by region of accidents/kilometer for 2000-2002. I think the standard expectation for someone who has visited France would be that Paris would be the worst, but it turns out that its actually a small section of road near Nice, which averaged more than .8 accidents per kilometer! When you think about that in absolute terms, and consider that the section is roughly 30 kilometers long, thats a lot of accidents; and these are only the "Serious" ones.
Moving on, there is even a PDF (in english), with a suitably macabre preface: "The international definition of "death" was amended by the Convention of Vienna in 1968: "Victims of road accidents are considered as having been killed if they die immediately or within 30 days following the accident". I guess I'm a little naive, but it had never really occure to me that there would need to be an international definition of "death"! Anyway, moving on:
Deaths+Injuries Deaths
Country 2003 2002 Variation (%) 2003 2002 Variation (%)
Germany 354,534 362,054 2.1 6,613 6,842 3.3
Spain 99,987 98,433 1.6 5,399 5,347 1.0
Italy 225,141 237,812 5.3 6,015 6,736 10.7
UK 220,079 228,535 3.7 3,658 3,581 2.2
France 90,220 105,470 14.5 6,058 7,655 20.9
Germany 1.8
Spain 5.4
Italy 2.7
UK 1.7
France 6.7
Deaths/million inhabitants in this group
0-17 years 18-24 25-44 45-64 64+
Germany 34.4 208.0 83.4 60.8 92.0
Spain 46.0 242.7 145.6 111.1 114.3
France 36.9 237.3 117.7 78.5 113.1
Italy no data?
UK 26.1 147.2 71.0 44.9 69.2
Last week, Chloe and I took friday off to try to climb "Pecher Mignon" on la tete de la maye, but were rained off after the second pitch. Since then, the weather has been pretty wet (which I prefer to boiling heat), so we've been starting to get a little cabin fever. Anyway, we'll be getting up early again to drive to La Berarde for a second attempt tomorrow!
