Tete Noire

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

guides

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!

moneycrushing is 1 year old!

happy birthday money crushing machine!

Pecher Mignon

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.

Accidents

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

This is not a fair comparison for many reasons, the most obvious of which is that there is no normalization for number of drivers, kilometers of road etc. More seriously, as the PDF states, the methods and obligations for reporting are very different between different countries. However, I think the most interesting comparison is between the deaths and deaths+injuries columns. For example, if you look at the percentages of fatal injuries in 2003, you get:

Germany   1.8
Spain     5.4
Italy     2.7
UK        1.7
France    6.7

So if you're going to get into an accident, make sure it isn't in France, since you have a strong chance of it being fatal! It should be noted that there are several other smaller EU countries with higher percentages (like Greece).

There is another nice table with fatal accidents per million inhabitants and shows that among the big five

Germany 80.1
Spain 128.0
France 101.6
Italy 105.2
UK 61.4

which puts france in the middle of the pack in terms of deaths per capita. Another thing i've wondered about is whether those late teen jackasses tailgating you everywhere tend to die more often than older drivers, but the data has been sliced in strange ways, so its a little hard to tell. The most useful statistic is the deaths/million inhabitants in this group. But this isnt perfect and is likely to be a n underestimate of the actual number since 1)"inhabitants" is not the same thing as "drivers" and 2)this ratio is not likely to be contant between age groups and 3)Their intervals for age ranges aren't constant (18-24, 25-44, 45-64, 64+. Why is the second bin so big?). However, here are their numbers:

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

So yes, that 20 year old guy passing you on the turns at 150 kmph is contributing to the very high per capita death rate (more than twice that of 35-44 year olds) in that age group.


Its impossible to tell if the teenage moped kids die with any greater frequency than other motorists (my criticism with the data is that the numer of deaths should be normalized by the number of that vehicle type, since there are many more cars than mopeds).

OK, FINALLY, the data that I was looking for: whether you are more likely to die as a pedestrian in france. The answer is no, at least compared to other EU countries. However, the number is not given in per capita, but as a percentage of all accidents in that country, so I guess more searching is in order. Also, I wonder how these stats compare to the states.

Nice Weather Back!

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!

Exploring

We had seen ropes up near the pont de Valchevriere, in the Gorges de la Bourne several times on our way to Goulandiere, but had never had the chance to explore the site. Having been rained off la Maye yesterday, we decided to make an easy day of it and see if there were any bona fide routes. After a dicey river crossing in which Chloe head butted and bloodied my nose, followed by a death scramble up a dusty slope we arrived at an impressive cliff. It had a big flat grassy section which was perfect for belaying, solid looking rock, and routes .... that went no where! As we walked along the cliff it became increasingly obvious that the cliff was just being used for bolting practice. I think there are probably enough in this rock, for example:


Later that day, Mark and I scouted several locations near the Mont Aiguille for his HDR lighting stuff. Hopefully my chromes will look good enough to use. I felt very old school next to his shots which a)require no scanning and b)will have dynamic range many times greater than mine when they're done.

Rained off La Maye

We had to retreat off of Pecher Mignon because of a giant storm cloud rolling in. It was even more frustrating because we had gotten up at 5:00 AM to get to La berarde early! On a positive note, the Petzl Shunt which I have not had to used until today worked perfectly and is a very useful little gadget!
Heres chloe racking up at the base

Climbing the first pitch

and the big "Uh-oh"

Next time!!!!

Rocher de l'homme

Today I climbed Ghost Dog (ED-) near Chamrousse with my friend Francois. I picked him up at 6:30 and we were at tthe trailhead by around 7:15 or so. It took a little while for us to find the correct trail to the base of the cliff, and we ended up getting a little lost, but we eventually found it. It helps to have a landmark (a 300 meter tall cliff!)

Along the way we saw a chamois, and heard many more scurrying off down the scree. Part of the approach involves a 50 meter rappel down loose rock

The beginning of the climb was on a steep grassy slope, and wound its way over more loose rock and grass until we reached a big ledge after two pitches. From here, the climbing got steep and difficult. It was a very athletic and fatiguing style of climbing, but we made our way up it mostly free. We had to aid our way past the crux pitch (5.12a/7a+) after getting a little spanked trying to free it. More than half of the rope lengths had roofs and long moves which made it impossible to save very much energy. Finally, theres a difficult (5.11a/6b+) but short section one pitch from the top, which I was happy to do on sight. Here are some photos from our climb





Its almost 1050 feet from the base to the top, but you start 1000 meters from the valley floor, so it adds to the exposure and "ambiance"! Here is a panorama from the true, and not very impressive summit:
jpeg image
quicktime VR

On the way out, we got trapped behind barricades because there was a downhill roller blading/ street luge/bike race. Having played ESPN extreme games on my playstation, I consider myself something of an expert with the street luge, but nothing prepares you for the real thing


Not impressed? Perhaps some videos will do them more justice.
one
two

Goulandiere

Went for a short day @goulandiere today. The hike was painful after yesterdays long walk, but 220 meters seemed pretty short in comparison! It was another day that made me happy to be in france: a beautiful drive through the gorges du Furon, the grassy plains around Villard de lans, the gorges de la borne and then climbing on 35 meter perfect limestone routes... sigh

Lac Labarre / Valsenestre

Today was our one year anniversary of our wedding, and to celebrate we had plans to go on a hike near the Alpe d'Huez to an alpine lake. Unfortunately, the traffic was backed up to the auroute, and neither of us relished the thought of two hours stuck in traffic behind diesel belching cars. Instead, we quickly re-routed, and I remembered that there were two small towns in the Ecrins park near La Mure. We took the slow but pretty departmental routes up past La Mure, overlooking the lac Monteynard, through Valbonnais, and finally on to the small village of Valsenestre

We looked at the map, hoping to find another lake that we could hike to, but the closest one was a bit more ambitious than we had hoped for. Lac Labarre, at ~2400 meters was only 5.5 km away, but more than 1100 meters (2600 feet) up from the village and was estimated to take 3 hours and 40 minutes. Since we had gotten a late start, we arrived in the village at 2:30, and we didn't want to get back at 9 pm! None of the other hikes looked that interesting, and the thought of an ice cold glacial lake was too tempting, seeing as we had been enduring temperatures in the high 90s recently. We moved pretty quickly, but started running out of water at around 400 meters. I guess 3 litres isn't enough for a hot day! There was a spring on the side of the mountain, and since we hadn't seen any livestock, we threw caution into the wind, and filled our bottles with the freezing and delicious mountain water. We were both very relieved, because with no water we would have had to retreat! Around 100 meters higher, we reached a plateau which was teeming with sheep, crapping and peeing everywhere. We tried various rationalizations (the water we had found wasn't the same water, the rocks would filter the water etc etc), but neither of us were totally convinced. Here I am 2/3 up the hike:

Two hours and ten minutes after starting the hike we arrived at the lake via a small stream on a plateau


and after eating and resting for a while, continued on to the col de la romeiou (2439 meters officially, but not really)


where we took some victory shots




as well as a nice panorama (If you have a DSL connection you should definitely check these out! JPG format and QTVR format)
We congratulated ourselves heartily, and then started walking down again


and got back down to Valsenestre at 7:30.

It was a perfect way to celebrate our first anniversary, and hopefully we'll find something equally good next year!

Fete Nationale

Today was Bastille Day in France, but its interesting to note that very few French people refer to it as such. Many won't even know what youre talking about if you refer to it as such. It's called "Fete Nationale", and I'm guessing that "Bastille Day" is just an anachronism. We watched the fireworks from the stately Place Verdun. Here's a blurry photo of the grande finale exploding over "La Prefecture": the local branch of government that I have come to dread any contact with ("what, you dont have all the forms?").