We climbed the excellent, but hard 'Role en Dalle' (~200m, TD+) at Ponteil today. The climbing is on excellent rock, and the approach is short (for once!). After freezing our butts off on recent climbs, this south facing climb was a welcome change. The only complication was that I only brought cold weather clothes, took my shirt off to cool down, and then got a ridiculous sunburn. Happily, there is a supposedly magic over the counter sunburn relief medecine called Biafine (will report back later if it works). The crux move on pitch 3 was pretty hard, and took a few tries, but I did it cleanly eventually. I even found a fantastic hand jam. I had my old long route shoes on (5.10 Ascents), which are now officially my most unfavorite shoes ever, since they expand a lot and become useless for anything technical. After struggling up the final two *beautiful* pitches, we did the long and slightly scary 43 meter/140 feet rappel onto the big ledge, and took the even scarier cables down to the base.
Today Chloe and I did "Tête de cuvée" on eperon de la route: A very nice, but short (150 meter) route near Monetier. We had originally planned to do 'Du miel est des abeilles', but it was occupied by four very slow moving Italians (I had secretly hoped we could get on Tête de cuvée anyway!). It was a very nice climb, and I freed the aid pitch, so that made me happy. The Italians, meanwhile, were smoking at the belay stations on the adjacent route!
Today, somewhat embarrassingly, we got on the wrong route, and ended up rapping down a scree and choss encrusted chute. It was also very, very cold and windy: booo!
I couldn't resist the temptation of another feed station and a closed road, so Ian and I rode the Col d'Izoard today. We set out a little after 7:00 and coasted down to Briançon before starting the climb. I passed, and said hello to the same guy I saw yesterday outside of Monetier, who was of course doing the Izoard as well. He had the coveted jersey from last year. We continued on up the not-too-steep grades that lead you up to the climb, and passed a farmer in his field who chuckled to himself and told us that we were about to get wet. Sure enough, storm clouds started to gather and we were soon in a deluge. It was also cold and windy. I guess farmers know something about the weather. Since we had started the climb, we continued on (actually, it never really occured to us not to finish it). As we got closer to le Laus (the official start of the climb for today), I dropped my chain, but Ian did not attack. The road up was not too bad, but I was still tired from Galiber yesterday. It was above all, very very cold. We took full advantage of the feed station (ravitaillement in French), drinking many cups of tea, and excellent blueberry tarts. The organizers recognized me from the day before "Eddy Merckx!!" (because of my bike), and as the guy who got up early enough to get to the col before the official start of the event. They had also brought newspapers for us to stuff into our jerseys for the descent, but Ian and I had another idea: the Refuge Napoléon du Col d'Izoard. We stopped in for hot drinks, and the hostess was amazingly nice to us: she turned on a radiator, sat us near it, and put our jerseys into the clothes drier! She let us borrow dry shirts and fleeces, too. Truly exceptional hospitality. We met Chloe at the Geant in Briançon to avoid the crappy and traffic filled road to Monetier.
~1140 meters /3740 feet of elevation gain
So, two famous, historic and beautiful climbs in two days. I did Galibier the "easy" way from the South, and Izoard the "easy" way from the North, so I guess I have to do them from the other sides now. I would actually really like to do the Southern approach to Izoard, since it goes through the Casse Déserte, which I only saw a small part of.
I saw a sign earlier in the week that Galibier would be closed to cars today, so I got an early start and rode up the famous col. This time, I was lucky enough to have essentially no wind on the ride up to Lautaret, and was surprised to see that the road closure also involved some bike support infrastructure on the col. I motored up the climb, enjoying the amazing views of the Cerces along the way, and looked for the parking that we will hopefully soon be using to climb the Tour Termier. Along the way, I passed a busload of Scots in fluorescent high visibility vests and helmets walking up the final steep switchbacks. At the col, I parked my bike and got a ridiculous picture of myself. Some people were setting up tents with a feed zone, which I assumed were somehow associated with the road closure, which was itself probably associated with some kind of organized ride. I was pleasantly surprised when one of the guys manning the feed station approached me and told me that I could help myself to hot coffee, tea, pizza, and various other goodies! This was at 8:45 in the morning (It took me ~1:43 to cycle up from Monetier. I have a feeling that that is quite slow, but I was worried that it would be a lot worse than it was, so was holding a little bit of juice in reserve). Everyone was very friendly and helpful, and they informed me that that the government was sponsoring an event where they shut down one famous col a day for five days. Earlier in the week had been some low altitude cols, including Noyer, which was in this years Tour. It was all very cool, and free! One of the guys even let me use his MacBook Pro to delete some files off my helmet cam, so I could record my descent. It was a beautiful ride in perfect weather, only slightly marred by yet another flat tire on the way down. One of our friends told me that she saw me on the evening news, cycling by.
It turned out that I was the first one at the col that morning, too, since I was up so early. When the second guy showed up (who I had seen near Monetier), he said something like "I'm the first!", to which the others responded in the negative and pointed to me. If only it was due to my massive power, rather than my adaptation to early morning wake up calls, care of Alex. One other key piece of information was that the next, and final col to be closed was Izoard -- tomorrow! I was not planning on doing back to back cols, but the feed station and camaraderie might change my mind. Next year I might try to do all the cols, since you get a special jersey if you do them all.
Here is the video with the typically excellent choices for music:
In the afternoon I went climbing at le roche qui repond, where I did a funky climb with a waist jam, and blew the crux of that damned 7a+ again. On the way back to the Chalet, we took my wheel by the excellent Ricquet Sport, who found tiny pieces of metal near the spokes on the inner rim, removed them and retaped. Here's hoping it works!
Today we went for a hike off the col de Granon: A fearsome dead end road that people run and bike up. I don't really know if I want to do this ride, as it looks like nothing but pain. In any case, we drove up to the col, past the military training barracks, and set off for the lac de l'Oule. It is as easy as hikes get, but we soon re-discovered the pain of ill fitting and inadequate child carrying devices. This time it was the ergo-baby (which is still one of the best), and a borrowed Deuter lightweight pack that we borrowed. I really liked this pack at first because of its simplicity and weight, but the harness is not really adequate for Alex, and he ends up listing left and right. After a while, Chloe and I gave up and found a picnic area. It turned out to be just past the field that people apparently poop and leave toilet paper under rocks in. Other than that, it was very pretty. Zoe insisted that we take Babu with us, and that she wear my sunglasses. And later on used the trekking pole to help her walk about 200 meters Some other hikers that were coming in the opposite direction took one look at us carrying Zoe and Alex and called us "courageuses"
Chloe and I did our first multi pith route in a loooooong time. I wanted something easy, but we got a little sandbagged on a 150meter 6c. The approach is short by local standards, but long for out-of-hiking-shape people like us. It was something like 600 meters of elevation gain and more than an hour of walking up sometimes steep grades. Finding the base of the route was also a challenge, as our guidebook author has chosen the popular "draw the cliff by hand" method of topo illustration rather than the boring but accurate "take a goddam picture" method. Anyway, we got on the route, and immediately realized that this was not going to be so easy. It was a gigantic slab with very few positive holds. While I started climbing on terrain like that in SoCal, I do not enjoy slab climbing, and very quickly we found ourselves in the weeds, with throbbing toes and injured pride. I had my helmet cam on, and set it to take pictures automatically... and then forgot about it. As a result, I have a collection of comically random shots of the climb:
The last shot is very illustrative of the pain: I NEVER take my shoes of on long climbs, because I have an irrational fear of dropping them. In this case, the pain was too much, though. If I had any sense at all, I would not have gotten on a climb called "Dalles Noires d'Enfer": Black Slabs of Hell.. or maybe Hellish Black Slabs? Black Hell Slabs?
We rapped down just as the clouds rolled in and lightning strafed the higher peaks That's Roche Robert on the left, above the chalet.
life in Grenoble, France as an expat postdoc life in Grenoble, France as an expat scientist life in San Francisco, CA as a biotech nerd
life in Grenoble, France as an expat scientist
