Ponteil

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.