MORE climbing!

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.