Frankenjura

It's quite odd - in the past we've been on many climbing holidays to France and Spain, due to the good food, pretty scenery and great climbing, but we've never considered going to Germany. As far as I know, neither have any of our friends. Having now spent a month in the Frankenjura, in the 'Frankische Schweiz' national park in Bavaria, I can't work out why... As well as being a massive climbing area, it's also a very pleasant place to spend time, with plenty of non-climbing activities too. Here's a summary of what we've been up to - both the climbing and non-climbing bits.

Non-climbing

The Forest

Most of the Frankenjura is forested. It's a working forest, but it's still pretty and well set up for tourism, with walking and cycling trails everywhere. In fact, there are so many, all signposted with different symbols, that it's actually quite confusing.



Night time around here can be quite atmospheric. The forest seems to be full of mystery creatures that go 'squeak', and owls that sound so owl-ish that they seem unreal. The first time I heard one I thought it sounded like a person doing an imitation of an owl. I only became convinced that the owls were real after hearing them several times in different places - no one could possibly have that much free time... In some places there's a bit of an owl theme to the local decor. This was my favourite:




The weather took a colder, wetter turn in the second half of our time here. While slightly annoying from a climbing point of view, the autumnal weather brought out a whole range of cool mushrooms. A guy we met at the crag told us that some of them are edible, but we got distracted by climbing and forgot to find out which ones...

Bierkultur

There is a lot of beer here! According to the leaflet we got from the tourist information, the Frankische Schweiz is 'the holiday destination with the highest concentration of breweries in the world'. Beer in shops is ridiculously cheap - we found some for 26 cents for a 500 ml bottle. In some villages, I reckon you could probably turn up, close your eyes and walk in a random direction, and you'd find yourself in a pub or a biergarten. There's a general sense that beer is taken very seriously here:




The brewing tradition in Bavaria is quite interesting. In 1487, the Duke of Bavaria introduced a rule, which was to become the Reinheitsgebot (Bavarian Purity Law), which stated that beer could only be brewed using three ingredients, barley, water and hops. This rule gradually spread throughout Bavaria, and later to the rest of Germany. According to Wikipedia, the restriction to barley was to make sure that there were enough other grains left over to make affordable bread, and the restriction to hops was to prevent people from using more esoteric preserving agents, such as henbane and fly agaric mushrooms! The rules have been relaxed somewhat nowadays (I'm still quite confused about where all the wheat beer we've been having fits in), but there is still considerable pride in Bavaria in the pure brewing traditions - many breweries still claim to be Reinheitsgebot compliant, even when this is demonstrably not the case. This means that there is a fairly narrow range of brews available (variations introduced through the type of malt, amount of hops, filtration and whether wheat is added or not), with every brewery producing its own take on a pilsner, dunkel lager, weizen, hefe-weizen, kristalweizen, dunkel-(hefe-)weizen, landbier, and kellerbier.




This has not been good for maintaining the healthy, clean-living lifestyle we've had on this trip so far...!

Castles, and other touristing

The Frankische Schweiz is full of pretty little villages, most of the bigger ones well endowed with pubs and biergartens. We spent a lot of our time here based around Pottenstein and Goßweinstein. These villages are roughly in the centre of the region and are probably also the most popular with tourists. Pottenstein is very pretty, with lots of old timber-framed houses in a variety of colours. Goßweinstein is also pleasant, and has an unreasonably large cathedral for such a small village.


A few weeks ago, our friend Lia came out to visit us for a long weekend - a great excuse for a touristic interlude. On the first day, we decided on a whim to go to Bamberg, not really knowing much about it. Turns out it's a world heritage town. It's very pretty, with lots of old buildings




We also visited Burg Rabenstein, one of many castles in the area. It is one of more than 90 castles that lie on the Burgenstraße , a 1000 km cycle route that runs from Mannheim to Prague. Burg Rabenstein is a small castle that now functions partly as a hotel. Unfortunately, it turns out that you can't just wander in and look around, presumably because it would disturb the hotel guests. We went on the half-hour guided tour instead - it was in German, but the tour guide (who had an ye olde worlde costume and an impressive beard to match) kindly gave a summary in English just for us. It was a bit of a bizarre experience - particularly the bits where he broke into song.

I think the entrance fee for the castle may have been wasted on Lia though. The field of sunflowers outside was clearly better!

Food

There are Gasthofen and restaurants all over the place here - mostly fairly affordable. The cuisine is very pig-based - schnitzel is ubiquitous (we had particularly good schnitzel at the Mager brewery restaurant in Pottenstein). The local delicacy seems to be pork shoulder (schaupferla), served with gravy, a potato dumpling and generous amounts of crackling. A lot of places serve wild game too, due to the surrounding forest being popular for hunting, but we didn't get the chance to try any.

There's also a lot of cake! Most villages have a bakery serving a wide range of cakes and pastries. I was a bit surprised - it's something I associate strongly with France and I hadn't realised Germany did it too. My favourite Bavarian cake was Zwetschenkuchen (damson cake), particularly the varieties that had crumble topping on - I am definitely going to learn how to make this when I get home. I also really enjoyed nuss-schnecke (like a Danish pastry with hazelnut paste in it), and cherry golatschen (a sort of folded-over croissant filled with cherry jam).

The climbing

The Frankenjura is a huge climbing area - so huge that it's almost overwhelming for first-time visitors. There's over 10 000 routes spread over hundreds of different crags, and the guidebook spans two (enormous) volumes. You wouldn't necessarily realise this at first glance though - most of the crags themselves are quite small and hidden amongst the trees.



In general, the climbing here is hard! Routes tend to be short and powerful, rather than the long endurance routes we were climbing in Spain, and are mostly on pockets, a climbing style that requires specific training to be good at.




Bolting, especially on the easy routes, can be a bit exciting. The local ethic is that, once something has been climbed, you can't add any more bolts or change their position. On the plus side, it preserves routes in their original form, and prevents them from being 'tamed', but on the negative side it means that some routes can be a bit scary, particularly the older, easier ones (having said that, there are plenty of 'normally' bolted routes around, and the guidebooks helpfully mark the position of the bolts on the topo so you always know what you're getting into!) My lead head, not that stable even at the best of times, utterly failed here to start with and I spent most of the time here toproping. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing in itself - I had many fun days trying lots of different things, of varying difficulties. Everything's graded in UIAA grades here, instead of French grades, and I found it best for the ego if I didn't try to convert. Highlights included a 35m VII+ at Roter Fels which had a crazy steep top section on big juggy pockets, a whole wall of amazing climbs between VII and VIII at Reichelsmuhler Wand, and a ridiculously steep VIII- at Herzwand, which was fun to try even though I could barely string three moves together. The leading mojo gradually started to come back towards the end: I had a fun day at Mittelbergwand leading a V+, two Vs and a IV+ (listed in ascending order of actual difficulty, in my opinion), and a few other bits and pieces.




As a climbing area, the Frankenjura is historically important - it was a place where sport climbing standards were pushed in the 1980s. It's the place where concept of the redpoint was invented - practising and refining the moves on a really hard route with the aim of eventually making a clean, no-falls ascent (the redpoint ascent). The name comes from the local custom where, if someone had bolted a route but hadn't managed to climb it yet, they would paint a red circle at the base of the route to signify this. When they finally managed a clean ascent of the route, they would indicate this by filling in the circle, making a 'rotes Punkt'. Actually painting red points on the rock isn't done any more, but you can still see the faded remnants of the originals in some places.

Fittingly, I ticked my first redpoint project of the trip here. It's weird that I managed to go for so long without trying to redpoint anything - it would have been good for my head to do more, but it never quite happened. At the start of the trip I was focused on 'just climbing', and I had to abandon a (much harder) project I had my eye on in France due to my hurty elbows.

Bold colour combinations make you climb harder...

The route was Mon Marie at Weisenstein. As climbing achievements go, it's not particularly impressive - it was a VI-, which translates to about 5b, but grades aren't important, right? Andy generously said he thought it was under-graded, and it was a style I find particularly challenging - steep moves between pockets, where it takes a while to work out which pockets are the good ones. It's a style that rewards confidence and punishes hesitancy - about as far from my ideal as it's possible to get. Even though it wasn't a particularly hard route (I definitely failed on the onsight attempt due to lack of head rather than lack of move-doing ability), it was fun to go through the process of figuring out the most efficient way to do the moves, finding the best clipping positions and piecing it all together. I found it really good for confidence. On my final go I was so focused on the moves I forgot about being scared - I'd been told loads of times that this happens but hadn't really believed it.

The end...

Unfortunately, time seems to have raced past (too quickly!) and it's time to head home and go back to real life. We're planning to be back though. I'd barely heard of the Frankenjura before this trip, but it's made an impression on me. I found the climbing quite strange (and frustrating) to start with, but the longer we stayed the more it grew on me. And the combination of climbing, pretty forest, twee villages, Zwetschenkuchen and Dunkelbier is hard to beat. There will definitely be a return trip - just have to get a lot stronger first...

Adventures on granite of all sizes - part 2 (L-XXL)

In the last blog I covered our climbs on small to mediumly sized things, mostly in Valle dell'Orco. Climbing in Orco was great fun in its own right, and we're both really psyched for a return trip at some point. The ulterior motive though was to prepare for some much bigger granite ascents in the French and Swiss Alps this summer.

Ultimately, the terrible mountain weather scuppered most of our plans - according to several people we've spoken to, this has been the worst Alpine summer for a very long time. We've seen Facebook updates from friends who live in Chamonix contemplating moving back to the UK, and we know of several other people who have cancelled planned holidays to the Alps and gone sport climbing instead. Last week, we'd planned to meet up with some friends in the Dolomites, but the forecast looked so bad that they drove all the way up to meet us in the Frankenjura instead (for more information see Andy's blog - as I was typing that sentence he announced that he has already finished writing a post about it - aargh!)

So that's our excuse for only managing to do one big route this summer. We picked a good one though...

The big

Motorhead

Motorhead is a classic 14 pitch route on Eldorado, a massive sheet of granite rising out of Grimselsee. This route was on both of our 'to do' lists so we were both really pleased when a few days of good weather in the middle of July gave us a chance to go for it. The climbing is a mixture of pure friction slabs and layback cracks. We'd been expecting to be able to put our Orco crack climbing practice to good use, but actually most of the cracks turned out to be flaring and hard to jam in, making the climbing a lot more strenuous than we expected. The views down the route to the lake below were awesome - just smooth sheets of granite as far as you could see. There is one particular photo that everyone who climbs Motorhead seems to take, looking down the crack on pitch 6 (I think?) - we took it too!




Friction slab climbing on glacier-polished granite is not something that I'm used to. It requires a lot of confidence to keep moving upwards with no real handholds or footholds, just trusting in the friction of your shoes on the rock. I was quite glad that I wasn't the one leading. It's also quite hard on the feet - by the end we were having to stop and take our shoes off after nearly every pitch. My advice: wear loose, comfortable rock shoes for this route - it's not like there's many actual footholds to stand on anyway!

Pitch 3 - fast climbing pair waiting patiently for me to get a move on...

Encouragingly, our multipitch practice in Orco seemed to have paid off and I thought we climbed the whole thing fairly quickly and efficiently with slick changeovers between pitches. We were so efficient that I completely forgot to take photos, which is why I only have the same two photos that Andy already used. We were slightly put to shame by another British climbing pair who started the route behind us though. They let us go first because 'We haven't climbed together before' and 'I'm out of practice at rock climbing'. It turned out though that she was out of practice because she'd just got back from climbing Denali, and I heard him apologetically admit that he'd only done a few E3's this year! So although spent the first five pitches desperately seconding as fast as I physically could, every time I looked down one or the other of them would be standing a few metres below, patiently waiting for me to get a bit higher. I was quite relieved when we found a ledge after pitch five that was big enough to let them go past, from where they rapidly disappeared into the distance.

We tried to take a summit photo - it didn't work so well...

Overall, it was an awesome route and a big day out - the combination of the walk in, the route, the descent and the walk out left us very tired, but in a good way. The next day we tried to climb some more granite slabs at Räterichsbodensee, but we gave up after three pitches due to a combination of tiredness and sore feet. We came down, had lunch and went for a gentle afternoon stroll around the lake instead. With hindsight, if we'd known that this was to be our last window of good weather we might have made more of an effort...

The very big (a failed attempt at...)

Salbit south ridge

Apart from Motorhead, my only defined goal for the Alps was to do a route that went to a 'proper' summit. I've never been to an Alpine summit before. On my only previous trip to the Alps two years ago we tried a route on the Aiguille du Moine, but abandoned the attempt very early on because the climbing was harder than we expected, meaning that we couldn't move fast enough to be sure of getting up and back down safely.

We picked the south ridge of Salbit (Salbitschijen to give it its full name, but that's hard to say) as our mountain objective for the Bernese Oberland. It's not as high as many of the others in the area, measuring 2981 m, but it is a very definite peak - the last pitch of the route climbs up a huge pointy flake. Given the dodgy weather, the low-ish height was an advantage as it meant that the approach was fairly straightforward - about 3.5 hours walk up to a bivvy hut near the base of the route, with no glacier travel involved. After Motorhead, we spent about a week hanging around in the rain, but then the forecast suggested that a three day weather window was coming up so we decided to walk up and have a go.

What is this..?

Cake...?!

We arrived at the parking area in perfect sunshine, and began the gear faff. We were planning to spend two nights up in the hills (one afternoon to walk in, one day to do the south ridge, one day to do another, shorter route and walk down), so we needed to carry food, cooking equipment and sleeping bags as well as all our climbing gear. Unhelpfully, some of the local cows got a bit curious about what we were up to. They seemed to be particularly interested in our pile of food - I didn't know cows liked marble cake! This slowed down our packing a bit - one of us had to find things in the van while the other stood guard to make sure the cows didn't steal or trample our stuff. I'm not sure exactly how I would have stopped a gigantic cow with massive horns from doing that, so I was quite glad when they got bored and wandered off.

Into the unknown...

The first part of the walk (up to the main Salbithütte) was hot and sweaty, but otherwise fairly pleasant. On the second part (crossing from the main hut to the bivvy hut), the mist suddenly rolled in and visibility dropped dramatically - we were glad of the very dense path markings. We were a bit confused when we came across a large, suspended bridge that wasn't marked on our map or mentioned in the guidebook. Walking across it into the mist without being able to see the other side was quite atmospheric. The bivvy hut is a small metal box, a bit like a shipping container, perched inconspicuously among some boulders on the hillside - it took us a while to find it in the mist. From the outside it doesn't look like much, but it's quite cosy inside, with two rows of beds, a table and benches and a tiny kitchen unit.

The next morning we woke up at 6am, ate an entire marble cake between us for breakfast (for energy!) and set off for the start of the route (back across the bridge, about a 20 min walk from the hut). It was disturbingly cloudy, but we were hopeful that it would lift by the time we got to the route and we'd get the patchy sun that the weather forecast had promised. As we walked, we heard a few faint rumbles that sounded a bit like thunder, but we optimistically convinced ourselves that it was just the wind. By the time we reached the base of the route though there was definitely water falling out of the sky and we couldn't ignore it any more. Disappointed, we turned round and headed back to the hut in a downpour that got steadily heavier - we were soaked by the time we made it back.

The bivvy hut, and the "view"

We had phones with us, so we spent the rest of the morning in the bivvy hut (which got quite full at one point with other similarly damp climbers) trying to get hold of weather forecasts from various sources. The overall consensus was that the forecast had changed and our three-day window had vanished and been replaced by near-continuous rain. Our chances of getting on the route the next day looked remote, so we waited for a gap in the rain and walked back down. The weather brightened up considerably as we got near to the valley floor, and we passed some people heading upwards carrying ropes and helmets, which was confusing behaviour given the forecasts we'd seen. So when we reached the van we checked the forecast again - in the three hours it took us to walk down it had changed again and was now predicting sun for the following day! We briefly thought about walking back up again, but decided we couldn't face it. In the end, it rained heavily in the afternoon of the next day, so this was probably the right decision...


Overall score: Alps 2, Ali 0. Next time...

Gelmersee - we went here one rare morning when it wasn't raining

The even bigger (for the future...)

Salbit West Ridge

Although I'm keen to go back for the South Ridge, I think I have also acquired a bigger goal for the future. The West ridge of Salbit is like the South ridge, but more so - it's both longer and harder at a total of 36 pitches and an overall grade of 6b (alpine ED). Some friends of ours from the NLMC, who are much fitter, better and faster than us, did the whole thing in one (very long) day during the good weather window when we did Motorhead. Many (most?) people do it as a two day expedition instead and spend a night at a popular bivvy spot in a notch between two ridge towers affectionately known as 'Hotel Salbit'. Either way, I'm going to have to get a LOT fitter - essentially we'd have to be able to climb the equivalent of 1.3 Motorheads on the first day, and then be able to get up the next morning and do it all again. After climbing the actual Motorhead we were basically broken the whole of the next day - definite work needed...

The start of the West Ridge - I think it would look better if it wasn't wet...

The bivvy hut is located about five minutes walk from the base of the route, so we caught a glimpse of the start of it from the window when the mist cleared. It looks pretty intimidating but inspiring too...

Adventures on granite of all sizes - part 1 (XS-M)

I had been hoping by now to have lots of exciting Alpine routes to write about by now, but the weather has chased us out of the mountains. We're currently sitting in a forest in southern Germany eating cake though, so I can't complain.

We did manage some climbing in between the rain, so I thought I'd give a bit of an overview of what we've been up to (and I need to catch up with Andy's blogging because it's getting embarrassing now...) Most of the climbing we've done over the last couple of months has been on glacier-polished alpine granite - a rock type that's very different to what I normally climb on and a new experience for me.

There are two main styles of climbing on granite:

• Friction slabs: climbing up smooth sheets of unbroken rock, usually at a fairly easy angle (because routes on the bits that aren't easy-angled are basically impossible!), but with very little in the way of holds - you just have to keep balancing upwards and trust in the friction of your feet on the coarse rock. These routes are usually bolted, because there's not really any other way to protect them. The bolts may not necessarily be very close together though...



• Crack climbing: climbing up the cracks between the smooth sheets of rock. Due to the compact nature of the rock, granite cracks tend to be very pure, smooth-sided and continuous, with not many other holds around them, and have to be surmounted with special crack climbing techniques. This usually involves jamming parts of yourself into the crack, which creates surprisingly secure holds if done right. Depending on the size of the crack this could be fingers, hands, fists, arms or your whole body. For the perverse, there's an awkward size of crack, known as an offwidth, that's too big for fists but too small to get inside. These have to be climbed with some special and painful techniques involving elbows, knees and stacked fist jams.

The overall route for our granite tour was:

• A day in the Ecrins National Park, near Briançon, on our way out of France. The area around Ailefroide is particularly famous for its long friction slab routes.  We would have liked to stay a bit longer but it hailed.


• Three weeks in the beautiful Valle dell'Orco, in the Gran Paradiso National Park in North-west Italy.  This valley is famous for its crack climbing, with sheets of granite forming pure splitter cracks of all sizes.  The region has been described as a 'Little Yosemite' because the rock formations are like a smaller scale version of those in the famous American valley.  It is often used as a training ground by European climbers preparing for a trip to California.  The Little Yosemite reputation is reflected in the names of the main climbing sectors - where Yosemite has El Capitan, Orco has Il Sergent, Il Caporal, and Il Disertore (because it's on the other side of the river from the other two).


• A non-granite interlude.  We visited friends in Chamonix and Basel, which was great fun.  Not much climbing was done though due to the horrendous weather - Basel indoor bouldering wall is very good, but not granite...  After that we had a brief trip home to the UK for a wedding and some job-sorting stuff. No granite here either...


• A soggy few weeks in the Bernese Oberland. We managed one really classic route (Motorhead - see below) but not much else.

During this time, we did (or at least tried) a variety of granite routes of all different sizes, styles, difficulties and levels of commitment.  Describing them all in chronological order would take a long time (and would probably be quite boring), so I thought I'd go with describing our granite highlights, categorised by size.

The small

As I said, pure crack climbing is something a bit new for us.  On the kind of rock we normally climb on, there's sometimes occasional cracks, and occasionally it can be advantageous to use a jam to get your balance while you find the next conventional hold.  It's quite rare though to get smooth-sided, parallel, continuous cracks where there are literally no other holds and you have to actually use proper jamming techniques to make upward progress.  We were therefore fully expecting to find Orco very hard...

It's a great place for jamming beginners like us though, as there are many great single pitch routes on offer, scattered in between the longer routes.  Some are bolted, but many of the routes following cracks are trad climbs (i.e. traditionally protected, you place your own gear as you go) - this is fairly standard in the UK, but a bit of a rarity in continental Europe outside the mountains.  Even the trad routes though have bolted belays, making them quite convenient and low-commitment - great when you're unconfident at jamming and a bit rusty at placing trad gear.

Incastromania

My personal favourites were:

• Incastromania (6a) at Il Sergent.  A beautiful curving crack that is perfect hand-jamming size all the way up.  People who are good at jamming have told me before that it can be a really enjoyable style of climbing once you get the technique right, but I'd never really believed them - after doing this route I think I get it!


• La Signora Negra (6a+), also at Il Sergent.  This was one of the earliest routes we did and I didn't really like it to start with.  The fingery corner crack at the beginning was a bit tricky and you have to trust your feet on a smooth granite slab.  But on the second attempt I got into it a bit more and found it an interesting and varied route.  After the finger crack at the start you get into some crazy bridging followed by (if you go left) a huge flake which gave me my first taste of offwidth climbing - this was enjoyable on toprope for its perversity.


• For pure weirdness, I also enjoyed Mr Green (6a) at Dado - a route that disappears inside a huge chimney, involving some very interesting 3D moves.

Andy hidden in the chimney of Mr Green

The medium

Single pitching is fun, but the main aim of this part of our trip was to do some longer routes.  We started off in the Ecrins with an ascent of Pilier du Levant, a 200m route that finishes on top of a cool detached pinnacle.  Unfortunately it was a typical first-multipitch-for-a-long-time experience, involving belay faff, getting lost (we climbed the wrong route for several pitches) and getting ropes tangled in bushes.  Once we found the right route it was lovely though - an education in trusting your feet on smooth slabs, but with some steeper pitches thrown in to keep things interesting.

A cheval on Pilier du Levant

We got a lot slicker with practice and got some good routes done in Orco.  My favourites were:

• Pesca d'April on Torre d'Aimonin, a devious, weaving line that climbs an impressive tower of rock overlooking the village of Noasca at an amenable grade.


• Nautilus on il Sergent.  This was the longest route we did in Orco at six pitches, although it's broken by a massive grassy ledge (big enough to hold several full grown pine trees), so feels more like two routes separated by a short walk.  I was particularly proud of leading the second pitch - it was only Fr4c but it's probably still the hardest lead I've managed on trad gear for several years.  Unfortunately, it wasn't my quickest climb ever, taking about 90 mins to cover 30 m, and this delay meant we got rained on quite a lot on the way down - Andy was commendably patient...

The very small

Weirdly, despite being in a massive valley filled with so many exciting multipitch adventures, the thing I got most psyched by in Orco was a small roadside boulder with one route on it, the Fessura Kosterlitz.  We first tried it on our second day in Orco because we thought it would be a good place to practice our crack technique.  The Kosterlitz crack is about seven metres high, and is on average the right size for hand jamming.  It starts off quite narrow at the bottom, where the rock is also slightly overhanging, and then it gradually gets wider and less steep as you go up.  It's great for working on crack technique because there's no way to cheat - there are no other holds, and climbing it any other way than jamming makes it much harder.  It's also short, low-commitment and right by the road - so close in fact that the construction company who built the big tunnel through the hillside were going to blow it up, until it was saved by a petition by local climbers.  It now sits partially cemented into a wall in its own little amphitheatre.

Fessura Kosterlitz

Supposedly it's normally climbed unroped as a boulder problem (nominally graded font 6B), but I don't think we saw anyone actually doing that - seven metres is getting a bit high, even with pads.  Most people seem to toprope it using the handy bolt at the top.  Andy led it placing trad gear on the first day we were there because he is more knarly than the topropers (but not as knarly as the boulderers).  I was a lot less convinced that I could do the moves (I could barely get off the ground the first time I tried), so decided that my goal should be to try to do a clean toprope ascent.

Andy's crux

Crack climbing is funny because how hard you find a route depends to a certain degree on your personal dimensions.  One person's perfect hand jam might feel a bit wide and insecure to someone with smaller hands, while someone with larger hands might have to do some kind of painful finger jam instead.  Andy and I found this a lot while climbing in Orco - we have quite differently-sized hands.  On Kosterlitz in particular, although we both found it hard, we each thought the crux of the route was in a different place.  For Andy, with his shovel-like hands, found the hardest moves to be pulling directly off the ground where there is a good foothold, but the crack is at its narrowest (only finger-sized for him) and steepest.  For me, once I'd figured out how, I could do the start fairly consistently because there were a couple of places where I could just about squeeze my dainty mini-hands fully into the crack.  Instead, I spent several days falling off a couple of moves up where the crack got slightly wider - there was a point where my feet were still on the steep bit on some tiny tiny holds, and the jams I was reaching with my hands were feeling rattly and insecure.  I found I had to be very precise to get my hands into very slight narrowings of the crack, which I found quite hard on the steep ground, whereas Andy at that point could basically put his hand anywhere and get a perfect jam.

Size differential

I got a bit obsessed with this route and tried it several times over four separate sessions, mostly mornings or afternoons, before or after going to do other, bigger things.  I finally managed the move I couldn't do on the second attempt of the fourth session and suddenly found myself standing on the decent footholds at half-height, with the hard bit below me.  I was a bit surprised, and had to desperately ad-lib my way up the gradually widening top section of the crack, which I'd not practised at all.  Luckily it was all fairly straightforward, except for a little moment right at the top when the crack became offwidth-sized and I couldn't work out how to transition from arm-bar to bellyflop to top out.  Then Andy reminded me to use my feet and a moment later I was standing on the top of the boulder feeling a bit shaky but elated.

So, I know it doesn't count as a real ascent because I didn't lead it or boulder it, but it felt quite significant to me.  I was my first real experience of working something I found really hard, and going from being unable to get off the ground to finally standing on the top after lots of effort and practice.  Unlike Andy I've not had much experience of redpointing sport routes - I think this was my first glimpse of what all the fuss is about...

Celebration!

This is turning into a bit of an essay now, so I think I'll save the larger sizes for next time...

Where did France go?!?

Hmmm, last time I wrote a blog post we were just leaving Spain. Now we're in Italy! I seemed to have skipped an entire country...

Excuses:
I've been meaning to write something for a while but:
a) no one particular event seemed to stand out at the time as the subject for a post
b) after nearly six months, living in the van has come to feel so normal that it doesn't seem worthy of comment
c) more geekily, (and probably the real reason for the lack of post) I discovered qPython for Android, so I can now mess about improving my programming EVERY EVENING, instead of just when I've managed to charge my laptop!

France was the second leg of the single-pitch sport climbing part of the trip. As Andy's already alluded to in his posts, in terms of climbing progress France probably wasn't as kind to us as Spain had been.  We had a bit of bad luck (or was it bad planning?) with soaring temperatures and injury niggles getting in the way.  Still, we visited quite a few cool places...

First few days:
We started off with a few days on the Ariege, on the French side of the Pyrenees. I had a fun couple of afternoons on a granite outcrop near Auzat. Out of curiosity, I tried to visit the Hypocras factory in Tarascon, where they make a medieval aperitif out of wine and spices, but it was 'Fermée Exceptionellement' on that particular afternoon...

The intended main event:

Cal on 'Les Culottes de ma Grandmere'

We next headed to Gorge du Tarn, near Millau, where we'd intended to spend several weeks. The first week was great - we met up with two of Andy's Kilnsey friends, Rachel and Cal, and tried a variety of things in the Tarn itself, and at Le Boffi, a nearby crag we'd been to before. I'd never visited the Tarn properly before, and it's now definitely on my 'to come back to' list. It's a beautiful, atmospheric place, with amazing rock architecture. The climbing is quite special too - the normal routes are spectacular enough in their own right, but there are several enormous 70-80m routes specifically bolted to be climbed as one massive, uninterrupted megapitch. We didn't do any this time, but possibly something for the future - maybe after buying a longer rope...

Injury time:
Unfortunately, after about a week in the Tarn, both of us started feeling broken. Andy had a tweaky shoulder and I developed golfers elbow, a common RSI in climbers. We decided it was time for some time off. We started with some walking around the Tarn area, exploring the gorge from a different perspective, but it became clear that our niggles weren't going anywhere fast and we needed a proper break from climbing. So we drove south and spent a few days beaching and exploring the Camargues near Montpellier: Andy wrote in more detail about this here.

Camargue wildlife

(I don't think he mentioned the white horses though - the area's famous for its indigenous breed of Camargue horses, many of which live semi-wild on the marshes).

Camargue horses

Next steps:
a storm front blew in after that so we escaped eastwards and eased ourselves back into climbing. The first stop was Chateauvert, near Brignoles, with John, a friend met through North London MC. After that we moved on to Saint Leger and Malaucene, some crags which are near Mt Ventoux of Tour de France fame (Top tip: if you decide to drive up this famous road biking landmark on a whim, make sure it's not a bank holiday Saturday!) Again, Andy already wrote about this part in more detail...

My experiences: Chateauvert is all about sustained, slightly overhanging climbing on scoopy pockets - I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I have become fit! Compared with the beginning of the trip (and when I visited Chateauvert a few years ago), I can now hold on for ages! On the other hand, my lead head (and on a couple of occasions my toprope head) seemed to have regressed again to zero, probably due to the loss of momentum caused by the injury timeouts.

The last day at Chateauvert was scorching, and that weather pattern continued for the next couple of weeks. Climbing in the sun became pretty much impossible. Apart from one day at Malaucene, which made my elbows hurt, I split my time in the Ventoux area between belaying Andy on the shady bit of Saint Leger,  and sitting in the river...

La Baleine is a good place to escape the heat...

...but the river is better!

The next stop was Orpierre, a bit further east, near Sisteron. On paper, this was an ideal crag for us - a whole wall of easy routes that I thought I could use to rebuild my momentum, right next to some 8a's for Andy to try. And it all came into the shade at about 1 pm, which suited my morning habits perfectly. Unfortunately, it turned out to be so hot and muggy that, even in the shade, we didn't get decent climbing conditions until more like 7pm - too much of a lazy morning even for me!

Star spotting at Ceuse:

A small part of Ceuse...

So we moved on to nearby Ceuse. As well as being described in our guidebook as 'the best crag in the world' (you can't go far wrong with that!), it has the added advantage of being at the top of a big hill, making it much less hot than the previous venues.  The downside, obviously, is that you have to walk up the aforementioned big hill to get to it... It was my first time at Ceuse and I was suitably impressed - it's also been added to the 'to come back to' list. I'll have to get a lot better first though - the other disadvantage of Ceuse (for the ego, at least) is that it's a difficult climbing style that's hard to do well at until you've got used to it. We both got resoundingly spanked...

Jonathan Siegrist on Biographie extension

Unsurprisingly, given the world-class reputation of Ceuse, there were a few famous climbers hanging around - the first time we've seen any on this trip. I'd assumed Catalunya would be the best place for star spotting, but the closest we got was hearing from a friend that Adam Ondra had been in Margalef about a week before we arrived. In Ceuse there was a group of American climbers filming Jonathan Siegrist trying the route Biographie and its famous extension. We got to see some of the magic of climbing film-making in action. The route's too long to film the actual successful ascent all in one go, so they were filming multiple attempts on different days to be edited together later. When we saw them they were filming a special hat removal scene to fix a continuity problem - they'd filmed him climbing the bottom section wearing a hat and the top section without it. We also saw Arnoud Petit (French climbing legend) hanging around the crag base doling out wisdom - this is probably less impressive though since he apparently lives at the bottom of the hill. Ueli Steck (famous for record-breaking solo speed ascents of Alpine north faces - e.g. North face of the Eiger in 2:47:33) was also staying at the campsite. We didn't actually see him, but we knew he was there because he has a special 'Ueli Steck' car that says 'Ueli Steck, www.uelisteck.ch' on it.

Summing up:
After a few days, the weather turned unsettled so we decided to move on, heading eastwards for the Alps. This marked the end of the proper sport climbing part of the trip. There may be some valley cragging on dodgy weather days, but the focus from now on is going to be on longer, mountain routes. But more on that later...

An Alp, in the distance...

Overall, the sport climbing tour of Spain and France has been fun, though I haven't made the gains in terms of climbing ability (at least when purely measured in grades) that I'd hoped I would. This was partly due to bad luck with injuries - I was definitely noticing some improvements before the finger injury - but probably also due to some tactical errors. I perhaps should have been a bit more disciplined about training my lead head (the biggest problem with my climbing) in the first month or so of the trip, trading some time spent doing some boring, unpleasant exercises in exchange for being able to climb well on a much wider variety of things later. At the time, however, I was quite happy to run around aimlessly leading easy things as and when I felt like it, and just hoping that improvement would happen by magic.

On the other hand, I'm feeling fitter than I've probably ever been, and this should only be improved by some time spent in the mountains. So this should give me a good base to work from when we get back, if I get organised and do some proper training over the winter. And having the opportunity to visit so many beautiful places has been amazing and really inspiring. I probably now have more on my list of places to visit again than will fit into one lifetime...

The end of the beginning

After four months of travelling we have finally left Spain. I'm sure France will be just as good, but still it's a little bit sad. Spain has a lot of rock - despite spending so long (nearly half the trip!) here we only explored a fraction of the country, and there's still so many climbing areas that we haven't visited.  It was starting to get a bit too hot for climbing though, so reluctantly we had to leave and head north.

Spain didn't seem to want to let us go either.  We meant to leave a few days earlier, but got delayed by an unfortunate series of events. The climbing shop that was resoling my climbing shoes seemed to have a stereotypically Mediterranean attitude towards being open during their advertised opening times.  Ryanair had a stereotypically Ryanair attitude towards cancelling our friend's flight (actually in this case it wasn't Ryanair's fault, but abusing them is fun...) And we had a slightly epic drive around Lleida province looking for a ferreteria that a) was open on a Saturday afternoon and b) had gas in stock.

We made it in the end though - I'm sitting in France as I write this! More on that later...  Leaving Spain definitely feels like coming to the end of the first stage of our trip, hence the post title. I've found myself mentally noting things we've done in the last couple of weeks as "the last time we'll do <insert thing here> in Spain". Here are a few of those 'lasts':

Last climbing in Spain:

Siurana village and cliffs (seen from Arboli)

After spending a lovely few days back in Barcelona with Maria, Chris and John, we headed to Siurana, near Tarragona.  Siurana itself is a tiny village perched on a hill, next to the ruins of a Moorish castle.  It's also a famous and extensive sport climbing area (one of the first true sport climbing areas to be developed in Catalunya).  We were joined for a few days by Simon, a friend from uni climbing days, and Liz, who climbed with us in Chulilla earlier in the trip.

Unfortunately, on my previous visits to Siurana I hadn't liked it very much - the climbing style involves small sharp holds, and the routes I'd tried tended to feel quite hard for the grade. I was a bit worried too about how my injured finger would cope. It had held up quite well to a gradual reintroduction of climbing, and after a few extra days of rest in Barcelona it was feeling really good. But for the type of finger injury I had, climbing on the small crimpy holds typical of Siurana was possibly the worst thing I could do to it!

It was not a promising start - I flailed like a giraffe on roller skates trying to toprope a 6b at sector l'Olla on day 1. On day 2 I failed to get more than 2m off the ground on the 6b+ "warm-up" route at el Pati because the savagely small holds at the start instantly tweaked my bad finger, and then got ludicrously scared toproping a 6b because it went a bit sideways. And it was windy. And I had a cold. I was feeling a bit miserable by this point, and was half considering just staying in bed for a few days.

Luckily, Liz had other ideas!  On day 3, she bullied me into trying a different 6b+ on toprope (I was just going to sit on the floor and feel sorry for myself but she was persistent), which turned out to be much nicer. Then we both had a toprope go on Crosta Panic, a 7a+ at sector el Pati, which is a level of difficulty I wouldn't normally have tried. I was quite surprised, both by how much of it I could actually do (at least, with a tight rope!) and by how nice the climbing felt - it seems like Siurana follows the pattern of several crags we've visited where it's important not to let struggling on the easy climbs put you off trying the harder ones.

Si pulling hard on Bistec de Biceps

The success of that day inspired me to keep on trying to toprope harder things (ie 7a/+, for me) over the next few days, both during the remainder of Liz and Si's scheduled visit, and Si's two bonus days when his flight home got cancelled.  I think their enthusiasm was infectious, and I was inspired by their efforts. Si did an impressively quick ascent of one of Siurana's most famous routes, Bistec de Biceps. And Liz was so, so close to redpointing Crosta Panic, which would have been her first 7a+, falling off the last move on the last day of the trip after having climbed for ten days straight without resting - a really good effort! Maybe, just maybe, if I tried that hard...

Overall, I left Siurana (finger still intact) in a much better frame of mind than when I arrived, and with the feeling that maybe it's not such a bad place after all!

Last food in Spain:

We stocked up at a supermarket on our way north, and I thought we should get something authentically Spanish for our last meal. Since Spain's famous for its pork products, we went for a selection of mini-sausages in four different flavours - chorizo, obviously, but also morcilla, longaniza and criollo which we'd not tried before. Verdict: tasty!

I spent a very long time in the cheese aisle too, choosing the perfect Last Cheese of Spain. I went for a mature, smoked sheep's cheese made with unpasteurised milk from local sheep - I thought this ticked an appropriate number of cheese-snob boxes! And some goat's cheese too because the first one didn't come in very big blocks.

Last water in Spain:
We filled up our water tank on the way north in Figols, a small village near Organya, where we'd spent some time previously. There was nothing particularly notable about this except that the fountain was shaped like a deer. This amused me.

Last view of Spain (almost):
This was the view of Siurana reservoir, where we spent our last night in Spain. Technically, I suppose, I did see other things in the 200-ish km between here and the Andorran border but I tried not to look at them too hard...

  

For completeness, this was the actual last view of Spain, as we were approaching the border with Andorra - it's nowhere near as good.

We were a bit delayed (again) getting to France by some entertaining-ness in Andorra (nothing bad happened but we now know how to change the wheels on the van!) We finally crossed the French border, via a mountain pass over the Pyrenees, late on Saturday evening. We were a bit tired and hungry by this point, so we just stopped the van in the first place we could, cooked our tiny sausages, ate and went to sleep without a clear idea of where we were. The next morning it turned out we were here:

Surprise view!

I like France so far!

Riglos! (in which Ali and Naomi have adventures...)

I was trying to think of some suitably impressive words to use to describe Riglos, but I can't so here's a photo instead:

The towers are about 300m high and are made of variously sized pebbles stuck together by a sandstone matrix. Close up, they look improbable, like a large pile of rubble that should fall down, but somehow doesn't. It's also home to the largest colony of griffin vultures in Europe - they circle around catching updrafts from the towers, making the place feel even more atmospheric.

We spend just under a week here, and were joined by Naomi (who also visited us earlier in Chulilla) and Charles (a climbing partner of Andy's from the Cheddar days). Andy and Charles had their sights set on some of the classic overhanging routes on Mallo Visera (Andy wrote about this here), so Naomi and I went exploring.

We had great fun on several days playing the fortunately/unfortunately game. It's not really much of a game - you just describe things that happened to you prefacing anything that went wrong with "unfortunately" and your solution to the problem with "fortunately". It amused me though, so I thought I'd write about our adventures in this style...

Day 1: unfortunately, on Naomi and Charles' first day there was a speed climbing competition going on in Riglos - routes had been allocated a certain number of points, and participants had to collect as many points as they could in a 12 hour period. This meant that the classic routes on the main towers were busy. Fortunately, the Mallos Pequeños (the smaller towers to the east of the main ones) were not included in the climbing competition, so we decided to head there instead. Pequeño is a relative term - the towers were still 100m high!

Mallos Pequeños (Aguja Roja is the one on the right)

We decided to do the Normal route on the Aguja Roja (graded 4+) as a gentle introduction to the strange rock. We made it up the first two pitches, despite some initial misgivings about the state of the rock - it turned out to be a lot more solid than it looked.

Crazy rock, before the rain...

...and after

Unfortunately, when Naomi was leading halfway up the fourth pitch (having decided to join the third and fourth pitches together) there was a crash of thunder and the heavens opened. Fortunately, we were highly resourceful, and organised a quick and efficient retreat, abseiling down in torrential rain which then turned into hail. The storm only lasted about 30 minutes, but, unfortunately, the rock was soaked and we were too. Fortunately, the sun came out afterwards so we squidged back to the village and steamed dry in the sunshine.

Day 2: with an earlier start, a more stable weather forecast and an absence of speed climbers, we set our sights on a bigger objective on the main Riglos towers - the Travesia de las Cinco Puntas del Mallo Firé (also graded 4+). The Firé is the west-most of the main towers, and has a distinctive, many-peaked ridge line along the top. Unfortunately, as seen from the east during the walk up from the village, it looks intimidating and impenetrable.

Mallo Firé

Fortunately, there's a sneaky easy route round the back that allows access to the ridge at an amenable grade. From there, the route goes to the top of peaks Montolar, Mallefré, Mateo and the tiny subsidiary peak of Buzón, before finishing on the slightly disappointingly named Punta de No Importa.

Unfortunately, our rope was too short to get all the way to the end. Fortunately, I decided this was close enough...

Unfortunately, taking in so many peaks meant that the route was quite complicated - lots of climbing up, abseiling back down, and some devious route finding. Fortunately, we formed an efficient and honed climbing team so this was no problem - we ticked off all the peaks, enjoyed some amazing views, saw some vultures and made it back down in time for a lovely meal at the Refugio.

Day 3: unfortunately, after the exploits of day 2, we were both tired. Fortunately, it was a lovely day and the shop in Riglos sold ice cream. We lazed in the sun taking many photos of Andy and Charles climbing the normal route on the Mallo Puro (it was Charles's last day so they'd decided to push through the tiredness). Unfortunately (for them), we mischievously decided to steal their shoes. Fortunately (for them), it turns out I'm not very good at subterfuge, and tend to crack under the pressure of devious questions such as "what's in the bag?" I don't think I'm cut out for a career as a spy...

Mallos Puro (the pointy bit on the left). Andy and Charles are just reaching the top - can you see them?

Day 4: Charles had to leave, so Naomi and I teamed up with Andy to climb Moskitos, a seven pitch route on Mallo Visera. This is a sneaky route that gets you into some similar positions to the famous harder routes up this wall (Fiesta de Los Biceps and Zulu Demente - see Andy's blog), but weaves around to avoid most of the steepness so is a much more amenable grade (6b/6b+, depending on which guide you read). The first few pitches were really fun: some interesting crack climbing, followed by an airy traverse across to the 'Trone', a car-sized boulder improbably wedged two-thirds of the way up the tower.

Naomi on the traverse pitch of Moskitos

Unfortunately, the sun hit the crag at this point, and we'd all underestimated the effect of the heat on climbing performance. The crux pitch leaving the Trone was a bit of a struggle and I had to pull on pretty much all of the bolts to get up it. Fortunately...erm......I made it in the end, we didn't have to do a complicated abseil retreat, and I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of staying hydrated... The walk down from the top was spectacular.

We were ravenous when we got down, so enjoyed some well-earned tapas and ice cream at the bar, and watched some base jumpers being silly...

Day 5: exhausted! We drove to Santa Ana, near Lleida, intending to do some more conventional single-pitch sport climbing, but instead ended up eating tasty food and paddling in the (very cold) river.

Overall, Riglos was an experience - a spectacular place, and a very different style of climbing from what we were doing before. I left feeling very inspired to come back in the future, but will have to get a lot fitter first!!