With Giulia being stuck in the UK, I was prepared to climb some British grit while visiting her over there. She was actually more psyched to climb French blocks instead and somehow we settled on Briancon. I had literally no beta and was fully prepared to follow her psych. Luckily, Seth had a book and some info to help me get started. I grabbed his guidebook at the airport and we parted ways; him to Rifle and me to France.
The flight wasn’t so bad other than being long and customs being weird. As in, France and Switzerland literally didn’t care as long as I had my American passport scanned into a box.
Our rental was supposed to be some tiny high clearance manual euro thing but Hertz screwed me in a weird way. I originally went to the French side to pick up my car but the reservation was on the Swiss side. I told them they sucked and they gave me a free upgrade to a new Prius. This thing was both super nice and awful at the same time. Nice in the sense that after a full 10 days of driving around and the 3.5 hours to and from the airport to France, we filled up like once. Awful that it was huge compared to other euro cars and the roads felt way too small for this thing. I was massively jet lagged and essentially lost a day to driving to our home in the alps.
Day 1: Meteorite
We followed the guidebook to get to section 1 but ended up in section 3 (meteorite). Whatever because there’s rock and we were here to climb it. What’s interesting about this limestone was that it wasn’t totally polished to hell but the first two climbs were quite weird for the grade. After doing some more easyish things I decided to jump on something in the 7b (5.12b) range and got my ass handed to me. I was mainly reaching up blind to a crimp a lot. Oh man, what a jump in difficulty.
Day 2: Entraygues
We followed the guidebook again and the guidebook showed a straight line from the last village to the parking lot. We parked at what looked like the right place and crossed a bridge that had a sign that said we were 1.75 hour hike away from the place. Great guide. After meeting other people looking for the area, we decided to drive further up the road to see if there was other parking. Several km and switchbacks later, we get to more parking. We park and hike way longer than the guidebook said to a river crossing and not a bridge like the guidebook showed and eventually made it to the wall. It wasn’t huge but here the gneiss was incredibly grippy unlike the sandy slopey rock at Farley. We do a bunch of things here and I get ready to battle this 7c in the main area that consisted mostly of giant holds with a little boulder problem near the beginning. I got some pretty good spray from some folks on the ground and made it to the top. Because of the number of people on the wall here and the sun, I didn’t quite get the number of burns I needed to send. Sad. I know I’ve got it next time!
Day 3: Rif D’Oriol
After our crazy ordeal of trying to find the place yesterday, we opted for the easiest parking and fastest approach. Parking was indeed easy and the hike in was only a few minutes down some fixed line and wooden stairs across a little waterfall and into a small canyon with a river running through it. Cute. I warm up on a 7a near the entrance. It was a terrible warm up with a cruxy sequence consisting of sloping crimps and not ideal feet. Giulia gets on what she thought was a 6b despite 6c+ written on the rock. Needless to say, it didn’t go so well. What the guidebook didn’t show were several new lines on the wall which heavily confused us on what climb was what. I get on what I thought was a 7a+ and eat all the poo and spend forever trying to figure out a sequence only to get told that I was on an 8a and the 7a+ was an independent line to the left. Our guidebook literally didn’t show it that way. I down dyno’ed to clean and got on that 7a+ which was quite fun. We get on one more on the way out because it was an interesting feature.
Day 4: Little Canada and Secret Garden
We headed out to get to Oreac which was just a little past Tournoux, where we went the first day. The dirt roads got bad enough that I was scared for our rental and turned back towards Tournoux. We decided to check out some other cliffs, specifically Little Canada. The hike was easy and the cliff looked pretty sweet minus some initial choss. We warmed up on a climb called Squamish which started in a choss band that was strategically cemented together to form usable holds that wouldn’t immediately explode off the wall. After the initial whatever climbing, you get to the main event of massive jugs traversing left with the small exception that they were all underclings. Very fun!
We then headed over to Secret Garden and I get on a 6b because there was the sickest looking left facing flake system. Too bad it was guarded by the ugliest slab. I get on another climb to the left that looks like far less slab. I was wrong. It was a slab sandwich with short overhanging jug sections in between.
Day 5: Face bouc
Another day where our guidebook brought us not quite where we wanted to be. We headed towards Ailefroide and the drive was nice but the guidebook wanted us to get on this really rough road for the remaining couple minutes of driving to the main parking lot. We didn’t do that road and parked nearby and hiked that road instead. After getting a little confused on this road, we eventually made our way to face bouc. Specifically, the right side, which was in the shade. Wow! It’s too bad there were like 9 climbs in the upper section with 3 shared starts and nobody wanted to do any of the climbs of one of the starts. We warm up on something the guidebook said was a 7a+ (5.12a) and I spent FOREVER trying to make it feel the grade. I couldn’t. Eventually, we went to the upper section and waited in line behind maybe 5ish people. Some were generous and didn’t spend a lot of time on their burns. Others spent forever dogging up each bolt. When it came to me, all I could think about was not waiting in line again so I tried hard and rested on all the holds and eventually sent and got out of that line. I try the thing to the left that had a really funky boulder problem near the start. I wasn’t tall enough to reach a particular hold and tried to change up my beta for my size. It didn’t work.
Day 6: La Gorge
Giulia wanted to check this place out. The approach was a little longer than expected but we arrived as the second party at the wall. There was 6b+ in the rock and we warmed up on it. What our guidebook didn’t show were like 20 new lines here. The worst part was that all these bolts were so close together that it was hard to tell where you’re actually supposed to go. I think we did the 6c+ finish on our 6b+ but who knows. We get on some other stuff and the area eventually turned into a cluster. People on literally every line to the right of us and people rappelling off their multipitch climbs right on top of us. I try to get a few more and we leave. Not sure I’d come back here.
Day 7: Face bouc (again)
With rain in the forecast and not a whole lot of places we can go with roads that didn’t suck, we decided to head back to Face bouc so that Giulia could get on Punishman Park. The queue for the climb was almost as insane as before. I get on that climb to the right that had a separate start. It looked like a kneebar tunnel so I equipped two knee pads and thrutched my way to the tunnel. I get my knee bars but they’re not entirely secure. Little bits of the rock were breaking off. I grab the only jug I could reach and I find that I’m literally holding onto the jug while double horizontal kneebars are the only thing keeping me from eating it. I toss the jug down and decided that I didn’t want to climb this in fear I’d kill someone below me. The route split where I was at and ended up cutting left and swinging back into the bolt line. Whatever climbing I did was supposed to be 8a but felt way less chossy than the knee bar tunnel. I aid my way to the chains and spend forever trying to clean. What a nightmare.
Day 8: Rocher Maubert
Since we were over 3 hours away from the airport, we decided to stay somewhere close to Geneva so that we didn’t have to drive so far on our last day to catch our international flights. Giulia found a little crag on the way there. We park on the side of the road and walk through some cow patties and we’re at the wall right next to the road. Oh boy were these climbs manufactured. We hike up to the upper level with what looks like more interesting things. We were right. We get on a 7a+ that looked like big holds. There were big holds but then slabbed out at the top. We climb a few more things, it rained a little, sun comes in and we leave on our long drive to our chalet.
Final thoughts:
I found it interesting that each crag had a different type of rock. We climbed, gneiss, granite, limestone and something else.
And I always learn something on these trips:
- Don’t fly into Geneva to climb in Briancon.
- The guidebook for Briancon is ass. We created our own list of GPS coordinates in Google maps to help guide us to the climbs and parking. UKC or 8a might have a more extensive list of climbs and more beta.
- Getting an international driving permit wasn’t needed.
- Stick clips were not necessary either.
I had fun and I’d come back but there are so many other places in France and in the world I haven’t climbed at. But it was really nice knowing that this spot was a solid 10c degrees lower than anywhere else in France.
Since I was too lazy to create and log all my ticks on MP, you’ll have to find me on 8a to see what I got on: https://www.8a.nu/user/aaron-hwang/sportclimbing
