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bman123
Oct 12, 2011, 3:38 AM
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I will be in france during june this year and wanted to climb in verdon. However my girlfriend can only climb about 5.10d or 6b. will there be any multi pitch bolted routes that we can climb or is it all too hard.
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ghisino
Oct 12, 2011, 12:37 PM
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yes there will between a handful and quite a lot possible routes, depending on your abilities and on her propension to toprope and pull draws on the occasional crux.
Given the abseil-then-climb nature of most routes, the possibilities increase a lot if you are happy with climbing only the last 3 or 4 pitches of some routes
(eg. last 4 pitches of ticket danger are all 6a's)
Possible hard bits:
-reaction to full exposure and hanging belays
-nature of the climbing and harshness of the grades.
-your ability as a leader to haul her up if the route is harder than expected. (A retreat to the bottom of the gorge is often possible, but a pain in the ass)
look at this website (non-comprehensive database!) for a rough idea http://www.camptocamp.org/.../fr/gorges-du-verdon
nb routes in that list get an evaluation like TD-/I/P1 6a(5c), where
"TD-" is the overall difficulty (pretty useless for bolted routes)
"I" describes the seriousness of the environnement and the retreat, where I is totally safe and VI is alpine nightmare.
"P1" describes the in-situ protection : the routes you're interested in are either P1 (100% bolted) or P2 (there are several bolts or pitons but you need a small rack)
6a(5c) means that the hardest pitch is 6a of freeclimbed and that the hardest bolt-to-bolt unaidable section is 5c
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bman123
Oct 14, 2011, 12:29 AM
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Thanks alot for the information, thats very usefull. Is there any other places in the area/france/northern Itally/spain that you would recomend for good sport climbing.
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ghisino
Oct 14, 2011, 8:13 AM
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there would be too many actually?
a good bet for the grades you're looking at would be buying the "schweiz plaisir" topos that have a selection of well-bolted (or well-protectable) climbs up to 6b for multipitch routes and 7a for single pitch crags.
Swiss based but it also covers climbs in italy and france (plaisir sud and west)
http://www.filidor.ch/
a couple of suggestions that are probably out of those topos :
france : ablon. single pitch or short mp, long walk in but rewarding climbing on the best limestone, lovely alpine setting, and excellent cheese at the farm next to the crag.
Summer spot.
grenoble: rocher du midi. multipitch climbing, sometimes bolted sometimes "euro trad" (pegs). You have a couple of nice short-ish (200 meters) bolted routes @your grades, "mediterranée" and "voie des pisteurs". Didn't climb them but as they are used for rappeling from other routes, i've had a close look on two coccasions and they look very nice, high-quality limestone, a good view of the surrounding mountains including mt blanc...
Good for a warm day as it's high up and gets shade after noon.
there must be a ton of nice climbing to do around chamonix too, but haven't done any.
For multipitch bolted routes with reasonable walk-ins look for the following topos by Michel Piola :
-Aiguilles rouges (steepish, bolted face climbing on very featured granite, if the descriptions i've had are right)
-Le Calcaire en folie (divided into two volumes : "tome I" and "tome II". Limestone climbing, more of the slabby kind, some walls are known for having a lot of "cannellures", ie water runnels)
Pyrenees : Cavallers. Good choice for a day or two if you like granite slab climbing, all sport is of that kind. Summer spot, nice mountain hikes too and tons of semi-trad multipitch too (the real deal of that place really) if you're into it.
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bman123
Nov 3, 2011, 2:30 AM
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Registered: Jan 17, 2011
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thanks for your help i will check all those out
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