Montréal on Friday, Québec on Saturday

After the seminar I gave at Université de Montréal on Friday, François Perron took me to Québec (City) to do some ice climbing on the famous Chutes Montmorency, close to the (plain frozen) Saint-Laurent river. The setting is quite exceptionnal as the 80 meter waterfall is surrounded by iced cliffs and a cone of meringue-like snow made by the drizzle of the waterfall turning to snow before hitting the ground, as shown by the picture on the right.

When we arrived, the cliffs had already been equipped with fixed ropes by mountain guides from RockGym and, after getting a pair of crampons from them, we were basically left free to try the different climbs by ourselves, with, luckily, no queuing nor waiting. (Initially, we were supposed to share crampons, which would have been a disaster!, but we ended up using our own pair all day long, in contrast with the other groups.) The climbs were fairly easy, with different kinds of ice (the farther away from the waterfall, the harder) but very few vertical parts.

It is quite fortunate that we did the climbing yesterday rather than today as the temperature dropped from -5 to -22 overnight! It would have been close to impossible today (even skiing on the gentle runs of Mont Saint Anne was a bit extreme!) I ended up doing six climbs over the day, which is nice but also shows how easy it was. The Chutes are about ten minutes from downtown Québec, with free access, and they are lit up at night, so there is a possibility for nocturnal climbing, but this means climbing in colder conditions…