climbing encounters

A nice if easy climbing morn on Éperon de Bouchier (à ne pas confondre avec Crochet de Boucher!) a week ago with a local guide, François, who happened to be a formidable character (even conditioning on him being guide). He left school at 14 to become a car mechanic, join the French Navy at 16, caught tuberculosis on a Navy basis, was sent to the Alps for recovery, caught a fatal and definite mountain attraction while there, got training supported by the Navy for an higher mechanic degree, took qualification courses to become a French mountain guide, started being interested in learning techniques and abilities through his training ski schools, experimented new teaching methods with kids from the Marseille suburbs,  eventually joined a Master in biomechanics and ergonomy at Orsay and ended up with a thesis on the topic, worked with French ski federation and a French ski brand, and is still guiding, training and researching despite having passed the retirement age! A wonderful chance encounter, with the facility of the route making chatting not an issue. (Except that some puritan ayatollah had recently removed most of the bolts, which did not make things harder in the end but exhibited an absurd degree of self-righteousness on a route that easy…)

And then an even more rewarding climb today with another local guide, Cathy, who gave me a great and profitable climbing lesson for over three hours, allowing me to reach a higher climbing level than I had previously achieved on an outside route. With a high degree of pedagogy and support. I ended up fairly tired, but exhilaratedly so!

mare e monti [climbing up Rumpe Cuou]

While at CIRM for Bayes for Good and Big Bayes workshops, I went again climbing with Nicolas, a guide from Cassis. As we had picked a day when the mistral (a local Northeasterner) was high and made climbing unpleasant and freezing, Nicolas picked a domain on the `other’ side, that was completely protected and started from the sea and went up in the sun, the wind only hitting us at the top, after six pitches, most of which I managed to lead.

We proceeded fast enough to get down for a second route, just as pleasant, finishing at the top as the Sun was setting down behind the islands below us. A well-chosen set of levels (5b, 5c) and rock-types like slab for my level and a nice conslusion to three climbing outings within a month. (Note that most pictures of our route are not mine as my camera battery went down before we even started.)