caigoose9

So a month full of news for The North Face Ski Challenge Tour final in Val Thorens !

It’s amazing just how wrong you can be cheap north face. After spending 2 days bolting and cleaning the route, I figured I had a good Idea of how hard it would be as most of the holds seemed good and it didn’t seem so steep. 8a/+ (5.13b/c) was the armchair guess but when the time came to finally give it a go, I just about managed to haul my self to the anchors going bolt to bolt.

It felt really tough and there were two sections I couldn’t climb (one due to wet holds, the other was just damn hard). I think I could climb the bottom section (to the good rest) with a little work, but the top section, with its unclimbed crux, into a massive four point off dyno, into the unclimbed wet section, to some pumpy jugs and final boulder problem seems a little beyond me at this moment in time. Reaching the anchors, I felt defeated and couldn’t see myself climbing the route with my limited time left cheap the north face. I decided to strip the draws but was convinced by my friends to leave them in and try another day.

Well, crossing my fingers didn’t work. We have had almost torrential rain all day combined with a thick damp mist. Out of desperation we took a taxi to White Mountain but even this (supposedly) perma-dry crag was sopping. Before we walked in, we had arranged with our driver for him to pick us up in four hours time and so with a wet crag, in the middle of nowhere, with no phone, we were faced with either a long wait or walk back to Yangshuo. We chose the walk and it was fairly pleasant, getting to see up close a lot of the local comings and north face denali fleece. After a short while we managed to flag down a van and once a price had been agreed, hopped in and rode back to town.

The forecast for tomorrow does not look good, nor does it look great for the rest of the week. At some point I need to return to Lei pi Shen to retrieve my remaining 14 draws from my project which, judging by the amount of water that has com from the sky, probably won’t be the best experience of the trip.