Baby, It's Cold Outside

And now, back in time to...

Sunday, September 14, 2008

So when Nick came back from the bathroom in the middle of the night, he admitted "okay, there might be frost on the ground tomorrow morning." There actually wasn't, but it must have been close. We sat around in the tent for a long time playing cards in the morning. We went to the Epicerie in town to get breakfast and lunch food, ate breakfast, and continuued debating what to do. There were a few people up on the wind-blown cliffs, but none of them looked that happy from where we were standing.

At one point I was huffily reading the guidebook's description of "sunny, warm, perfect-time-of-year September days" in the guidebook, and the English guy from the next tent along got excited, thinking I had found some kind of forecast. Had to tell him nope, sorry.

Eventually by noontime Nick convinced me that we had to at least go up and try climbing, even though the temperature in his car still said about 11C, and it was cloudy and windy. We ate lunch in the parking lot (a two-minute drive from the campsite), and by that point it had finally started to warm up slightly. We purposely chose a south-facing cliff, Falaise du Château, but it didn't really make much difference, since there was no sun.

However, once we started climbing, it turned out to be more-or-less manageable. We were definitely at the Parking Lot wall of Orpierre -- it had some of the easier grades, and was closest to the parking lot, and had the gumbies to match. Nick and I were the most competent ones there, which was saying something.

The 10-minute walk up to the crag was actually fairly steep, and so gave a good view of the little town of Orpierre. If you know where to look, you can see the campground. When I get it up on FB, I'll tag the campground.

So we only did 4 routes -- 3 5.9's and a .10a, according to our guidebook. Not too impressive. The 5.9's were kind of monotonous, but the .10a had a nice toit (roof) at the top that looked intimidating but was mostly circumventable Gunks-style -- you could pretty much climb around it with only a few little power-moves. Nick was nice and did the first leads/draw-hanging/beta-sussing for me, so all I had to do was flash with prehung draws. Which wasn't too challenging, even in the cold. Nick had to hang to figure out the beta on the roof, but he clearly could have sent.

I did like the limestone rock -- nice holds and surprisingly solid. However, I really was having major El Potrero Chico flashbacks because of how chilly it was.

So we survived our first day at Orpierre, but didn't really have high hopes. The weather information we could gather was extremely vague and out of date -- some "nuages" was all I could pick up on. We decided to make a decision about what to do the following morning.