Pictures This Time

Linda climbing Vitage a Venus @ MontgronyDylan helping to belay Linda, notice there is no way that he is letting go of that brake end, he needs to work on giving slack though.
Dylan double fisting a sausage sandwich at the train station in Girona.
A shot of the Grand Boveda @ Rodellar, this cliff has about 40 routes from 20m at the left end to 30m in the middle and 40m in the right hand cave. Very impressive wall and everything looks great, although kind of intimidating.

We are taking our first rest day in Rodellar, so we headed to the nearest bigger town, Barbastro to do some grocery shopping then to one of the "camping" areas to do laundry, 4 euros a load, pretty expensive. The climbing here is prett incredible, the rock is very featured making steep climbs relatively easy.

Linda has done a 5.12a on her second try, though on TR so she will try to lead it, maybe tomorrow.

Claude has on-sighted a few 5.12's and done a couple of 5.12+ on his second try, but is close to doing some harder stuff as well.

I have on-sighted a 5.13a and flashed two 5.13b's so far in the two days that we have been here. My thumb was a bit sore though after the second day, so I will be spending some quality time with a bag of frozen spinach tonight.

Given how beautiful the area is, it is really a shame as to how poorly it is treated. If you go anywhere off of the trail, and most of the time this means just feet since there is a ton of undergrowth that is spiny and viscious, you will find that people have used the bathroom, and not just to wizz. I don't remember it being so bad back in 2001 when Linda and I came to Europe. It seems as though some facilities in the canyon would be nice or at least near the trail head.

Our intro to Rodellar was pretty rough. We headed to the popular warm up wall and Linda got on a route. She was only at the first bolt when I heard a scream and a really loud thud, I was further away watching Dylan at the time. Apparently a belayer was looking down while holding the GriGri open when the climber fell. They hit the ground from maybe 40 feet and definately broke an ankle or more. The Guardia Civil flew a chopper in and dropped a medical team and a trail guy without touching down. Then came back and with military precision loaded and were ontheir way in about 15 seconds. The drop off took significantly longer. Needless to say, Linda has been a little spooked and Claude and I will not let anyone outside of our group belay us. If you look around it seems as though every other person you see belaying is doing it flat out wrong.

It is going to be difficult to get climbing shots here since we only have one rope and the routes are pretty big. We climbed at a cliff called Pince Sans Rire yesterday and we did 3 routes that were 30 meter or longer. It rained several times during the afternoon and it was no issue as the wall overhung 20-50 feet so it was easy to stay dry.

More to come.