First Day in Buis

Slept in today due to the jetlag and possibly from the sleeping pill I took to make sure I stay asleep through the night. Adrian and I continue to unpack and setup our interenet connection.

The place we are staying is pretty nice. The owner is a friend of Adrian's named Ollie and he has the house next to us. We are sharing his ADSL with the Wifi router I brought from Van, so hopefully I have lots of posts for you.

We packed out gear and were out of the house for a trip to the market in Buis to get food for the next couple of days. Little did we know it was 12:00 and the market is only open this late. We managed to catch one baker in time to pick up some raisin bread and a couple loves of french bread for dinner tonight.

Then we headed up to one of the local crags call Baume Rousse for some abuse. The weather was nice and sunny. I would guess the temperature was around 14 C, we were able to climb in our T-shirts while in the sun.

Adrian lead the first 6a+ call Coin Coin, I know I'm writing about it and so this its a little ironic to say that its nothing to write home about but I would give that for the description. It was a so so line that followed a crack and probably should have been bolts. Dear god listen to me I'm turning in to a climbing snob.

I took my turn leading up Coin Coin, and then lead the 6b right next to it. A climb call Au Bout. This climb was a lot more fun and sustained. Apparently it had been raining and nowing a couple days ago so there was some water seeping through the rock in parts making a few hold unusable but this didn't change the character of the climb all that much.

We finished dispatching these slabby warm ups and decided to walk around the corner to the overhung business. We found that all the climbs in the 6c-6c+ range was wet so we opted for the 7a (L'ecole Net) and 7b tuffa climbs on the right hand side of the crag.

Lets just say that low 6 slab climbs a totally inadequate warm ups for overhung tuffa climbing. Furthermore, let me say that I am not an elephant and have nearly completely forgotten how to tuffa climb. I manage to make it just a little over half way up the climbing before getting my butt handed to me. Atleast I got the first fall of the trip out of the way early. I gave it a shot at the crux a couple of times but decied to come down and give Adrian a second chance on the 7b that had unceremoniously spit him off earlier.

He swept up the 7b commented it was a touch on the hard side but didn't give any appear to having trouble with it despite not having climbing in the last month. Talk about power off the couch.

I took one more shot at the 7a but found I was a touch too tired from my first attempt and had to retreat one more at the crux. We cleaned the draws off and called it a day. Tomorrow we'll see if the sun holds.

The picture for this post is look away from the crag, you can see in the center of the shot Buis and the ski runs on the local mountain.