Day 277 - l'elephant (part deux)

l'elephant!

Having focussed yesterday on Jezz's 40@40@Font Challenge, today was our turn to work on one of my (and subsequently our) Font missions...to climb a problem graded at 6A.

Most of the climbs we've done this week have been in the 3' and 4's, so 6A represents quite a step up.   

Having said that, mostly we climb problems on our first attempt, whereas to climb something at your limit requires much trying, and failing, and working it out over a series of attempts.  This can be a frustrating process, as you can spend several hours (or days, weeks, months, or even years for the professionals), and never succeed.

So usually we go for climbing lots of problems that we can climb, but now and then it's good fun to work on a problem that initially seems impossible...the sense of achievement upon eventually getting to the top is immense, and deeply gratifying.

So we went to a famous and iconic climbing area of the Fontainebleau Forest, known as l'elephant...and by incredible coincidence, there's a large, elephant shaped boulder near the start of the climbing area!

I'm happy to report that we did get up our first 6A's!  There was some debate over how we climbed the first one, and whether it counted, so we added a couple of hard moves on the beginning (to satisfy the nay-sayers - you know who you are... ;-p ), and then did it again!

Then we tried another one, which started with a mono (a one-finger pocket in the rock) before climbing a steep face to a very sketchy (aka desperately trying not to fall off) climb over the top of the boulder...

Here's me halfway up...

hang in there

This may not look particularly hard, but I can tell you it was physically very challenging!

Of course, Anna flashed it (which means to climb a problem on your first attempt), whereas it took me about 20 goes...which I interpret to mean that Anna is 20 times as good as me...which seems about right, because, well, she is!

Anyway, I've just realised it's gone midnight, and I have yet to shower after a hard days' bouldering...we went out late and bouldered until it got dark, which was a lovely treat, but means we've been behind schedule all evening.

Oh, and in a further adventure, we got back to our gite to find that our bedroom door had mysteriously jammed since we went out at lunchtime.

After a significant amount of messing around trying to get it open, we had to call the landlord, who essentially advised that we break it down using brute force and/or a pied de biche (that's a crowbar to you and me).

We were reluctant to do this in his absence (he was away for the evening), but after his wife came round and egged us on, we did indeed kick/crow/shoulder the door open.  

So not only did we achieve our 6A mission today, but we also have a bed to sleep in tonight...

Yay!

:-)