08.31.09
Climbing to heaven
Or not. That was the question of this weekend.
After weeks of searching for lands, making offers, meeting house constructors and talking budget we needed some fresh air and took a ‘weekend off’ to go up in the mountains.
We started off saturday afternoon, drove up in the Mercontour and walked a couple of hours up to the feet of the mountain ‘St Robert’ (next to Mont Gelas, for the ones of you who know).
We found a lake where we put up the tent. The weatherforcast had forseen some light rain in the afternoon, as so often in the mountains. We got no rain on us, but the clouds showed us beautiful scenes. A real life 3d cinema, sometimes horror, sometimes romantic. We sat down and enjoyed it together with a cup of wine.
Talking about horror movies I went to see the ‘Inglorious Bastards‘ on cinema this week, followed by ‘The Ring’ at home the night after. Gave me nightmares and really bad sleep. So now when the weekend came I knew I would sleep so good in the tent, with only the nature around.
In the nature, there are animals. Animals like to eat. A couple of weeks ago, Anthony and Thomas went up camping and climbing and got all their food eaten at night by a marmot (murmeldjur). This night we kept the food with us in the tent. Unfortunately it didn’t help that marmots are very cute and nice animals, both of us stayed awake half the night listening and looking for the marmots to come in under the outer telt wall to search food.
Seven in the morning the alarm went off, time to get the tent together, eat breakfast and head up towards the summit, 2919m above the sea, about 300m of climbing following a ridge. You can see it on the photo above, st Robert in the middle and mont Gelas to the right. We started from lowest ‘V’ you see if you follow the sky/mountain line from the left on the photo. Then you climb up, down a little, up, down a little, and up, until you get to the summit.
It was supposed to be clear blue skye in the morning, but the clouds stayed on. When we came up to the start of the ridge and could see over to italy, hm, no, that was exactly what we couldn’t do, there was no italy to see, only clouds, we hesitated to even start the climbing.
But since the beginning was fairly easy quoted, we went on up to one quarter of the ridge. On the first peak, just before it was about to get a bit harder we decided to turn around, too risky. In fact further on it would have been impossible to turn back, we would have had to continue to the summit even if it started to rain or worse…
Of course we were a bit dissapointed well back down again, especially when seeing that the summit were still not completely covered. However there were quite a lot of dark clouds around the valley, so in the end it was a wise decision. Instead we went down to the coast and the beach, 20 degrees warmer. Playing in the big waves is quite some fun as well, finally I think heaven can wait.