So what did we do
there? On the first day, feeling like something “straight-forward”,
we headed towards Congo Star. Michel Piola, the author of our
guidebook and climber responsible for setting up many new routes in
the area, states explicitly that “Nuts and friends not needed”
for this route. He describes with some angst the re-equipping of the
route by a previous Requin hut warden against the wishes of the
original ascentionists, who presumably wanted to keep the line as
predominately trad.
However as we
started to climb, we realised that Mr Piola obviously hasn't climbed
the route since its infamous re-equipping. Yes there are a few bolts
around – but we were very glad on the first few pitches to have a
few camalots and nuts with us: if you were only to rely on the bolts,
it would be horrendously and dangerously run-out! As it was not
turning out to be as straight-forward as we'd hoped, and finding the
third pitch still wet from the previous days' of rain, we decided to
pull the pin and rappel off.
The next day, we
headed up towards the beautifully named “L'Eden de la Mer” (The
Eden of the Sea). Thanks to the retreating glacier, it took us a
while to find the start … an extra pitch of easy climbing has been
added onto the bottom of the route, where once you should have been
able to walk up the ice – sadly, not that uncommon these days! But
we soon knew where we were heading and were enjoying some fabulous
granite in the sun.
We didn't follow
the route exactly, however. There are some bolts on it, and the rest
uses natural protection, but in many instances it seemed to us that
the bolts took the climber a few metres out onto harder, smooth slabs
and away from the easier and interesting cracks which for the most
part took good gear – so we opted for the easier line and didn't
always clip the shiny hangers. Again, Mr Piola's guidebook lead us
astray – he clearly shows the line of the climb going to the left
of a large buttress (the buttress being one of the few features he
has drawn on his topo), and we foolishly followed this rather than
the bolt we saw on the right … this lead us into easy but broken
ground, with enough rock spikes to create belays, but we doubt this
was the direction of the original route.
At any rate, we
shouldn't complain too much about the route, as the view from the top
of the balanced boulder was quite lovely.
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| The Dent du Geant |
And what next? The
Dent du Requin – the Tooth of the Shark – loomed above the hut …
taking a rest day to sort gear, eat and chill out, we sussed out the
possible routes. According to the hut warden, the best route by far
was Voie Renaudie: first climbed on 4th August 1946 by Mr and Mrs
Jean Renaudie, it has 570m of rock climbing but involves 900m of
vertical ascent from the hut. An early start would be essential.
So, the alarm went
off horridly early. With a group of Germans aiming to climb the
nearby Chapeau a Cornes, we breakfasted, grabbed our gear and set off
across the moraine. Hitting the ice, we popped our crampons on to
head up what is described as a 35degree slope – the ice got steeper
and steeper as we climbed towards the rock, and by the top we were
joking that this was certainly an inaccurate geometry calculation! We
may also have headed up the initial rock step the bonus-points way …
(and still in crampons … urgh!)
So, all told, it
took us a little longer than expected to hit the official starting
ledge, marked with a large white arrow pointing the way.
Then the sun rose,
turning the sky pink, then purple, then blue …
Ditching the
crampons and ice-axes, we set off – moving together over easy
terrain, with Mark placing a few bits of pro between us. We quickly
covered the first couple of hundred metres this way, and after being
so slow on the approach, we were happy to finally be making good
time. The description of the route matched what we were seeing
(funnily enough, it wasn't written by Michel Piola), and we reached
Step 7: The Cliff Becomes Vertical. Changing into rock shoes, we
started to pitch out the climb – and pitch after pitch of great
granite climbing followed. Nothing too hard, but consistent, we
climbed towards the summit ridge.
Hitting the ridge,
we admired the steeper drop down on the other side and scrambling up
and over the loose boulders, and through a small letter-box opening,
we reached the step just below the block of the true summit around
2pm.
All that was left
to do was abseil down … following Mr Piola's instructions, we found
the abseil point and (foolishly!) did the long 50m rappel – despite
the intermediate rappel points we could have used. Of course, the
rope then got stuck and Mark had to climb all the way back up the
rope to clear the jam – a simple sentence to describe two hours of
hauling, pulling, flicking and pleading with the rope, not to mention
the effort required to prussik up 50m of very stretchy, thin climbing
rope. Oh, and then the fog suddenly came in – with snow, then sleet
and rain to follow. We had enough gear to keep warm, but ropes are
far heavier when wet than dry and even once we'd cleared the initial
jam we had at least 16 more rappels to go. It wasn't until we were
half way down that we found the promised abseil bolts, as we had been
using instead an older, more slabby abseil line with slings around
rocks – these were mostly OK, but some we backed-up with our own
tat, and the terrain made us quite concerned we'd catch the rope
again (which, thankfully, we didn't). All up, it was heavy and hard
work, and we slowed down. We were back at the ice-axes and crampons
far later than we'd hoped, and were even slower heading back to the
hut.
Once finally at
the hut, we were greeted with a warm welcome and the fire going …
needless to say we slept well that night!
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| Looking back - the hut on the left and the tooth on the right |
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