Cold Rock

We’re in Chamonix to get our annual lift passes; a significant saving is to be had, but as is typical for France there’s a series of hoops to jump through to qualify… First you need a Carte Resident Secondaire, and to get one of those you need a passport style photo, several forms of ID, and the French equivalent of a Council Tax bill for an address in Chamonix. These cards take about a week to process and you have to collect them in person. Then for a resident’s lift pass you also need a fist full of ID, another passport style photo, and the Carte Resident Secondaire. Oh, and a large chunk of cash! 😯 To get massive early discounts (-40%) you have to buy your pass before the end of November. But at least you can collect, again in person, any time.

After the first hoop was passed we got on with some very late season – cold – rock climbing! 😀 Of course Les Gaillands was the venue being low level, a bit warmer, and ease to get to after a morning of lift pass hunting.

We did a nice 6a+, Zig sans Zag, despite our cold fingers.

But it also had a few wet pockets. Laetitia found one which was too hard to keep hold of with cold fingers and slipped from the crux bashing her knuckles on the cold rock – ouch! :angry: Good job it was cold; it helped numb the pain. 😉

After that we went for a brief walk in the woods near Les Gaillands to warm up a bit…

Ian wanted to see a French cake blog post, sorry Ian, no cakes; we’ve moved on to the beer… You can just see the wound on Laetitia’s finger in the picture – not so bad as to stop her getting a grip of her beer glass! 😛