From Montserrat to the Spanish Pyrenees for a 2000 UIAA International Youth Meet
My trek to the Spanish Pyrenees started in Paris. I arrived there with a couple of days to spare, so I decided to pop in at the all-famous Fontainebleau. Here, the ever-mighty weather wasn’t lenient with my climbing plans. I had to abandon bouldering several times just to avoid the summer rain and hailstorms, but at least managed to visit the Georges Hough area and Mt Ussy where I did a couple of excellent problems on sunny, dry boulders.
An overnight bus ride took me to Barcelona, the city of sun, good food and party. I wanted to do some rock climbing before the UIAA Meet in the Pyrenees and made my way to Montserrat, famous for its 10th century monastery – symbolic status of the Catalonian freedom fighting - and for superb climbing.
Montserrat’s conglomerate domes offer amazing rock scenery. The rock is a sedimentary conglomerate which seems crumbly, loose and relatively featureless. On the classic routes, many generations of climbers have left their marks in the form of weird protection: paper-thin riveted hangers, rusty wires wrapped around pebbles embedded in the sandy matrix, lead-heads squeezed into tiny cracks are but a few of the old cunning methods used to get up these big domes. It would nowadays be suicidal to use these and the most prominent single and multi-pitch classics have been bolted.
The climbers’ hut is the abandoned 15th-century chapel of St Benet. Water has to be fetched from way down below. The rock features in St Benet (the crag nearest to the hut) are best described by their names: La Prenada (the pregnant one), La Momia (the mummy), Elefant (the elephant) and Panxa/Panza (the belly) whose predominant features are curves. Climbing is slab-like with a couple of overhanging bulges and with ever-hidden and slopey grips.
The tranquil setting, silence and the breathtaking surroundings cause climbers and those who come to visit Montserrat to fall in love with it. July is not the most popular time to climb there as it gets very hot and some prefer the September/October gap, but despite the heat I had heaps of fun climbing there over four sunny days.
The time had eventually come to leave Montserrat for Zaragoza (pronounced Tharagotha) to participate in the UIAA International Youth Meet in the Pyrenees. The night train arrived in Zaragoza (Aragon Province) at 1 am on Sunday 23 July, which forced me to spend the rest of the night at the deserted station. Unfortunately the local police officer decided to exercise The Law and did not allow me to sleep at all for the following nine hours.
The officials from the Spanish Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (FFME) met all the participating climbers in the morning. After a brief introduction we all proceeded to a bus which took us north past the town of Hueco into the village of Sallent de Gallego. This was followed by a four-hour hike through the valleys towards the Circo de Piedrafita group of the Aragon Pyrenees, with as final destination the mountain hut, Refugio de Respomuso (2 200m). The hut was built quite recently next to a mountain lake in a scenic valley surrounded by peaks and hills, almost right on the Spanish-French border.
Immediately after arrival most of us started to climb the bolted routes on the side of this three-storey hut. In the evening we made use of a bouldering wall in the cellar downstairs to train and to discuss climbing plans and strategies for the following couple of days.
Choosing climbing partners was a bit tricky because the Austrians and most of the young Spanish climbers had never climbed trad before, and had never climbed mountains besides sport-crags. The group was divided into climbers and beginners. The latter group was to do very easy, almost non-climbing, ascents with minimal difficulty of rope-work under the supervision of the UIAA officials and the ‘climbers’ group could do what they liked.
Monday morning saw myself, Xavier (a young UIAA official) and a group of four Basque climbers make our way through rocky moraines and snowfields to the base of Balaitus (3 151m), the highest peak of the Circo de Piedrafita, where we split up to climb our own routes. Despite the magnificent look of Balaitus, the hardest route was easy (SA 16 max) and unjustly too short (being only four pitches) in relation to the three-hour hike in. If it were not for the fierce and unpredictable, ever-changing weather the climbing would have been relatively uneventful.
Over-geared and over-equipped, we were the only party to reach the summit that day as everybody else backed out due to constant drizzles and the strong, chilling wind which brought clouds all over the circo. The summit was wrapped tightly in the dense, metamorphic clouds. After we had established radio contact with all the others, we decided to make our way down fast for a hot cup of anything. We abseiled hastily and sliding down the snowfields on our packs perfectly facilitated the hurried descent. On our arrival back at the hut the weather improved a bit and with a few hours spare to dinner-time most of us decided to so some sport climbing near the hut.
At night the barometer reading dropped drastically and Tuesday was destined to be a basement-bouldering day for all the participants. It was clear to me after Monday’s climbing that the Circo de Piedrafita is not a prime rock-climbing venue but rather a mountaineering one. The loose, highly weathered and extremely crumbly nature of the granite in this area simply did not allow for exposed, overhanging routes. Instead there are easy scrambles or good hiking paths to the tops of all the peaks. After a lengthy discussion with a couple of local mountaineers, Xavier and I decided to tackle the hardest route in the area, which happened to be of only SA grade 18, the next day.
We took off early on Wednesday morning, to climb the Ursi Route on the Picos de las Frondiellas. This time we were seriously under-geared and over-clothed. Upon reaching the base of the climb we found that the weather again started to change. We had to wait four hours before it stopped raining and the rock dried out a little so we could start the climb. The snowfield just below the base of the climb had suddenly turned into an ice-field which forced us to chop our way up a 50° rocky ice-slope - this in running shoes.
On the route we again found ourselves chopping our way through loose rock, moss, grass, slime and even mud for three unexposed, unprotected chimney pitches. These brought us to an optional last pitch, as we could have walked out to the top upon exiting the chimney. This last 25m pitch was a short, but rewarding, rock climb at SA grade 18.
By the time we reached the top we were as wet and dirty as we’d ever been during a climb before, but the weather cleared and all of a sudden we were presented with a breath-taking view of the Spanish and French Pyrenees all around us. After an enjoyable lunch at the top of the Picos de las Frondiellas, we abseiled on to the French side and washed ourselves in the snow. We then proceeded back up over the ridge to the Spanish side and down to the refugio.
The day was successful and adventurous, but we felt a little drained. So, for the next two days most of us hiked, swam in the icy lake, sport-climbed, sunbathed and occasionally listened to the radio messages from various parties abandoning their routes. Altogether, out of nine attempts, only three parties reached their summits.
Friday evening’s nostalgic farewell atmosphere was drowned in a good couple of drops of excellent Spanish plum liquor called Pacharan. This in turn caused an overwhelming and painful slowness in the activities the next day.
We all managed to pack up, took the ceremonial group photos, said goodbye to our hosts, hiked down to catch the bus to Zaragoza station; all the time recalling the good time we had at Respomuso. We then said our last good-byes, swopped e-mail addresses and planned how to get back home. After a few days spent with one of the participants from Barcelona, I rushed off to Paris and from there to Cape Town.
Note: I thank the Club for the opportunity and financial assistance to be one of those lucky climbers to go to Spain and climb in an international climbing environment. I had an immensely enjoyable time throughout my trip and only wish I could do it again soon.