Promesse des Profondeurs

This is a climb we did back a while ago, eight years ago maybe. The name is the Promesse des Profondeurs at Castelvieil in the Calanques. My partner really, really wanted to climb it again, since we’d had some problems route finding the first time around.

I really didn’t want to do this climb again, but nothing I proposed as a good excuse not to go seemed to hold water. On my end, it might be the last time I can do a climb this hard again, so there was that pushing me in the direction to try it. So today, we went.

We got lost a bit finding the access to the plateau. I don’t think my partner really understood the layout of the place, in spite of having been there once before. It’s really on a plateau separated from the mainland by a thin ridge. Normally you hike up and have to actually climb a pitch to get access. Maybe he thought we could just walk over from the mainland? I don’t know, but we couldn’t, or we couldn’t without losing a lot more time trying to find out way along the ridge. So we hiked down and back up again. Lost maybe an hour.

The area was crowded today (yeah for people climbing outside! All is good when folks are enjoying the outdoors.) There was a pair of climbers already in our rappel line so we had to wait kind of a long time to go down. Lost another 20 minutes or so. It’s a bit vomit inducing, these belays, straight off into the void. And there’s this thing that there’s no way out except climbing back up again, so you’re committed. Not my favorite thing in the world.

When we finally got started, there was another group in our line who were a bit slow. We had to hang out down below and wait for them to move on.

All that to say that we finished with the sunset and had to walk home in the dark. We did it. No exclamation point because I’m so dead tired and so many things hurt. (A while back, some older friends came down to climb in the Calanques. Each one was secretly finishing their day with some sort of analgesic, until they finally fessed up. Then they just pooled their painkillers together and ground up their paracetemol or ibuprofen or whatever into the sauce for their steak. I thought it was cute, then; now I totally want ibuprofen in my spaghetti sauce.)

So good and bad things about today:

Good: met a nice man from my home town who was climbing with his son. He remembered me from the climbing club but we never did figure out the circumstances. It’s a huge club and we’ve never climbed together. But he was cool. They were the one who told us to wait in the shade while the slow climbers finished. They’d decided not to do the first pitch so wound up ahead of us. That was maybe a good choice on their part because there’s almost no way not to have the rope fall into the sea, at least a little.

Bad: every single branch wanted to grab my hair or rope or whatever, all the time. Every stone wanted to trip me. There was just too much time spent on rocky, narrow paths today. It was tiring.

Good: there was no risk of bad weather at all, so even though we finished at night, it wasn’t like we had the additional stress of rain or winds or anything.

Bad: so many things hurt at the moment: stomach, fingers, toes, ankles, neck, back. I am seriously getting too old for this stuff.

Good: we’re home, showered, fed (we went to a pizzaria on the way back). And there’s no more bad, so I guess today the good won out. As well it should.