Via Ferrata

In the tourist guides and sports stores they advertised a series of protected climbing routes called the via ferrata. There were several 8-10(?) set up in various places throughout the south of France. Ja had a pamphlet that highlighted several local courses but it wasn't clear how they worked. They looked like artificial climbing and ropes courses but it sounded interesting enough to drive out to the medieval village of Pielle and check it out.

The village of Pielle is a quiet and old place. The road into the village climbs up into the steep hills and goes through a short tunnel in the rock. The stone buildings were clustered together between narrow cobblestone paths. Ja pointed out the house he and Celine looked into buying. At twenty miles away from Monaco it was a bit too far to bike to work.

Ja's little pamphlet said we could rent gear at the town bar but when found the spot it was still closed so we wandered around the city for a while then sat outside to wait for it to open. Eventually a young woman in a tight dress opened the door and let in two scruffy Persian cats.

In addition to taking care of the cats and running the bar, this woman rented out climbing equipment. The gear used when climbing the via ferrata isn't a standard climbing harness. We wore harnesses with two clips on stretchy lines tied to our waist. There was an extra backup safety clip, a helmet, a pulley, and an oval ring on a loop of webbing. As we struggled into the unfamiliar gear the woman watched us like we were complete idiots. She looked tired and bored and when I struggled to get the strange buckle tightened properly she pulled it tight with a quick motion.

She then gave us a rundown of the course in French. She spoke too fast for me to pick up very much, Amanda and I caught the words '80 meters' and 'fatal'.

I took a helmet with a gopro mount but discovered as we walked to the start of the course that the battery had already died. Apparently, by default, if you turn the gopro on, even if you aren't recording, it will remain on until the battery is dead. It isn't obvious that the device is on and it was only a few days later I discovered how to turn this setting off. I'm still angry about the dead battery because the climb was awesome and it would have been fantastic to have a video of the course.

On the short hike to the start of the route Amanda tripped on a steep section of the trail and rolled down the path a few meters. She was unhurt but furious with herself for being such a klutz.

The via ferrata isn't a traditional climbing course. It consists mainly of a ladder of u-shaped rebar rungs cemented into the rock. A safety cable runs along side the ladder and you're supposed to clip your stretchy lines to this as you climb. The safety cable is attached to the wall every three to six meters which is why you have two stretchy lines. When you reach an anchor point, you clip one line past the anchor point and then the other with the idea being you're never fully unclipped from the safety line. Climbing the wall was a process of climbing ten feet, clipping and unclipping, and then climbing ten more. Though usually what would happen is you would forget and climb past the anchor point until the harness would threaten to pull you off the wall and then downclimb to unclip yourself. There were a few strenuous overhung portions and it really sucked when I forgot to unclip and had to downclimb on a dynamic hold.

The safety line would keep you alive but I really didn't want to test it. For one thing, the rental clips we used were visibly worn - probably still solid enough to catch a fall but I wasn't ready to test them. Also the stretchy lines stretched much farther than an arms length. This meant if you fell you'd have to climb up your own equipment to get back to the anchor. And finally the safety line was anchored to the wall in ten to twenty foot stretches that was sometimes horizontal and sometimes vertical. If you fell at the top of a vertical stretch, you would fall the ten feel to the next anchor and then another six to eight feet to the end of your clipped lines. You'd probably bounce off the rock or the steel rungs on the way down or swing back into the rock in the overhung sections. Fortunately the holds were solid and no one fell but it was a bit unnerving.

Amanda, still upset over her little tumble, realized she wouldn't have the upper body strength to complete the course and bailed early leaving Ja, Lucille, and I to continue the course. The rungs led us over a knobby ridge and then traversed across a sheer cliff to a wobbly cable bridge. The first bridge was a proper suspended bridge but later on we had to cross a large ravine using only two cables; shuffling along like a tightrope with our hands holding onto the higher cable.

At one point the path led us into a natural cave in the rock with crumbled ramparts where soldiers were stationed during the war to watch the narrow road leading into the village. We crawled through a hole in the rock and then onto a spiderweb of cables, suspended like a very sparse net about a meter away from the overhung rock face. This loose net formed of metal cables climbed 30-40m up the rock face. We climbed with our back to the wall and it was a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the ground below.

The course ended with a thirty meter zipline. Here you attached your pulley to the line and sat in your harness. The oval ring and short bit of webbing was held in your other hand and used to control your speed across the ravine. The cable didn't look too sturdy and our rental equipment had seen better days. They had a series of cushions glued to the rock on the other side to provide some padding if you got out of control. Ja went first and made it successfully, arriving at the other end at a reasonable speed.

While unhooking his gear he accidentally dropped his pulley. It tumbled down into the ravine below, landing on a little ledge and he had to climb down and retrieve it. This was probably the most dangerous event of the trip, especially considering we were both trapped on the other side of the ravine and couldn't help him if he got into trouble. But by some miracle he found the pulley and managed to climb back up to the ledge.

I helped Lucille get situated on the cable and she screamed as she spun out of control while sliding down the cable. When I followed her, I got my safety line tangled in my pulley and for a moment I thought everything was going to get so tangled I would be stuck hanging out over the ravine. I came to a stop about half way and managed to disentangle the line from the pulley but had to pull myself hand over hand the rest of the way.

The zipline marked the end of the via ferrata and we returned to the bar to drop off and pay for the rental gear and we caught up with Amanda watching birds from a picnic table that overlooked the valley. We ate ratatouille and Leon sausage for lunch.

From there it was back to the house to do some laundry and then another drive out to Menton to go swimming. We went shopping for a porcelain cicada souvenir and we stopped to have strawberry slushies. Back at the house that evening, we had barbecued sheep sausage for dinner and Amanda crept around the house stalking lizards until she caught a gecko and accidentally pulled off it's tail. She was so distraught after maiming the poor lizard she buried it's tail in a small grave with a little flat rock as a gravestone.

I filled my shirt with hand-fulls of plums picked from Ja's fruit trees after eating my fill and we got to bed around midnight after setting our alarms for 5:30am to give us time to catch the first train to Florence.