At the end of July, Phil Gruber and I had planned to climb big rock walls in the Dolomites of Italy. We wouldn’t have much time to wait out poor weather, so when we checked the mountain forecast (for the hundredth time) before leaving Colorado, it confirmed a grim outlook: heavy rain and thunderstorms for the foreseeable future. Chris Weidner / Wicked Gravity The only “clear and calm” was our mindset about bailing; why go to Italy to sit in the rain? We decided to keep our flight to Milan and follow the stable weather to Briançon, France — a haven for warm-weather sport climbing.
That said, cragging in France was a far cry from the walls (up to 2,000 feet) we’d hoped to climb. There would be no 2 a.m.
alarms or pre-dawn starts, no racing to be first on a route, no fear of being stuck high up in a storm, no deep fatigue, hunger, or thirst from super-long days in the mountains ...
Mais oui! I could get used to this. Better yet, I was about to be reminded that it isn’t the objective — the ‘what’ — in climbing that counts, it’s the ‘who.’ The first stop on our spontaneous French sport climbing trip was an idyllic alpine crag called La Saume, which juts sharply out of a high, grassy meadow.
While warming up we met “Hudy,” a kind, older man from the Czech Republic who asked us where we live. He then recounted his past travels to the U.S.
, including a stint in Boulder in the early 1980s when he climbed with Christian Griffith, one of the best and most.