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 influential American climbers of that era. Three days later, at a more obscure cliff called Pimaï, Phil and I talked with one guy from northern Spain who, after a while, looked at me and said, “I know you. Your wife, she is really strong, no?” I laughed and said, “Yes, she is.
” “I met you in Indian Creek many years ago,” he recalled. “And I saw you and your wife in China.” Sure enough, Toti and I first crossed paths at a sandstone crag in Utah probably 15 years ago.
Then, in 2018, we met again in Getu, China, where we stayed in the same hostel and ate delicious food at adjacent tables. To randomly meet a third time, in a third country felt serendipitous — as if the many years and life stages that had passed for both of us were timeless in that moment. Our penultimate climbing day found us back at La Saume, where our “to-do list” of routes had somehow grown during our days away.
There, I ran into David — a keen, young Scottish climber whom I’d met with my family last winter in Chulilla, Spain. He said he’s been traveling and climbing nonstop since we met in February. “I should probably go home and work at some point,” he said with a laugh.
I tweaked my knee that morning so I climbed conservatively for the remainder of the day. Meanwhile, Phil battled two long, steep routes (both rated 5.12d) that demanded a full-on effort — and he succeeded on both.
An Italian man belaying next to us, Andrea, was impressed and offered congratulations. He seemed well-versed in Italian climbing so I asked him about the weather in the Dolomites this season. Was it as bad as the forecast had warned? I burned with curiosity: had we made the right call by bailing from Plan A? “Many climbers wanting long routes are.
.. how do you say.
.. frustrated this summer,” he said.
“Wettest summer in many years.” At first, his words reassured me. But then I thought how ridiculous that was.
I didn’t need reassurance. Our trip had been dreamy, regardless of our original plans. We’d explored new crags, savored the low-stress, high-elevation climbing and we hadn’t felt a single drop of rain.
I’d even had a chance to reconnect with friends, new and old, from times past. Best of all, Phil and I made a great team and we’re closer now than we were two weeks earlier. The climbs merely provided a memorable backdrop for what really counts: the people we meet and the friends we know and love.
Contact Chris Weidner at [email protected]. Follow him on Instagram @christopherweidner and X @cweidner8.
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