Les Calanques, France

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Les Calanques, France

On the Mediterranean shore near the delightful French town of Cassis is what has to be one of the most fascinating climbing areas in the world: Les Calanques. Cassis has enough charms to seduce all but the most focused and oblivious climbers to throw down their ropes and racks and order up a bottle of Chateau Vannieres.

Toon, Cary and the Sloth had been attending a meeting in Aix-en-Provence. At one time, I thought that medical doctors held the cards when it came to finding fantastic places to scam a convention. But you will be hard pressed to find a better place than Aix in which to discuss the intricacies of electron cyclotron emission and absorption. Not only is Aix the former home of the famous impressionist painters Chablis, Cabernet and Cezanne, but it also is only an hour or so from the Grand Canyon of France, Les Gorges du Verdon another good climbing and hiking venue. An added bonus of the trip to Verdon is passing the French nuclear research site at Cadarache, where, if God has any empathy for fusion research whatsoever, the ITER project will be built. The impressive Mount Saintes-Victoire, with several routes on it, is just outside town. Chablis made several paintings of this massif, capturing its many moods and his.

Toon, you may recall, has a tradition of car problems. He is the very same guy who left his jacket with the keys to the rental car, which in turn contained all of everybody's stuff when we climbed the Snake Dike route on Half Dome a few years ago. "Hey, Toon, this car sounds like a diesel." "No, it's a normal car," was the conversation, which preceded a gas purchase and subsequent tow to a garage to get the gas swapped out for diesel fuel. Luckily, the car recovered, since on this day, our first shot at Les Calanques, the heavens opened and it just poured…after, fortunately, the car was running again. With the rain it became necessary to abort for the day and find a suitable café, which we did. Toon and I still had one more day before we had to leave.

But, unfortunately, the next day was without Cary, who had better things to do than run around with two dudes in the south of France. This was explained by the fact that Cary didn't have tenure yet, Buoyed by the beautiful weather, Toon and Sloth dropped Cary off at the Marseilles airport and headed again for Cassis. Once in town, you can either park in a lot which is famous for breakins and theft or you can drive past the lot and try to find a place on the street closer to the jumping off place. Later in the day there may be a gendarme present to guide you back to the lot, but early in the morning there were plenty of places on the road leading to Les Calanques. Just follow the crowds of climbers and picnickers.

We had decided to head for En Vau, which is about the third Calanque from the town. As you walk, you are paralleling the shoreline and cutting off the points of land between the bays. It's a fun hike, with lots to see and the trails are well marked if you know where you're headed. Finally, we topped a rise and way down below us sparkled the bay at En Vau. It was classic Mediterranean, with a couple of moored boats, steep cliffs that plunged right into the water and a sandy looking beach, which turned out to be rocky. Some of the ants on the sand turned out to be topless beach babes, much to our delight.

We stupidly decided to bushwack from the overlook to the beach and slipped, slid and swore our way down to the broad well traveled trail leading to En Vau. As we hiked along the trail, we began to see bolted routes on the steep cliffs. The more we looked, the more routes we saw. They were everywhere, the current US moral discussions regarding bolting apparently not having reached this area. From time to time we would see locals hanging from and standing on the bolts, making the most of the French technique. Pooped out, we were happy to see the beach heave into sight as we rounded a bend past an aguille with climbers all over it. We headed directly for the beach.

Walking on the stones with bare feet, one is compelled to hunch over and wave one's arms in order to lighten the body and take some of the weight off the tender tootsies. Ignoring the topless ones, we hit the water, which was cold as hell despite the turquoise blue, the sun and the ambience. We hunched and flapped back to our towel and began to survey the scene. The etiquette for going topless, it became clear, is that you had to have given birth to do it. The hardbodied teenieboppers all were topped out, as were their grandmas. Although only a few moms were available to ogle, that was OK with us, since we had, after all, come to climb. After a few crude attempts to take breast photos by pretending to take pictures of each other framed so that we were in the lower left corners, we decided to head for the rock.

Right at the beach was the Petite Aguille, a finger thrusting sharply up next to the trail, which had routes all over it, so we decided to climb there rather than try to find the Supercalanque, which had been our original objective. The route we chose on the Petite was actually a lot of fun…two pitches of about 5.8 near a whole lot of climbers having similar fun on other routes. All the routes are on limestone, with very different texture from our standard granite. In some places really easy moves were made much harder by the fact that the holds were polished to a slippery sheen. In other places, hand cracks were unbelievably solid without being sharp. If you are looking for an ego trip, flexing and posturing on a climb, which is being passed by literally hundreds of appreciative hikers, this area is for you.

In France you have to remember that shouting "rope, rope," is about as understandable as shouting "vous et a mouche" would be at Tahquitz. If you want everyone to duck, "attencion!" works better, even if it's not the standard call. In spite of my bombing them with my rope, everyone smiled eventually once they realized I was a stupid American peeg. As far as we could tell, the climbers were clones of the Los Alpinistas, except we didn't see the equivalent of Carl, since there is no equivalent of Carl.

So, as the sun began to set, we rapped off, ogled one last time, packed up and headed back to Cassis and eventually back to our far away homes. We only climbed that one climb, but it was great fun and the whole thing was much more interesting than a regular climbing trip. If you ever plan on being in the very south of France, perhaps setting up a cold fusion laboratory or looking to join the Foreign Legion, take your shoes, rope, harness and about 6 draws to the Calanques. You will have a fantastic time in a spectacular setting.

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