Crag X (Hardwear Sessions)

By Malcolm Kent

There have been a few colder days over the past week, but nothing anywhere near close enough to bring back the ice climbing conditions. As we watched the cascade d'arpennaz fall apart, piece by piece we decided it was time to go investigating.

Many years back I had a chat with Ian Parnell and he told me about a crag not too far from Chamonix where you could get in a bit of mixed/drytooling. He called it 'crag-x', which meant nothing to me, but I remembered vaguely where it was. After chatting with Jeff [Mercier], I put 2 and 2 together and figured that we should try and find where it actually was. Jeff's directions led us to a health and beauty spa in Le Fayet. Neither me or Rob could find any sign of crampon marks or tool placements in the ladies' changing rooms, so we figured we were better off walking up the gorge.

Eventually a slightly spooky trail took us to a small rock wall by the river. The crag was called the 'Dry Spa' and the topo told us of a dozen or so routes with French rock grades. It was an odd looking place started by one Mr Bruno Surzac. To be honest, I wasn't completely taken by the place, but at the same time I felt like I was engaging in some climbing history. This was the kind of place where people came to in the early days of leashless tooling in an attempt to train for hard mixed routes, without hacking at decent rock that could be used for sport climbing. Because of that it felt quite hidden and secretive and used by a small number people who were determined to train for mixed climbing all year round on real rock.

Given that I wasn't totally convinced by either the setting or the rock at the 'Dry Spa' we decided to investigate further and drive out to a place known as 'Le Sanglier' (the wild boar). I remembered watching some summer tool training on a dvd called 'Ice Up'. Jeff and Boris [Bihler] told us that this was the 'Wild Boar' and as suggested in the video the crag was mainly developed by Stephan Husson. I was psyched to check it out, so off we went. Armed with a hand drawn map and topo from Jeff and Boris we drove for an hour and a half to eventually arrive at a burned out Peugeot 306.

The Peugeot seemed to be fine, no obvious reason to burn it. This scared us. More than a 20m run out on crap holds. But cool, we headed up the 3min walk in and got involved. We ended up spending most of the day there, casually onsighting our way through a bunch of routes. The rock was great, not falling apart at all. This could have been a Limestone sport crag in the Peak. I really enjoyed the climbing at 'Le Sanglier'. The routes were on great rock and the moves flowed well. Although the holds were often well used, you got a sense of history here too. This was the first really decent mixed training venue to be developed in the Alps, and maybe in Europe?

For any more information on these locations just fire me an email and I'll sort ya out.