Nope, I don't ice climb. Sorry.
I'd heard of the Grands Jardins before but hadn't ever been there. It was also quite difficult to get good beta, since the (Quebec-wide) guidebook was from 2000 and impossible to buy; at least I managed to take a few pictures of it in the Grande Bibliotheque du Quebec. There are three areas just outside the Grands Jardins are the Dôme, Mont du Gros Bras ("big arms"), and de l'Ours. As the name suggests, the Dôme is slabby climbing, on granite.
A break in the rain on Sunday meant that carrying climbing gear to Chicoutimi and Baie St-Paul wasn't in vain after all. Yay! The PDF about Gros Bras suggested that it dried slowly, so we decided to climb La Granuleuse on the Dôme. Four pitches, mostly slabby. First ascent May 15, 1977: 37 years and 3 days before my climb. Also, the climb shares my birthyear. Obviously I had to climb it.
Looks dry to me! In patches, anyway. But the clouds are less than encouraging. This view is towards the Fleuve St.-Laurent.
Navigating through wet patches and some shrubbery got me to the top of pitch 1. Pitch 2, straightforward, also continued to be dry.
I'd read that the route was full of the holes characteristic to the area and was a bit confused about that. Turns out that they are mini-huecos. They totally make for excellent holds.
There are also lots of horizontal cracks and I found myself placing lots of tricams. More than I'd placed at the Gunks; on some of the pitches I placed all 4 of my tricams (black, red, pink, brown).
I tried to avoid the wet patches on pitch 3 as well, but after extended close-up examination of unprotectable slab harder than 5.7 right off the belay, I realized that the route couldn't possibly go that way. Instead, the right thing to do was to climb through the stream. Fortunately, granite, and 5.6. Still, it was pretty runout, and a long pitch. Felt adventurous.
(Don't go straight up; go climber's left.)
There was just one vertical section on this climb. It came with a bolt. (There are also bolted anchors on the route). A reach to a jug gets you over that section, though, and three steps to the right then get you over to the belay anchor.
The fourth pitch has a variant with allegedly amazing climbing, but that followed some bad pro. A couple of raindrops convinced me to not take the variant and instead to climb straight through the corner. It's still pretty difficult to protect, but straightforward to climb.
As I started climbing pitch 4, the rain switched to hail and I felt like I was in a big pachinko machine. This effect is particularly pronounced on slab, since the hailstones bounce down on the slab and towards the leader who has no gear above the anchor yet. If you look closely you can see the hailstones in this video.
The hail switched back to rain and it definitely started to get wet. Yet I could see the sunshine over there. How unfair!
You may have noticed MP trailing a rope in some of those pictures. I was climbing on my 60m rope. All the documentation mentioned that I better have two 60m ropes to rap. So I brought along my 70m rope. A tag line would've been nice to own.
Pitches 4 and 3 were somewhat long, so I rapped them separately; definitely more than 30m each. Pitches 2 and 1, though, were much shorter. So I thought I'd link those rappels. I saw that the rope reached the last bushy ledge just above the ground as I was at the p1 anchor, about 2m above the ground. The snow on the ground was useful here---probably better than a bouldering pad!
As I've mentioned elsewhere, there are emus nearby. The self-proclaimed largest emu farm in eastern Canada in fact. (The crux to emu farming is in selling emu products, they say.) Even though they claim to be open until 4:30, we'd shown up at 4 the day before, and the barn was closed. No emu visiting. But our 6am start on climbing day definitely got us to the emu farm in time. As you enter the barn, you see dozens of emus, all looking at you (unless they're too short; full-grown emus are 6 feet tall, though).
(Note on red tape: The Dome appears to be on land owned by the ZEC des Martes. You are supposed to sign in with them and pay $5/day or something. The chalets, however, are owned by La Traversée de Charlevoix. You can pay $35/person/night to stay there. They do get good views though!)
- 3713_plam_starting_the_approach 2515 visits
- 3715_chalet_l_eudore 2152 visits
- 3717_landing_area 2432 visits
- 3718_la_granuleuse 2043 visits
- 3719_red_lichen 1823 visits
- 3723_plam_ready_to_climb 1933 visits
- 3724_mp_belaying_on_snow 2002 visits
- 3727_route_381 2272 visits
- 3728_might_rain 1947 visits
- 3731_mp_navigating_through_tree 1957 visits
- 3733_up_at_p2 1894 visits
- 3734_up_at_top_of_p2 1932 visits
- 3735_chalets 1950 visits
- 3739_framed_by_branch 2346 visits
- 3743_holes 2194 visits
- 3750_one_of_many_tricam_placements 2458 visits
- 3751_kinda_runout_in_retrospect 1910 visits
- 3752_still_belaying 1959 visits
- 3753_more_horizontal_cracks 1715 visits
- 3754_long_pitch 1713 visits
- 3755_scar_in_mountainside 1555 visits
- 3756_view_atop_p3 1640 visits
- 3757_vertical_bit 1596 visits
- 3759_mp_at_56_crux 1584 visits
- 3760_the_jug 1650 visits
- 3763_traversing_back_to_the_belay 1598 visits
- 3766_initial_corner_of_p4 1649 visits
- 3767_pachinko 2079 visits
- 3768_vegetation 1661 visits
- 3772_now_more_wet 1958 visits
- 3774_topped_out 2307 visits
- 3775_panorama 1981 visits
- 3776_definitely_raining 2184 visits
- 3783_mp_closeup 1914 visits
- 3786_mp_in_rain 2051 visits
- 3787_plam_in_rain 1894 visits
- 3790_mp_waiting_for_rope_free 1816 visits
- 3791_off_i_go 1788 visits
- 3793_mountainside_again 1673 visits
- 3794_roofs 1775 visits
- 3798_mp_on_rappel_down_p4 1906 visits
- 3803_lichen 1997 visits
- 3806_mp_after_rappel 1759 visits
- 3809_wet_slabs 1871 visits
- 3810_around_chalet_dome 2032 visits
- 3814_all_done 2552 visits