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Farewelling Briançonnais 22-Sep-2014 At 5:36:33 AM Doug

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Our trip in the French Alps has come to its end: Di and I head to Grenoble tomorrow and on to Geneva the next day to fly home. We have enjoyed our time here immensely, having climbed on 5 different types of rock in six different areas. For various reasons, we didn't get done as many of the longer routes as we'd have liked (the longest two routes were 11 and 12 pitches), but are pretty happy the way things have panned out generally.
We'd definitely like to come back, although we would stay a little farther south so we could be closer to some of the crags we really enjoyed. There is a fantastic mixture of single and multi-pitch climbing to do that is readily accessible. (For those who are looking for a stouter challenge, there is lots of more remote rock and from what I could gather some really challenging trad stuff to do.)
The nicest rock we climbed on was the quartzite at Rocher Baron; the nicest crag was probably Nid d'Aigle, which is limestone with routes up to six pitches in length. The multi-pitch granite at Ailefroide was a lot of fun, although not as good quality generally as what you will find at Yosemite or Squamish.
I've done a blog post of our last week (without the visits to a 12 century fort and 12th century abbey on days it rained) consisting of a couple of day walks and three days climbing, for those who might be interested: http://dougsrandomramblings.blogspot.fr/2014/09/la-derniere-de-lete-brianconais-last-of.html