Climbing in Rodell

After the first day of climbing in the room we rented
View from Rodellar looking down into the canyon
Really hard climbing...
we did two climbs in the right part of this picture
Who wants a leg... :-)

Had the first real day of the trip and it was a great one. Started with a nice shower and doing some laundry in the hostel. Amaizingly after taking 3 hours to find the hostel I managed to find my way back to the airport to pick up Mikey in only 30 minutes (I think I got very lucky). Picked up Mikey a little after 8:00, found some detialed maps to find our way around Spain and France and spent about an hour trying to find a grocery, after which we spent close to an hour and a half walking around trying to get everything we´d need for the next couple days. The meat selection was out of this world, every isle had meet and there were dried cow legs lining an entire isle. Finally hit the road, and with very little wrong turns made it to Rodell by early afternoon.

There is no wonder it´s considered one of the world class climbing destinaitons, I havn´t climbed limestone like this in probably 5 years, and there just isn´t any in the northwest part of the US. The other shocker was that our 70 meter rope doesn´t really cut it. Here the routes are super long and most people are climbing with narrow diameter 80 meter ropes. It turns out they go with the narrower ropes because when you have 35 meters of rope hanging off of you it gets a little heavy. Mikey and I both agreed that we climbed the 2 longest single pitches we´d ever climbed before, both using the full 70 meters, and the secont one being about 38 meters so when the rope tension was realeased the rop was 10 feet up in the air.

Got some great pictures, will upload when I have a chance. Ended up getting a bungalo for the night because there´s very heavy rain with thunder and lightning, but our bungalo is warm and dry. :-)

Hope the weather get´s better tomorrow or we may have to drive to France early.