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| Summer 2024 |
Rodellar was an absolute blast! We met up with friends, sent some routes and had many a day lounging about at the campsite or in the pools. In the end we stayed for the whole of June and in the El Puente campsite Fina gave us a good price for having stayed the entire month! So win win!
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| Sending beers at Kalandraka |
As for the walk to and from the Mascun valley we devised quite an ingenious way of getting there with minimum effort! We have an electric scooter in our van (charging it takes up the same power as a laptop) and although the road from El Puente to Rodellar is quite steep our scooter could just about make it (with a bit of old-school pushing) carrying one of us with the two rucksacks. So what we would do is one person would start up the hill with the scooter and bags whilst the other walked but carrying nothing, halfway up we would swap and then once at the top of the hill we would both get on the scooter and carry on to Rodellar! Like I said it was a bit mental! For the way back we would both be on the scooter and just pray that the brakes didn't break whilst going down the hill!! If you have ever seen or ever go to the el Puente hill you will realise how terrifyingly dodgy going down it on an electric scooter is! Especially when you are at the front but not being able to control it as I was, it was certainly a good test of faith in your partner!
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| Our slightly unsafe mode of transport |
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| Last weekend in Rodellar with friends |
We decided to leave at the end of June as temperatures were rising a bit and we wanted to discover the Basque Country / Euskal Herria.
ONGI ETORRI
(meaning welcome in Euskadi)
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| Mutriku |
From Rodellar we headed west to Araotz in Gipuzcoa to check out the Korea crag near the town of Oñati. This crag has some spectacular routes including the first female 8c Honky Tonky and 8c+ Honky mix sent by none other than Josune Bereziartu in 1998 and 2000!
Read more about Josune here:
Our original plan was to spend some time in the Araotz area and then carry on to Teverga Asturias La Hermida and maybe even Galicia. WELL we ended up staying for just over a month in Korea and rarely climbed in any other sectors. Whoops! What can I say! We really liked the climbing there and although the car park wasn’t great, whenever we thought about going somewhere else the temperatures were much higher in other places and so we stayed put!
The luxury of having more time meant that days that were not so good we would rest or just not climb as much. The Basque Country is very similar to England weather wise and conditions are often very hit and miss. Temperatures can vary enormously going from almost 40 degrees to 18 degrees within a day! But on the whole we were fairly lucky and we were able to climb for the almost two months that we stayed without too much interference from weather. There were 4 days of a heatwave that we went to Mutriku to visit a friend of ours and up to Urbia for a yearly celebration.
We got very very psyched with the wall and there is constant development going on and currently there are about 70 routes in the Korea sector alone. The wall itself stays mainly dry even when it's raining which is a huge bonus especially in the Basque country because it rains a fair bit(!) Apparently we were really lucky because when we arrived it had been raining for several weeks straight and had only just stopped. Spring had been very very wet...! If it's a sunny day the sun tends to hit the wall at around late midday and go back into the shade about 18h / 19h ish. Conditions are a complete mystery, there were days where we'd wake up and think that the conditions were going to be bad but then we'd walk up to the crag and they would be fantastic! In the end more than temperature it came down to whether it was windy or not and whether the wind was coming from the north or not. Rainy days actually tended to be better days and windy and cloudy days were spectacular!
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| Aitzulo (the eye that sees all) above Araotz |
I would definitely recommend the Basque Country in summer. The weather is fairly stable, some rain if you're unlucky but on the whole fairly dry. The people are great and welcoming and you escape the unbearable heat that drives most of the rest of Spain into spending the summer in air conditioned gyms or like us, moving around a bit to find cooler crags. On other trips we have been to La Hermida and Teverga, I would recommend Teverga over La Hermida if you have a bigger van as La Hermida involves driving every day to and from smaller carparks whereas in Teverga you can park up and walk to nearly every single sector. I have friends who stayed in one of the car parks to a particular sector in La Hermida thus avoiding moving every day but it's right by the road and not that relaxing! If you have a second smaller vehicle or even a motorbike then you'll be fine! The climbing in La Hermida is well worth the visit.
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| Urbia - here we stumbled on a yearly festival held on the 31st of July |
On our way back east we stopped by La Leze, many people had told us about this crag and we wanted to check it out before leaving. You park up at a sort of New Forest vibe area with donkeys and horses roaming freely. There's a water fountain and plenty of shaded woodland. There are easier sectors close-by but to get to La Hoya de La Leze it's about a 40min hike up a south facing hill and then a short track down into the sector. It's a pretty impressive wall with long routes and predominately crimpy old-school style climbing, like I say we weren't there for long but what we saw and tried was fairly manufactured but cool moves all the same.
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| The view from the top of the hike to La Hoya de la Leze |
Continuing east we stopped by Campo wanting to discover a sector called La Ola but there were roadworks all the way up the valley and none of the carparks were usable (roadwork machinery and materials having shut them off) so we only got to see the sector from the road as we drove past. We carried onto Bielsa where to our surprise (but maybe not really that surprising) the car parks where they used to let vans stay overnight have signs saying that overnight sleeping is prohibited. We had come some years earlier and there was absolutely no problem at all to sleep there - there was even a group that set up a projector and held an outdoor cinema in the middle of the carpark. So I suppose it's not surprising that something was done but it's a shame that it's just straight out prohibiting overnight staying. A bit higher up there is a campsite and I think not too far away there is a campervan area that's fairly cheap to stay at. As for free camping all options seem to have been eliminated. We climbed a bit in Las Devotas sector and carried onto Figols in Alt Urgell.
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| Our happy faces at the top of Pànic Timpànic |
We climbed for a few days in Figols a l'Ombra and then finally we got to climb Pànic Timpànic. A multi-pitch that goes up the left side of Paret Primavera of Roca Narieda. An impressive 250m route with 7 pitches and some really cool climbing. We thoroughly enjoyed it! Recently I got some new hearing aids and quite by accident David and I discovered that I could use them as walkie talkies. We forgot to charge our actual walkie talkies, a multipitch must have if you're hard of hearing like I am, and to be honest for anyone doing a multi pitch, it makes communication a hell of a lot easier, and so David called me and because my new hearing aids connect to my phone I was able to answer and talk completely hands free and David placed his phone in his back pack and was able to continue talking to me as he climbed! It worked wonderfully!
Maps:
Route description:
We finished off our summer with a family wedding in Osor, proving that we may spend our days climbing rocks but we can dress up nicely too! Although I was helped by my mother in law and sister in law... I misunderstood the wedding invite... it said we could go casual but obviously not as casual as I was thinking!
Next stop Alicante!!
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