350 pages, 850 ice and mixed routes: it’s been a long wait, but not in vain! Twenty years have passed since the previous topo, and now the new guidebook for ice climbing around Briancon, France, by Sébastien Constant, has been published. This guidebook includes the Fournel and Freissinières sectors, and offers the keys to the largest concentration of icefalls in the Alps. Just in time for this weekend’s Ice Climbing Écrins festival.
While the Alps are home to several major ice climbing valleys – not forgetting Gavarnie in the Pyrenees – the Briancon region of the French Alps is widely acknowledged to have the highest concentration of ice climbing in Europe, with the two flagship valleys of Freissinières and Fournel at its center. For a good three decades now, ice climbers have been making the pilgrimage to the Hautes-Alpes, and more specifically to L’Argentière-la-Bessée, south of Briançon, France, from where Le Fournel and Freissinières are just a few minutes’ drive away. Close to Italy, Briancon is a two-hour drive south of Grenoble, three and a half hours from Lyon.
At the time, pioneers such as Robert Balestra, a mountain rescuer, and of course Gérard Pailheret – inventor of the event that would become Ice Climbing Ecrins Festival – were enjoying dozens of openings, particularly at Le Fournel valley, so vast was the playground and so many possibilities. Robert Balestra’s first topo was published in 1992 and 1996. The last to be published before Seb Constant’s new topo was by Philippe Turin and Étienne Fine, in 2005! From 150 routes in 1992, there are now over 850.
Let’s take a look at the important heritage of ice climbing, its sectors and major routes opened especially around the 90s and 2000s.
Before the 90s, there were the first ice climbing adventures in the early 80s, with the advent of straight-handled banana-blade ice axes (Simond Chacal). There were French pioneers like Gérard Chantriaux, the visionary climber (designer of Charlet’s Pulsar) who soloed the Viollins cigar (rated 6 at the time) in 1982, but also brothers Jean-Marc and Stéphane Troussier, Jacques Perrier, Hughes Jaillet… who at the dawn of the 80s pioneered stunts like Hiroshima at Fournel.
Then came what topo author Seb Constant calls “the golden age” at the turn of the 90s: winters with little snow, and plenty of ice! This was the time when François Damilano, but also locals such as Philippe Pellet and Guy Cavarec, were scouring the cascades.
The key moment? 1991! The year when the Gramusat face, in Freissinières, saw the first (Au-delà des ombres 5+ by Ph. Pellet and S. Rosso) of a series of lines still regarded today as major and, for many, high-level, and some ten days later François Damilano and Philippe Allardin with the most beautiful (it’s subjective) route on the face, Juste une illusion, 6.
In 1992 Christophe Moulin and Serge Angelucci opened Geronimo, the highest line on the face (550 metres!), while other major lines fell, with Jeff Lowe and Thierry Renault (Blind Faith, 6), Jacques Perrier (L’ensemble de Mandelbrot, 6+) and even a certain Canadian, Guy Lacelle, and also Jean-Christophe Lafaille.
The Icefall has found its center of the universe, and it’s on the north face of Gramusat, for the next ten years… and maybe even today. This week French climber and mountain guide Jonathan Joly climbed one of Gramusat’s great routes with Greg Boswell from Scotland.
From the mid-90s to the turn of the 2000s, it was all about finding the ultimate fragile edifices, tubes or freestandings completely detached from the rock, and then climbing on the rock itself, with the first mixed and dry tooling lines, where the aim was to reach lost draperies far from the ground, or to connect ice swords interspersed with rock pitches. With major openings in extreme ice, including Over The Top (one of the only grade 7s in the Alps), opened by Christophe Moulin and Jérôme Blanc-Gras in 1996.
Then came the craze for dry tooling, and not just in Gramusat, but in all the large walls of Freissinières, which became a high-level laboratory, a movement inaugurated in 1991 (with a little artifice) with Les Racines du Ciel (6, M6/A2 by Serge Angelucci, Damilano, Moulin), and which was to be unleashed by the advent of “dragonne-free” climbing in the early 2000s.
Ephemeral, interrupted and extreme lines were then born, such as Cimetière des Éléphants (6/M8, by Cyrille Copier, Jean-François Étienne, Ph. Pellet, in 2000).
Climbers like Cyrille Copier, Tony Clarasso, Jérôme Blanc-Gras, Christophe Moulin and Arnaud Guillaume reinvented ice climbing. Extreme M10 pitches such as Quartier Nord (now rated M9) were born.
With its precise dates and locations, this new guide to the Briançon region traces the history of ice climbing, which is also a part of the history of mountaineering.
But ice climbing, even in the Briançon area, is not limited to high-level practice. The number of affordable waterfalls is huge, provided you’re willing to take the trouble to get away from the more classic ones, such as the popular spot at Cervières, above Briançon, or Ceillac. And then there are the artificial structures for discovering the ice climbing activity.
It’s the merit of a new guidebook for the Briançonnais region to embrace the history of ice climbing, but above all to offer the chance to look a little further afield, in the next valley – at the bottom of Freissinières, at Chichin for example, on little-frequented lines – some of which were already cleared in 1995.
By the way, this new topo doesn’t just cover the Briançonnais, Fournel and Freissinières. You’ll also find the excellent sectors of Queyras, further south, and Valle Argentera, in Italy, as well as Vallouise, and Embrunais and its less-frequented valleys with numerous possibilities, from the affordable (Crévoux, for example) to the very hard (with the Pisse wall at Rabioux, and the famous Rappelle-toi que tu es un gnome, by Raphaël Borgis, Damien Charignon and Seb Foissac in 1999).
The author, also a guide and former CRS mountain rescuer, has given the keys to each route, with precise access and approach information.
Important: the avalanche risk, if any, is indicated in orange for each waterfall. Seb Constant preferred to write this down in black and white, rather than indicating a degree of commitment in Roman numerals, which is rarely used in the 05.
Each sector, and therefore each route, has been traced on photos: a titanic task when you consider the extent of the terrain, and the relative brevity of the icy season.
If a topo is first and foremost a compendium of mountaineering history, it is above all a guide that helps you avoid cramming in the most frequently climbed routes, or those that have been returned to camptocamp.
In a thick preamble, Seb Constant takes the time to explain which equipment to use for which approach, which rack or set of clothes to take for this demanding winter mountain practice. And above all, how to prepare for your outing.
An essential guidebook for ice climbers in the French Alps.
How to get the topo
Available in bookshops and at Le Vieux Campeur.
Also available online from Éditions Constant.