The week kicked off with a gorge walk from around 900m up to about 1900m. The going was quite tough but the views were spectacular.
Next on the agenda was some white water rafting, followed by some hydro speeding. Rich S gave me a complete bum steer as to what hydro speeding entailed, so I was a little surprised to find myself suited and flippered up, then lashed on to a bit of polystyrene before being deposited back at the start of the rafting course.
Great fun, although more than a little bruising.
Without any let up, we then went mountain biking with some good technical stuff and some great downhill sections. Walkers were a bit of a problem though and as we meandered our way down into Spain, there were more than a few shouts of 'excusez moi!' and 'pardon!'.
I'll not bore you with details of the highest aerial extreme I have ever been at and will skip direct to our day off.
We hired a guide called Sebastian, who we found out afterwards is one of the strongest and most famous climbers and boulderers in the Pyrenees.
Kinda like a French Ginger.
Sebastian took us to some great rock outcrops and set up a range of climbs from VS to HVS. The weather was great and the HVS routes were outstanding.
Why I worried about InPin is beyond me.
In the afternoon, we went bouldering in the Targasonne area, which is very like a French version of Brimham Rocks. We tackled some easy problems to start with and moved on to 6a Grades on the Fontainebleu scale.
For the newcomers, this equates to 'bloody difficult - Spiderman qualities required'
Our guide for this was Dave. Dave is originally from Barnsley and lives for 6 months of the year in a cave in the Himalayas. He too was quite obviously descended from Ginger and seemed to climb using only two fingers and one of his toes.
A maestro of bouldering, but then he does practice 7 hrs a day in the Himalayas.
The finale to our week was a canyoning day and having done numerous ghyll scrambles here in the UK, I felt quite confident.
The reality is however, that the canyons there are much steeper sided, much faster and much more dangerous. We negotiated sumps, tyrolean traverses, zip wires, swims and about 6 major jumps, the biggest of which was 11m.
All in all a great week. Simon and Dave (our guides for the week) were superb and have stated that if Verdes want a tailor made trip next year, say over a long weekend, they will put it together for us.
Davie
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