The Col de Bavella is home to Corsica’s most famous (and infamous) routes: 200 to 2,000 feet, adventurous, intricate — exactly the kind of climbing that I liked. Not everyone goes climbing in Corsica in search of adventure, though. Many climbers visit then promptly forego the Col’s frightening, rusty-bolt epics in favor of clipping shiny hangers at the smattering of sport-climbing areas along the coastline and in the mountains. The main draw for us, however, would be the Col de Bavella. Unfortunately, it had never occurred to me that “adventure climbing” might translate into all adventure, no climbing. On our first day at Bavella, we never even donned our harnesses.
Two hours of tight, twisting roads from Ajaccio, Napolean’s birthplace on the west coast, lead to the Col, at 4,000 feet. As you motor along, beaches turn into pastures, which merge into sloped terraces and finally into the spine of mountains at the heart of the Bavella. From the Col, blue sea frames the jagged peaks and granite towers to the east and west. It was more than 90 degrees F when we left the coast; the thermometer at the Col hovered around 45.
Our objective that day was the Teghie Lisce, Corsica’s “Petite Yosemite,” a 1,000-foot dome boasting a handful of 5.10 to 5.13 adventure-endurance fests. We set out at noon, our packs full of baguettes, Brie, and a sampling of Corsican charcuterie, supplemented with a double rack of gear. Though we were supposed to meet the French climbing legend and Corsica pioneer Arnaud Petit at the cliff, we had not set a meeting time. Petit’s first glimpse of us came in the form of the treetops rustling below the cliff, a half-mile from the correct approach trail, two hours later.
I had been in charge of navigation. Using my high school French, I’d determined, as per the guidebook, that we should “follow the stream then go right at some cairns.” I couldn’t quite translate two or three other sentences, but they didn’t seem important. After all, we could see the Teghie Lisce from the trailhead, separated from us by what looked to be an easy thousand feet of forested elevation gain. “We’ll be climbing in 30 minutes,” Gabe said, not bothering to fasten his pack’s waist belt as he trotted behind me. “Forty, tops.”

At the first cairn, I confidently led us right, onto a worn trail. For the next hour we followed cairns over car-sized boulders, through tunnels in the dense maquis branches (a scrubby and short tree with pungent flowers that cloaks most of the Bavella), and up slippery, black mud runnels between plateaus of thorny rosebushes. Two hours into our “30-minute” approach, we called a halt in a small clearing with cairns on every side.
“Which one is the biggest?” I asked.
“I told you we should have gone left 20 minutes ago,” Eli said.
I looked at Gabe; he looked away. Married himself, he’d chosen to stay out of Eli’s and my directional squabbles. I swatted the flies swarming around my maquis-marred elbow and squinted into the brush. “The biggest cairn usually means the route, right?” I asked.
Eli scratched a growing bite on his thigh. “Or, it could mean you’ve gone the wrong way,” he said.