He might have been right. Later, Petit later told us about a friend on a similar approach. While struggling through the bushes, snapping the branches back at his partner, he realized he was lost at the precise moment she did. When she burst into tears, he turned away and quickly stacked a few stones. “Look!” he exclaimed, pointing at the cairn. “We are not lost after all.”
By the time we made it to the base of the cliff, our bodies were slick with sweat, and prickly pear spines and rose thorns clung to our socks, shorts, and in my case, hair. Arnaud was two pitches up.
“You made it!” he shouted down.
“No problem!” I called back.
“There is a good route, over there,” he said, pointing out right. “It’s very classic — bolts, good rock. Perfect for you.” Perfect for us? What was that supposed to mean?
The first bolt was 35 feet off the ground. Eli bouldered up to it to see how much the ocean air had corroded the hardware. “Is it still vacation when you can die on your first route of the day?” he yelled down. It was already 4 p.m., and the next, rusted bolt was another 30 feet up … we needed little impetus to bail. We easily found the approach trail — a broad, well-marked path that took us directly back to the river in about 25 minutes — on the way out.
That night we met Arnaud at his van. He was climbing with two friends, the UIAGM guide Frédeéric Gentet and the photographer Evrard Wendenbaum. Trading beer for information, I offered up our guidebooks for comments and hand-drawn modifications.
“You didn’t like the route?” Arnaud asked, flipping through the book.
“How do you say ‘sandbagged’ in French?” I replied.
“Sandbag? What is sandbag?”
“You are a sandbagger,” I explained, telling Arnaud about our experience on the “classic” route.
“Perhaps this is because you are la donna Grigri?” he countered. The other Frenchmen went quiet.
“A belay bunny?” I guessed, stretching my French into Italian, and then to the universal language of climbing. “Not on your life.”
“Good, then,” said Arnaud. “We can now talk about the real routes of the Bavella.”
Soft-spoken and with a surname that aptly describes his stature, Arnaud Petit calls himself an “alpine cat.” In a café, dressed in a button-down shirt tucked tightly under his belt, he looks more like a computer technician than a climber, but put him on rock — any rock — and he dances. From success in climbing competitions, to pioneering traditional climbs, to establishing the Ceüse testpiece Biographie (5.14c), to full UIAGM guide status, Arnaud has lived almost every side of European climbing.