Wending our way westwards towards Santander and our ferry home, we crossed into Navarra – you know you’ve arrived in the Basque speaking part of Spain because all the place names seem to contain at least one of X or Z, and more than their fair share of vowels. Navarra’s premier crag, by far, is Etxauri, south west of Pamplona (or Iruna)
It’s an undeniably awesome crag, around 3km long and with over a thousand routes, mostly single pitch but with plenty of MPAs of 100m and more. They even throw in a handy topo at one of the numerous parking spots along the steep road beneath the crag.
We’d made a brief visit as a part of our “Little Big Trip” in 1995, and managed to squeeze in a token route despite having a 15-month old Tash in tow (the abiding memory being to wonder how confident we should be that the circling vultures would really have no interest in our tiny tot!)
We’d had a couple of rainy day recces in the last decade, trying to reacquaint ourselves, but the weather gods had never played game…
This time we weren’t to be denied – it was toasty (maybe too toasty!) We climbed either side of Sector Jessica, somewhere around the center of the crag. Here’s Helen on Mirri, being photo-bombed.
… In fact they seemed to be lining up in formation…
The topography also lends itself to parapenting, and it’s striking to watch how similar the soaring patterns are between the vultures and parapents as they each seek to harness the thermals.
Grades are notoriously tough, but Gox (a stupendous soaring arete) is stiff for 6a rather than ridiculous. Buoyed by that success, I had a go at Durruti, a 35m 6a+ with a 6b extension. Suffice to say I was pleased to scrape my way to the first lower off, and called it quits whilst I could! Nails! Hot, hard, polished, run-out, tired, weak – probably all of the above, but my aspirations for getting on to some of the fab looking 7as will have to wait for a future visit.
Instead, we returned a couple of days later (ironically on a more overcast day) to sample one of the multi-pitch routes at the right hand end of the crag. There are a number of tall pinnacles, of which Kiriakon, a free-standing obelisk, is the most prominent. We picked Jaiotze Basatia, a 5-pitch 6a on the towering Torreon.
Helen led the first pitch up a diagonal flake:
I ran the next two together, leaving Helen with the tough and slippery P4 up a chimney system:
… and I finished things off to reach an airy perch (obviously regularly used by our feathered friends) with fine views of a couple of parties on Kiriakon:
An 80m just gets you down to the stance at the bottom of P4…
… and then a couple of less rope-stretching raps have you back on the ground.
Looking back from the parking you can just about make out the slender spire at the top of Torreon, uphill from Kiriakon and with the tail end of the Pyrenees in the background.
RockAroundTheWorld 