Via Ferrata - Chapelle d'Abondance

There is an infinite* number of sports and activities to be done in the French Alps.  It doesn't really make much sense when i tell people i want to be an Alpinist and then have to admit to an over-developed fear of heights.  And there are a lot of heights to be found in the mountains.

Anyway so we recently took up Rock Climbing (Escalade).  We've previously climbed indoors so we have some basic knowledge and have been learning to lead climb at our nearest wall which is just down the road at Bas Thex.

But so far, because we are beginners, we've not got much more than 15 - 20m off the ground, and although this is clearly high enough to kill you as much as you can drown in 2 inches of water in the bath tub, we wanted to get out of the tub and get some real exposure.  Enter Via Ferrata - which is basically climbing a rock face which has been laced with steel cable and steel horse-shoe shaped rungs in the form of ladders.  You clip yourself onto the steel cable with a specialised karabiner and cowslip which has a shock-absorbing system built into it.

I actually didn't realise it would be so vertical, or over-hanging in a lot of places, and i certainly didn't realise that the exposure would be so huge, for the entire trip.  Anyway, it was definitely good for my heights fear - but as usual Natalie had no problem with it whatsoever and climbed it like she was climbing a flight of stairs!

* For large finite values of infinite.