Fun week in Annot!!

I'd first heard about Annot when climbing with Alan Carne a few years ago in Verdon, he'd mentioned he was off to a climbing festival there run by a friend. I remember hearing "Trad" & "Cracks" and curiosity got the better of me reading an article he wrote here.

This stayed in my memory and we thought we'd take a trip to visit.

Annot was a lovely destination, again in Provence, perfect for those travelling and living in a van with all the things we need.

The climbing is all accessed via a short walk across the village train tracks and up through forrest on a hill. It's all cool sandstone, with some lovely crack & friction climbing, definitely worth a visit for those who like splitters or offwidths or want a change from all the limestone, or like me, need to go to crack school.


Low down you have huge boulders mainly bolted as sport routes and a lot of friction climbing (which takes a moment to get back into after Limestone), and the higher you go you get increasingly larger crags full of splitters and offwidths which are not bolted and protectable using natural pro.

We bought the topo from the local newsagent, and set off. The Topo's are fine once you get a hang for the area, but at first it was not straight forward finding our way around. Thankfully we bumped into some others who had spent a few days getting orientated (thanks to Ronny & Kathy Ek!!), and then those who we're pictured in the guidebook (Mariana Jagercikova), and they helped us find the areas we were looking for.

It's not a large venue, but well worth a visit with cracks from equivilent VS/HVS upto mid/higher level E grades. We got about as far as E1, so will have to return.

It was a great week, brilliant contract to Verdon, and perfect to get our heads around some crack and friction climbing before heading to Valle dell Orco, and later Grimsel.

After Annot we took a brief detour down to the Med for some sun and a little more climbing on the red granite around L'estreal.