Clean climbing above Corcelles

The forecast called for a nice day but thunderstorms in the evening, and we weren't necessarily up for a big thing anyway, so we decided to go climbing in the Jura. While planning that, we happened to find a nice-sounding multi-pitch clean route outside of Corcelles in the keepwild books, so we opted for an adventurous climb (the first multi-pitch clean route we've done on our own).

From the train station in Corcelles we take a farm road up and out of town. At the first hairpin in the woods we follow the (not super often used) use trail into the woods and up, up to the cliffs. We find the bolted routes and the giant Sanduhr (not quite sure how to translate that) and start looking for the beginning of Lapiaz fantastiques. This, of course, isn't as straightforward as finding the beginning of a bolted route (and goodness knows that we aren't alwasy great at that!), but we eventually decide that we've found a likely starting point.

On with the gear and then G starts the first pitch. The first bit is kind of mossy, but after that it clears up and is pretty easy to protect up to the top of the flake. There's a bit of a drop on the other side to a saddle that's manageable after traversing the top of the flake and halfway climbing over/through a crack. Good tree here for a belay, so G stops and A comes up. Protection on the pitch was easy to find: mostly slings around trees with one sling around a rock spike. The situation looks good for us to A continues up towards the slab, trying to stay out of the couloir to the right (per topo). There's a short bit of tricky transition to slab, but then she heads to the edge and things settle down until she comes to a big tree that's another good belay. Protection on the pitch was reasonably easy: slings around trees, one sling through a sanduhr, and a friend. At this point it's looking like we're not really on the route: we're on the leftmost pillar and according to the topo there should be a pillar to our left. Ah well, we'll see what happens with the next pitch. G leads the short distance up to the top of the pillar, find that it's an easy meter down to the saddle, and opts to do a belay on a rock spike so that we can talk about what comes next. Protection on the pitch was easy with slings around trees. A comes up, crosses the saddle and moves around the corner onto the face of the next pillar, where there's a good tree for a belay. Rather than A continuing to climb, G comes over and leads the next pitch up. More pretty easy climbing with protection on trees and a couple of friends up to the saddle, where he does a belay on a tree and brings A up.
At the saddle we shorten the rope to have about 5m between us, change into our approach shoes, and take a food break. From here on its lower-grade climbing and scrambling, so we simulclimb with ~5m between us. The first bit is somewhat steep but has some nice trees for slings (including one with a colony of ants underneath it that got very unhappy and active as G stepped on the colony to rig a sling... we both ended up brushing off ants and dealing with ant bites for the next 5 minutes). After that it was less steep along the ridge, setting the occasional sling or friend to protect things, but mainly using rock spikes and making sure that we're either on different sides of the ridge or there's a good-sized tree between us; fun stuff. At the end of the ridge we congratulate ourselves, pack up all the gear, and start the hike out.

There's a use trail that takes us up, up, to an old forest road, which we follow up for a bit and then head cross-country up to the road on the broad, flat ridge of the Raimeux. Along the road, joining where we came up on our hike earlier this year, to the Raimeux de Grandval (closed! no cool drinks for us!) and then further along the ridge (G was last up here doing a trail run), past the SAC hut (closed! no cool drinks for us!), down, down, past the Auberge de Raimeux (closed! no cool drinks for us!). Since the next cool drink chances are at the station, we check the train times and realize that we've got 40 minutes to make it down. The signs say an hour. No worries, we start moving a bit more quickly. The nice hike down along the switchbacks through the woods is great for making up time and we're at the station with 7-8 minutes to spare. Plenty of time to get cool drinks before catching the train. :-)
<40 do="" down="" hour="" minutes="" nbsp="" p="" the="" to="">
<40 do="" down="" hour="" minutes="" nbsp="" p="" the="" to="">This was great! We likely weren't on the planned route for parts (possibly large parts) of it, but what we did was still a lot of fun and no problem to find protection on. We agree that doing more of this kind of thing would be good. :-)

Track (missing most of the climbing bit):