Page 16 - 2012 AMA Summer

In praise of the Costa Blanca
£50
ARTICLE
Capt Tomo Thompson R SIGNALS
Twenty four hours ago I was in the sunshine in Spain. My hands were sore but I didn’t care as it was a symptom of another excellent trip to the Costa Blanca. In any case I was using that tried and tested remedy for the pain by wrapping them around a cold glass of beer! Now I am in the car on my way to the airport again but this time it’s 0500 hours, it’s raining, and I’m going to Glasgow for the day.
This was our third trip as an HQ to the Costa Blanca to take advan- tage of the superb mix of climbing, scrambling and Via Ferrata that is available in the winter sun. The access is simple and cheap – we were climbing on one of the crags in Echo Valley within 7 hours of getting out of our beds in Innsworth – with dozens of flights, and cheap car hire and accommodation options. My recommenda- tion on the accommodation would be to use The Orange House though. Sam and Rich Mayfield run a great set up and give a dis- count to AMA members. Kit, local advice, and the guidance of an MIA (Rich) are all available but the atmosphere is also really good, with some hard-core (for example Steve McClure just before we got there) and many not so hard-core climbers. The village of Finestrat also has excellent restaurants and bars for the evenings when you don’t feel like cooking. In the same vein, Rich will run up a very tidy barbecue at a reasonable cost.
The instructors went out a couple of days early to recce some areas and routes we were unfamiliar with. This included an ascent of the Puig Campana via the 13 pitch, 450m, Hard Severe called Espolon Central. It was a superb trad route with stunning exposure, and some quite delicate climbing high up. The ascent then finishes with a couple of hundred meters of scrambling and the descent follows the main gulley down the centre of the mountain. If you do it, head for the paths to the left of the lethal scree! It was definitely a big day out and we had that warm glow of achievement as we tucked into a beer or 2 in the village that evening.
We mixed the week up for the group with a bit of everything as we had an abundance of instructors, and a wide range of experience in our students. The week began with everyone on the Ponoch Via Ferrata, which is well equipped and spectacular, and immedi- ately provides the students with a hundred metres of air beneath their heels. It finishes with a 50m abseil (it can be split into 2 if necessary) and is highly recommended as a half day activity. We then moved on to a couple of the crags in Echo Valley
to work on the climbing and belaying skills. Echo 1.5
(both Abajo and Alto) provide perfect venues for this,
and in very easy reach of the parking area. The
routes range from 3 to 6b in difficulty so there is
something to test most people. Please note you
wont find these crags in the Rockfax Guide to
Costa Blanca – contact Rich if you want to
download the topos he provides from The
The Puig Campana, 1406m
Capt Tomo Thompson climbing Espolon Central, 450m, HS on the Puig Campana
Orange House website (www.theorangehouse.co.uk). He has also made up topos for the Via Ferrata and ridge scrambles, and they are regularly updated as more crags are developed.
On the following day we split into groups, with Tomo taking Angie and Maria onto his beloved Castellets ridge (see UKC and the AMA Journal of Winter 2011 for details). They came back having visited that place called ‘stretch’ as the ridge is a serious proposition and delivers soaring exposure relatively quickly. John took our Mountain Troop representative (name withheld for obvious reasons – let’s just call him Dan) up the Puig Campana for a big mountain day out, and Ian and I concentrated on bringing on Ryan at a crag called Alca- lali – another first class teaching venue that we barely scraped the surface of in a day.
As luck would have it, one of the UK’s leading trad climbing wads (and no slouch at clipping bolts), Adam Hocking, was staying at The Orange House again (we saw him last year too) so we took advan- tage of his E9 leading ability in the hope that some of it would rub off on us mor-
14 ARMY MOUNTAINEER