We had checked out the popular and only easy to access climbing spot of the Cascade de Lilliaz at the start of the week. It looked like a good plan for when we would be too tired to do more long walk ins and when the weather was predicted to be less reliable.
The cascades is the only climb which isn’t a committing route as you can bail off at any point along the river route. This also means it is very popular with climbers and spectators.
We had only intended to do one day of climbing there but after Moliene wasn’t in condition we headed back there on both Friday and Saturday.
There had been heavy snowfall and any thin ice had been covered enough for us to momentarily forget about it. So on Friday we headed up and climbed pitch 3 on the right side.
The ice was actually quite good although it did have gaping holes in some places where you could see straight through to the waterfall below.
We went continued up the river gorge to climb pitch 4.
Pitch 4 felt much easier and while there was a mid way belay point we did it in one pitch.
We had such great fun we headed back down to do the left side of pitch 3.
The following day we couldn’t bear to pay for ski hire so we headed back to climb the first two pitches. Having arrived a bit late we discovered the truth about the Cascade de Lilliaz, it is a very popular ice crag. Especially for groups and for instructors to take clients. As such it took us a while to be able to climb up the middle of the waterfall.
I found this line incredibly tricky as the centre of the waterfall was cauliflower ice formations and very snowy and soft on the top. I didn’t feel stable at all so there was some severe whinging from me.
From here we walked around the gorge to pitch 2 which was much more fun.
