Du Saleve

Du Saleve is an amazing wall above Geneva, playground for climbers, runners, sky-runners and all the other outdoor activities. It isn't any wild mountain wall anymore but very well equipped net of routes. Better description would be to call it a big open climbing gym. I see larger potential in skyrunning there, please see my project: run-the-wall
where one can find also 3-d model of Saleve.

The knowledge of Saleve is very well provided in plenty web pages. I don't want to bring any new information with this post but rather to summarize that and maybe point out some issues at specific routes.

Important links:
Touristic paths: link
1-length routes: stone
Longer routes:Morgans main-wall
Boulders: boulders
Maps: geoadmin

Please inform me in case that you have any other nice source of information!

WARNINGS:

(I hope I don't have to tell this but:)

- Some of the tourist paths are very difficult!
- Stones are falling down very often, wear the helmet even  for walking tours!
- Don't go there when it is raining, it is limestone!
- There is a risk that big part of the rock falls down. Please see the warnings down at the parking place close to the tennis courts.

Some of our experiences

L'arête des Etiollets

inside the crevice

the route is quite slippery, but very nice. There is one difficult decision how to get over the gap between rocks after two lengths. We decided to rappel down 30 m to the gap/cave/crevice where we found another route up called flip (I am sure that this is not part of this route). I did one length and decided to rappel down again as it was too difficult for us (maybe 6a or something at slippery rock). But we could walk around and join the route again at 5th length. After 6th length we found the way to prolong that via few routes in the right culoir so that we could climb quite high.

Le Jaune

this is one of the very old and classic routes. It has two lengths of 4+, maybe 5 if you choose the outside variant for last 10 m. It is very nice route with nice view. The problem is that it is very slippery. The rivets are also quite far from each other so we used our own gear for securing at least at two places.

Le Balcon

we continued Le Jaune with Le Balcon which is 5+ 15 m long. Also slippery but very well secured so it doesn't matter too much. The Balcon itself is amazing place when one can sit for hours.