Adventures on granite of all sizes - part 2 (L-XXL)

In the last blog I covered our climbs on small to mediumly sized things, mostly in Valle dell'Orco. Climbing in Orco was great fun in its own right, and we're both really psyched for a return trip at some point. The ulterior motive though was to prepare for some much bigger granite ascents in the French and Swiss Alps this summer.

Ultimately, the terrible mountain weather scuppered most of our plans - according to several people we've spoken to, this has been the worst Alpine summer for a very long time. We've seen Facebook updates from friends who live in Chamonix contemplating moving back to the UK, and we know of several other people who have cancelled planned holidays to the Alps and gone sport climbing instead. Last week, we'd planned to meet up with some friends in the Dolomites, but the forecast looked so bad that they drove all the way up to meet us in the Frankenjura instead (for more information see Andy's blog - as I was typing that sentence he announced that he has already finished writing a post about it - aargh!)

So that's our excuse for only managing to do one big route this summer. We picked a good one though...

The big

Motorhead

Motorhead is a classic 14 pitch route on Eldorado, a massive sheet of granite rising out of Grimselsee. This route was on both of our 'to do' lists so we were both really pleased when a few days of good weather in the middle of July gave us a chance to go for it. The climbing is a mixture of pure friction slabs and layback cracks. We'd been expecting to be able to put our Orco crack climbing practice to good use, but actually most of the cracks turned out to be flaring and hard to jam in, making the climbing a lot more strenuous than we expected. The views down the route to the lake below were awesome - just smooth sheets of granite as far as you could see. There is one particular photo that everyone who climbs Motorhead seems to take, looking down the crack on pitch 6 (I think?) - we took it too!




Friction slab climbing on glacier-polished granite is not something that I'm used to. It requires a lot of confidence to keep moving upwards with no real handholds or footholds, just trusting in the friction of your shoes on the rock. I was quite glad that I wasn't the one leading. It's also quite hard on the feet - by the end we were having to stop and take our shoes off after nearly every pitch. My advice: wear loose, comfortable rock shoes for this route - it's not like there's many actual footholds to stand on anyway!

Pitch 3 - fast climbing pair waiting patiently for me to get a move on...

Encouragingly, our multipitch practice in Orco seemed to have paid off and I thought we climbed the whole thing fairly quickly and efficiently with slick changeovers between pitches. We were so efficient that I completely forgot to take photos, which is why I only have the same two photos that Andy already used. We were slightly put to shame by another British climbing pair who started the route behind us though. They let us go first because 'We haven't climbed together before' and 'I'm out of practice at rock climbing'. It turned out though that she was out of practice because she'd just got back from climbing Denali, and I heard him apologetically admit that he'd only done a few E3's this year! So although spent the first five pitches desperately seconding as fast as I physically could, every time I looked down one or the other of them would be standing a few metres below, patiently waiting for me to get a bit higher. I was quite relieved when we found a ledge after pitch five that was big enough to let them go past, from where they rapidly disappeared into the distance.

We tried to take a summit photo - it didn't work so well...

Overall, it was an awesome route and a big day out - the combination of the walk in, the route, the descent and the walk out left us very tired, but in a good way. The next day we tried to climb some more granite slabs at Räterichsbodensee, but we gave up after three pitches due to a combination of tiredness and sore feet. We came down, had lunch and went for a gentle afternoon stroll around the lake instead. With hindsight, if we'd known that this was to be our last window of good weather we might have made more of an effort...

The very big (a failed attempt at...)

Salbit south ridge

Apart from Motorhead, my only defined goal for the Alps was to do a route that went to a 'proper' summit. I've never been to an Alpine summit before. On my only previous trip to the Alps two years ago we tried a route on the Aiguille du Moine, but abandoned the attempt very early on because the climbing was harder than we expected, meaning that we couldn't move fast enough to be sure of getting up and back down safely.

We picked the south ridge of Salbit (Salbitschijen to give it its full name, but that's hard to say) as our mountain objective for the Bernese Oberland. It's not as high as many of the others in the area, measuring 2981 m, but it is a very definite peak - the last pitch of the route climbs up a huge pointy flake. Given the dodgy weather, the low-ish height was an advantage as it meant that the approach was fairly straightforward - about 3.5 hours walk up to a bivvy hut near the base of the route, with no glacier travel involved. After Motorhead, we spent about a week hanging around in the rain, but then the forecast suggested that a three day weather window was coming up so we decided to walk up and have a go.

What is this..?

Cake...?!

We arrived at the parking area in perfect sunshine, and began the gear faff. We were planning to spend two nights up in the hills (one afternoon to walk in, one day to do the south ridge, one day to do another, shorter route and walk down), so we needed to carry food, cooking equipment and sleeping bags as well as all our climbing gear. Unhelpfully, some of the local cows got a bit curious about what we were up to. They seemed to be particularly interested in our pile of food - I didn't know cows liked marble cake! This slowed down our packing a bit - one of us had to find things in the van while the other stood guard to make sure the cows didn't steal or trample our stuff. I'm not sure exactly how I would have stopped a gigantic cow with massive horns from doing that, so I was quite glad when they got bored and wandered off.

Into the unknown...

The first part of the walk (up to the main Salbithütte) was hot and sweaty, but otherwise fairly pleasant. On the second part (crossing from the main hut to the bivvy hut), the mist suddenly rolled in and visibility dropped dramatically - we were glad of the very dense path markings. We were a bit confused when we came across a large, suspended bridge that wasn't marked on our map or mentioned in the guidebook. Walking across it into the mist without being able to see the other side was quite atmospheric. The bivvy hut is a small metal box, a bit like a shipping container, perched inconspicuously among some boulders on the hillside - it took us a while to find it in the mist. From the outside it doesn't look like much, but it's quite cosy inside, with two rows of beds, a table and benches and a tiny kitchen unit.

The next morning we woke up at 6am, ate an entire marble cake between us for breakfast (for energy!) and set off for the start of the route (back across the bridge, about a 20 min walk from the hut). It was disturbingly cloudy, but we were hopeful that it would lift by the time we got to the route and we'd get the patchy sun that the weather forecast had promised. As we walked, we heard a few faint rumbles that sounded a bit like thunder, but we optimistically convinced ourselves that it was just the wind. By the time we reached the base of the route though there was definitely water falling out of the sky and we couldn't ignore it any more. Disappointed, we turned round and headed back to the hut in a downpour that got steadily heavier - we were soaked by the time we made it back.

The bivvy hut, and the "view"

We had phones with us, so we spent the rest of the morning in the bivvy hut (which got quite full at one point with other similarly damp climbers) trying to get hold of weather forecasts from various sources. The overall consensus was that the forecast had changed and our three-day window had vanished and been replaced by near-continuous rain. Our chances of getting on the route the next day looked remote, so we waited for a gap in the rain and walked back down. The weather brightened up considerably as we got near to the valley floor, and we passed some people heading upwards carrying ropes and helmets, which was confusing behaviour given the forecasts we'd seen. So when we reached the van we checked the forecast again - in the three hours it took us to walk down it had changed again and was now predicting sun for the following day! We briefly thought about walking back up again, but decided we couldn't face it. In the end, it rained heavily in the afternoon of the next day, so this was probably the right decision...


Overall score: Alps 2, Ali 0. Next time...

Gelmersee - we went here one rare morning when it wasn't raining

The even bigger (for the future...)

Salbit West Ridge

Although I'm keen to go back for the South Ridge, I think I have also acquired a bigger goal for the future. The West ridge of Salbit is like the South ridge, but more so - it's both longer and harder at a total of 36 pitches and an overall grade of 6b (alpine ED). Some friends of ours from the NLMC, who are much fitter, better and faster than us, did the whole thing in one (very long) day during the good weather window when we did Motorhead. Many (most?) people do it as a two day expedition instead and spend a night at a popular bivvy spot in a notch between two ridge towers affectionately known as 'Hotel Salbit'. Either way, I'm going to have to get a LOT fitter - essentially we'd have to be able to climb the equivalent of 1.3 Motorheads on the first day, and then be able to get up the next morning and do it all again. After climbing the actual Motorhead we were basically broken the whole of the next day - definite work needed...

The start of the West Ridge - I think it would look better if it wasn't wet...

The bivvy hut is located about five minutes walk from the base of the route, so we caught a glimpse of the start of it from the window when the mist cleared. It looks pretty intimidating but inspiring too...

Adventures on granite of all sizes - part 1 (XS-M)

I had been hoping by now to have lots of exciting Alpine routes to write about by now, but the weather has chased us out of the mountains. We're currently sitting in a forest in southern Germany eating cake though, so I can't complain.

We did manage some climbing in between the rain, so I thought I'd give a bit of an overview of what we've been up to (and I need to catch up with Andy's blogging because it's getting embarrassing now...) Most of the climbing we've done over the last couple of months has been on glacier-polished alpine granite - a rock type that's very different to what I normally climb on and a new experience for me.

There are two main styles of climbing on granite:

• Friction slabs: climbing up smooth sheets of unbroken rock, usually at a fairly easy angle (because routes on the bits that aren't easy-angled are basically impossible!), but with very little in the way of holds - you just have to keep balancing upwards and trust in the friction of your feet on the coarse rock. These routes are usually bolted, because there's not really any other way to protect them. The bolts may not necessarily be very close together though...



• Crack climbing: climbing up the cracks between the smooth sheets of rock. Due to the compact nature of the rock, granite cracks tend to be very pure, smooth-sided and continuous, with not many other holds around them, and have to be surmounted with special crack climbing techniques. This usually involves jamming parts of yourself into the crack, which creates surprisingly secure holds if done right. Depending on the size of the crack this could be fingers, hands, fists, arms or your whole body. For the perverse, there's an awkward size of crack, known as an offwidth, that's too big for fists but too small to get inside. These have to be climbed with some special and painful techniques involving elbows, knees and stacked fist jams.

The overall route for our granite tour was:

• A day in the Ecrins National Park, near Briançon, on our way out of France. The area around Ailefroide is particularly famous for its long friction slab routes.  We would have liked to stay a bit longer but it hailed.


• Three weeks in the beautiful Valle dell'Orco, in the Gran Paradiso National Park in North-west Italy.  This valley is famous for its crack climbing, with sheets of granite forming pure splitter cracks of all sizes.  The region has been described as a 'Little Yosemite' because the rock formations are like a smaller scale version of those in the famous American valley.  It is often used as a training ground by European climbers preparing for a trip to California.  The Little Yosemite reputation is reflected in the names of the main climbing sectors - where Yosemite has El Capitan, Orco has Il Sergent, Il Caporal, and Il Disertore (because it's on the other side of the river from the other two).


• A non-granite interlude.  We visited friends in Chamonix and Basel, which was great fun.  Not much climbing was done though due to the horrendous weather - Basel indoor bouldering wall is very good, but not granite...  After that we had a brief trip home to the UK for a wedding and some job-sorting stuff. No granite here either...


• A soggy few weeks in the Bernese Oberland. We managed one really classic route (Motorhead - see below) but not much else.

During this time, we did (or at least tried) a variety of granite routes of all different sizes, styles, difficulties and levels of commitment.  Describing them all in chronological order would take a long time (and would probably be quite boring), so I thought I'd go with describing our granite highlights, categorised by size.

The small

As I said, pure crack climbing is something a bit new for us.  On the kind of rock we normally climb on, there's sometimes occasional cracks, and occasionally it can be advantageous to use a jam to get your balance while you find the next conventional hold.  It's quite rare though to get smooth-sided, parallel, continuous cracks where there are literally no other holds and you have to actually use proper jamming techniques to make upward progress.  We were therefore fully expecting to find Orco very hard...

It's a great place for jamming beginners like us though, as there are many great single pitch routes on offer, scattered in between the longer routes.  Some are bolted, but many of the routes following cracks are trad climbs (i.e. traditionally protected, you place your own gear as you go) - this is fairly standard in the UK, but a bit of a rarity in continental Europe outside the mountains.  Even the trad routes though have bolted belays, making them quite convenient and low-commitment - great when you're unconfident at jamming and a bit rusty at placing trad gear.

Incastromania

My personal favourites were:

• Incastromania (6a) at Il Sergent.  A beautiful curving crack that is perfect hand-jamming size all the way up.  People who are good at jamming have told me before that it can be a really enjoyable style of climbing once you get the technique right, but I'd never really believed them - after doing this route I think I get it!


• La Signora Negra (6a+), also at Il Sergent.  This was one of the earliest routes we did and I didn't really like it to start with.  The fingery corner crack at the beginning was a bit tricky and you have to trust your feet on a smooth granite slab.  But on the second attempt I got into it a bit more and found it an interesting and varied route.  After the finger crack at the start you get into some crazy bridging followed by (if you go left) a huge flake which gave me my first taste of offwidth climbing - this was enjoyable on toprope for its perversity.


• For pure weirdness, I also enjoyed Mr Green (6a) at Dado - a route that disappears inside a huge chimney, involving some very interesting 3D moves.

Andy hidden in the chimney of Mr Green

The medium

Single pitching is fun, but the main aim of this part of our trip was to do some longer routes.  We started off in the Ecrins with an ascent of Pilier du Levant, a 200m route that finishes on top of a cool detached pinnacle.  Unfortunately it was a typical first-multipitch-for-a-long-time experience, involving belay faff, getting lost (we climbed the wrong route for several pitches) and getting ropes tangled in bushes.  Once we found the right route it was lovely though - an education in trusting your feet on smooth slabs, but with some steeper pitches thrown in to keep things interesting.

A cheval on Pilier du Levant

We got a lot slicker with practice and got some good routes done in Orco.  My favourites were:

• Pesca d'April on Torre d'Aimonin, a devious, weaving line that climbs an impressive tower of rock overlooking the village of Noasca at an amenable grade.


• Nautilus on il Sergent.  This was the longest route we did in Orco at six pitches, although it's broken by a massive grassy ledge (big enough to hold several full grown pine trees), so feels more like two routes separated by a short walk.  I was particularly proud of leading the second pitch - it was only Fr4c but it's probably still the hardest lead I've managed on trad gear for several years.  Unfortunately, it wasn't my quickest climb ever, taking about 90 mins to cover 30 m, and this delay meant we got rained on quite a lot on the way down - Andy was commendably patient...

The very small

Weirdly, despite being in a massive valley filled with so many exciting multipitch adventures, the thing I got most psyched by in Orco was a small roadside boulder with one route on it, the Fessura Kosterlitz.  We first tried it on our second day in Orco because we thought it would be a good place to practice our crack technique.  The Kosterlitz crack is about seven metres high, and is on average the right size for hand jamming.  It starts off quite narrow at the bottom, where the rock is also slightly overhanging, and then it gradually gets wider and less steep as you go up.  It's great for working on crack technique because there's no way to cheat - there are no other holds, and climbing it any other way than jamming makes it much harder.  It's also short, low-commitment and right by the road - so close in fact that the construction company who built the big tunnel through the hillside were going to blow it up, until it was saved by a petition by local climbers.  It now sits partially cemented into a wall in its own little amphitheatre.

Fessura Kosterlitz

Supposedly it's normally climbed unroped as a boulder problem (nominally graded font 6B), but I don't think we saw anyone actually doing that - seven metres is getting a bit high, even with pads.  Most people seem to toprope it using the handy bolt at the top.  Andy led it placing trad gear on the first day we were there because he is more knarly than the topropers (but not as knarly as the boulderers).  I was a lot less convinced that I could do the moves (I could barely get off the ground the first time I tried), so decided that my goal should be to try to do a clean toprope ascent.

Andy's crux

Crack climbing is funny because how hard you find a route depends to a certain degree on your personal dimensions.  One person's perfect hand jam might feel a bit wide and insecure to someone with smaller hands, while someone with larger hands might have to do some kind of painful finger jam instead.  Andy and I found this a lot while climbing in Orco - we have quite differently-sized hands.  On Kosterlitz in particular, although we both found it hard, we each thought the crux of the route was in a different place.  For Andy, with his shovel-like hands, found the hardest moves to be pulling directly off the ground where there is a good foothold, but the crack is at its narrowest (only finger-sized for him) and steepest.  For me, once I'd figured out how, I could do the start fairly consistently because there were a couple of places where I could just about squeeze my dainty mini-hands fully into the crack.  Instead, I spent several days falling off a couple of moves up where the crack got slightly wider - there was a point where my feet were still on the steep bit on some tiny tiny holds, and the jams I was reaching with my hands were feeling rattly and insecure.  I found I had to be very precise to get my hands into very slight narrowings of the crack, which I found quite hard on the steep ground, whereas Andy at that point could basically put his hand anywhere and get a perfect jam.

Size differential

I got a bit obsessed with this route and tried it several times over four separate sessions, mostly mornings or afternoons, before or after going to do other, bigger things.  I finally managed the move I couldn't do on the second attempt of the fourth session and suddenly found myself standing on the decent footholds at half-height, with the hard bit below me.  I was a bit surprised, and had to desperately ad-lib my way up the gradually widening top section of the crack, which I'd not practised at all.  Luckily it was all fairly straightforward, except for a little moment right at the top when the crack became offwidth-sized and I couldn't work out how to transition from arm-bar to bellyflop to top out.  Then Andy reminded me to use my feet and a moment later I was standing on the top of the boulder feeling a bit shaky but elated.

So, I know it doesn't count as a real ascent because I didn't lead it or boulder it, but it felt quite significant to me.  I was my first real experience of working something I found really hard, and going from being unable to get off the ground to finally standing on the top after lots of effort and practice.  Unlike Andy I've not had much experience of redpointing sport routes - I think this was my first glimpse of what all the fuss is about...

Celebration!

This is turning into a bit of an essay now, so I think I'll save the larger sizes for next time...