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:
The overall route for our granite tour was:
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.
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.
My personal favourites were:
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.
We got a lot slicker with practice and got some good routes done in Orco. My favourites were:
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.
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.
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.
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...
This is turning into a bit of an essay now, so I think I'll save the larger sizes for next time...
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.
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| 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.
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| 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...
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| Celebration! |
This is turning into a bit of an essay now, so I think I'll save the larger sizes for next time...
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