Climbing Joy

We’ve had good weather in the and have climbed ourselves to exhaustion. There are now new, bolted routes in the Dolomites, taking advantage of areas which are perfectly climbable but there’s just no way of adding much mobile protection. There still seems to be a bit of a war of some local, anti bolt guys sawing off a bolt and adding a rope sling in its place, when that’s possible. The thing is, with long, flat cliffs, you can really go anywhere and if you don’t have some indication (a sling, a bolt, a piton) you may or may not be doing a particular route. Popular routes often have cemented belay stands, and those are worth finding, but if it’s a big, flat cliff with multiple ways up, there’s really no way of knowing where the official line is (and finding the belay stand).

People tend to climb a bit of everything here, so it’s not like bolting means that no one does classic routes anymore, or that the bolted routes are unpopular and everyone snubs them to do the classic lines. I enjoy both: route finding on easier cliffs and going up to my physical limit knowing that if I fall, there’s a bolt below me so solid that you could hang a truck from it.

We did one yesterday that was a perfect mix of both. We started the Via Miriam on the Torre Grande of the 5 Torres. The first four-five pitches are a very, very polished mostly trad line (some pitons in place but you can definitely add to what’s there). Miriam O’Brian was one of those Americans who came to Europe in the 20’s and hired a guide for the entire season. The guides would propose a climb and she would go, and she became as strong as her guides and started climbing on her own with other women partners.

Later, after climbing the Via Miriam, she did the what might have been first all woman climb of the Grepon in Chamonix in 1929 with Alice Damesme, and the Matterhorn. Although he lived quite a bit before her, she was one of the examples of the Albert Mummery quote “It has frequently been noticed that all mountains appear doomed to pass through the three stages: An inaccessible peak—The most difficult ascent in the Alps—An easy day for a lady.” I’ve read her book Give Me The Hills and found her to be smart, funny and courageous. I’d recommend it but it’s out of print.

After the Via Miriam traverse, there’s an option to finish with the Direttissima Scoiattoli, which had pitons instead of bolts, but is protected the whole way. It used to be an aid climb, but it’s possible (but physically pretty hard) to free climb it. Suddenly we went from polished rock to unpolished, steep, crimpy climbing. It was hard, and personally I’d exploded my arms the day before on another bolted climb and I found the whole thing pretty hard (but beautiful).

We didn’t have a good description for the way down, so we wandered around a bit at the summit with storm clouds coming and thunder rumbling in the distance. We found a nice, long rappel (happy to have our 60 meter ropes with us) and then another rappel after a bit of a walk. We loaned our rope to a cute Italian couple who were also running down before the rain.

We almost, almost made it back to our lodgings before the rain. We started thumbing it because we’d walked up and it was 1 1/2 hours back. We both found individual rides and were happy and warm when the storm started really blasting. We got a bit wet but not too much.

All is good. I could have climbed something easy today, but my partner says his hands feel like cooking mitts so we’re taking a day off.

Tomorrow is our last climbing day. I’m trying to build up the courage to go to Tofana di Rozes. It’s a day to do that (nice weather and our bodies and brains are well trained at the moment), but I kind of look at the cliff and feel like vomiting from stress. Many of the routes are sooooo long and impressive. So we’ll see. There’s joy from climbing harder things and impressive lines, but there’s also joy in taking a day off, blogging a bit and taking a naps.