for each route a grade E1-E4 details how far it is between the points of protection
for each route a grade E1-E4 details how far it is between the points of protections and a grade F1 (12 mm stainless bolts) to F6 (no fixed gear) gives information of the quality of fixed gear.
Book sounds great.Quotefor each route a grade E1-E4 details how far it is between the points of protections and a grade F1 (12 mm stainless bolts) to F6 (no fixed gear) gives information of the quality of fixed gear.But no indication as to whether the gaps are easy or impossible to protect with your own gear?
Thanks jwi.When Graham Hoey was promoting his Gritstone guidebook the second half of his talk consisted of adventures on some of the routes in Musatto's vol. one. I'm afraid to say I found this more inspiring than his gritstone exploits!
Strone / Sron? Elsewhere in Scotland there are a couple of routes on the Main Bastion of the Shelterstone that run to 8 pitches or so and are 3* routes; Haystack E3, Steeple E2, The Needle E1, Stone Bastion E5. Not done them myself, but they look excellent. There are a few on Creag an Dubh Loch too, although most of the harder routes only run to 5 or 6 pitches.
I have (had while the weather was good) a hankering for something long in the mountains, still not been to Dubh Loch.Apparently it looked like a mini festival camp up there over the warm spell, about a dozen folk camped by the shore.
I did La Demande in 1980 on my second Verdon trip when this style really clicked for me. A really enjoyable experience. Had to rescue a well-known South West (England) activist benighted in the final chimneys on the same trip. He wouldn't be the last.
Just got back from 6 weeks big-walling in Kyrgyzstan, I'll stick a small amount of info and some photos up here to try and get other Brits psyched to go out there - seems like Americans, Germans, and Russians have the most info on the place, we were the second british team in the last decade or something!So the Karavshin area is about 45km walk from the nearest road in Vorukh, you will need to hire donkeys. There's a company called Ak Sai who if you pay them lots of money will actually sort you out a plane from Bishkek to Batken and then a helicopter to the valley, we didn't want to do that so we got taxis for the entire length of kyrgyzstan and then got Ak Sai to sort out our donkeys, which didn't work so we ended up hiring them off the local garrison. I digress, essentially the point is either you need someone who speaks Russian well enough to haggle with taxi drivers or you need to pay Ak Sai lots of money.When you get there, there are are two valleys, Ak-Su and Kara-Su. Ak-Su has the Perestroika Crack which everyone does (7b and normally climbed over 3 days, there are two big ledges to sleep on apparently), and Kara Su has Yellow Wall, home to Diagonal Route on Yellow Wall, which, again, everybody does (one pitch of 7a, the rest is much easier I believe, and usually climbed in a day). We didn't do either of those routes though, mainly because everybody does them and we wanted to be a bit different.Peak 4810 is the most hellishly impressive mountain-suitable-for-rock-climbing I have ever seen, here is a picture: (sorry it's FB)https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/533770_10151100837341225_1433408746_n.jpgIt's about 1200m vertically, takes about 3.5 hours to walk in from base camp with heavy bags and the last bit is up a nasty bit of glacier, I actually ended up leading the fucking-terrifying first pitch (F7a slab climbing protected entirely by RPs and pitons I placed on lead, I am never doing anything like that again ever) to get out of carrying one of the haul bags up the glacier. It faces NW so gets the sun in the afternoons, this means that every morning there is a fairly serious build up of ice on the inside of your portaledge. It would be possible to climb it without portaledges as there are a few good ledges but you would need to move VERY fast and be pretty confident - we packed 6 days worth of food and 8 days worth of water, but right from the beginning we rationed ourselves as much as we could which was just as well as we were on the wall for 10 days. All the routes on the NW face were put up as aid routes in the late 80s and 90s, the first ones were mainly winning entries in the USSR climbing championships. I have no idea about aid climbing and even less about Russian grades (they all got the maximum Russian grade of 6B), but I would say that you do not want to have to aid the first pitch - it would involve copperheads or drilling bolts!Ok so we did the Mirror Route:http://mountains.tos.ru/kopylov/pict/g8.gifWe did it entirely free in 40 pitches at about 7b+. The first pitch was absolutely terrifying, there was one other very run-out 7a-ish slab but the rest wasn't too awful (mainly good-but-sometimes-spaced protection and climbing in the 6s), with two well protected pitches of 7b and one of 7b+ (these crux pitches were all absolutely superb on immaculate rock):https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/487606_10151242088259595_1040962822_n.jpgWe did need to take crampons for the summit ridge sadly, I now have a deep seated hatred of rock with snow on it.We also did a new route on Peak Kotina, we're working on a topo but it took probably the best line on the crag through as much steep ground as we could find, and always taking the easiest line through it. The rock is incredibly free-climbable, all the steep bits turned out to be about 4 grades easier than they looked! The crux pitch (7a) was escaping a groove through a series of blocky roofs to a belay on the prow of the entire mountain at about 3/4 height, we think the route is about 1000m and have called it Dreaming Spires, we would definitely recommend it as the rock is mainly sublime (ok there are a few pitches where the rock is whack but its a 26 pitch route and the good bits are worth it!)https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/225971_10151100836096225_557687990_n.jpghttps://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/376571_10151100849446225_1969791675_n.jpghttps://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/305033_10151100859431225_846635480_n.jpgThere's a vast amount of rock, much of it unclimbed. The hardest route done out there was in the Ak Su valley and had one hard pitch of 7c/+ and a few pitches of around 7a+, there is probably potential for harder though! So there is a lot of potential for new-routing, and a lot of potential for trying to free Soviet aid routes of the late 80s, and a lot of opportunity for bivvying in fairly unpleasant conditions. The Russian climbing team was there and they were the hardest men I have ever met - they did a different route to us on Peak 4810 almost entirely free in Alpine style in 4 days, with 7 litres of water between them and sleeping in slings! They said the hardest pitch was 'quite dangerous', which turned out to mean 7b with no gear for the entire rope length. When they got back they stayed up tol 1am drinking vodka, then got up at 5 30am the next day to chase cows away from the campsite with a shovel. The day after that, one of them casually did Perestroika Crack........ Anyway, I would recommend the place to anyone a bit harder, fitter, and psyched for rock-climbing-based-mountaineering than myself (I nearly died on some of the approaches!). I have to admit for the foreseeable future I am going to be a single-pitch sport-climbing pansy!
Thanks Digging that up has got me all nostalgic for the bygone days of slightly cringe climbing blogs.... can't indulge like that these days on Instagram!
Saw this on insta the other day, the Sasso Cavallo, described by Matteo della Bordella as: "Remote, wild and with bulletproof limestone".https://www.instagram.com/p/CYMkAX5of_r/Looks like a cool wall, and it's just above Lake Como which is very lovely by all accounts (my better half went there a couple of years ago). Has anyone climbed here? I'm assuming it's in the Versante Sud "Lario Paretti" guide. The route MdB did is probably best described as an ambitious goal for me but it would be cool if there were easier routes on equally good rock. It's also less than an hour from one of Milan's airports.