Back from Europe
After spending two wonderful weeks in Europe (not only by scaling rocks) I am back on Long Island, a place specially designed to be boring. Sorting through the unread news in my feed reader has been a challenge. A lot of things happened in the climbing world while I stayed overseas, here are few highlights that caught my attention:
- Alexander Huber, once called by Reinhold Messner the best of all rock climbers, redpointed a 40 meter roof on Cima Ovest, one of the famous Tre Cime di Lavaredo towers in the Dolomites, Alps. The new line Pan Aroma 8c zigzags through an original aid route climbed in 1968. Huber and his friends drilled 11 new bolts, but the route is anything but a ladder of shiny pieces of metal. A 60-meter long 8b+ pitch with only 7 (!) bolts speaks for everything.
- A young Czech phenomenon Adam Ondra was touring France and Switzerland and amazing the onlookers by on-sighting “Hot Chili beans Volcano” 8b+, and redpointing “Abysse”, 9a (in 3 attempts) on the Gorges du Loup crag. A day later he turned up in Switzerland’s Voralpsee and sent “Speed” 8c+. To top everything up, he pinkpointed a multipitch Alpine testpiece called Silbergeier, 8b+ (first ascended by Beat Kammerlander in 1993) in a recordly fast 8-hour push.
- Rich Mayfield and Mark Stevenson climbed 60 British Classics in 36 days during one of the rainiest summers in the U.K!
Source: Planetmountain.com, Climbing.com. Photo by Michael Meisl.
