Switzerland Day 23

Les has switched into crush mode lately, sending three 7C+’s and one 7C in a four day period.

We’ve been spending most of our time lately at Brione. Les sent Fake Pamplemousse a few days ago and then we headed down to the lower river area for Andrea and Doug to try Bach Bloc again. While they were working on it I walked just downhill to check out a cool problem called Side Effect which I think was put up a few years ago by Nalle Hukkataival.

It has a pit of doom landing that someone stretched a web of logs across so that you can put a couple pads down.

I pulled on a few times, did the first long move to a small sharp crimp but couldn’t do the second move. It was feeling really hard so I took a long massa rest. When I hopped on it again, I felt much stronger, stuck the first two moves and then sent the problem!

Unfortunately our good friends Doug and Andrea have left us for Spain. On the bright side, we convinced our apartment owner to let us stay for half price, so we are still living the high life in our swanky swiss apartment. The pace around the house has slowed considerably with only two of us inhabiting. No more late night games of Spades or Oh Hell, but we have been watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia which is hilarious!

Ok now back to the outdoors…

I’ve been projecting Vecchio Leone (Old Lion), an 8B put up by Bernd Zangerl which was featured in Memento and Dosage III. It’s a beautiful overhanging wall that climbs on positive holds up to the crux which involves an undercling pinch/crimp and a really powerful move to gain the crimp rail above. I stuck the crux move by itself at the start of my second session and linked it to the crux five times but couldn’t quite do the move. I was psyched to get all the moves done and felt close to sending!

We drove back up to Brione yesterday so I could get back on it. While we were there Les dispatched a cool 7B+/7C called Atlantis (vid to come).

Then he started working on an 8a called Salamandre which involves some awesome bread loaf pinches. We’ll take some photos of it today to show you.

The climbing at Brione is only at 800 meters or 2,600 feet so unfortunately we’ve past the prime season for climbing here. I’ve been waiting until the sun dips below the mountain, around 4PM, to start warming up since it’s been so hot lately. This gives me a brief window from 6:30 – 8:30 when it gets dark to send in halfway decent temps.

I had some good goes from the ground, usually getting to the crux and coming close to sticking the move. Here’s the crux sequence of one of my attempts from the bottom:

So after falling at the crux a few more times, we walked out in the dark just before 9 only to start the cycle over again: climb 2nd day, rest day, wait until 4 to warm up and try project. We’re headed back to Brione today to work on Salamandre.