Two Months Of Euro Fun

Hi Richie, here’s a summary from my trip. It’s a bit long but I don’t know how to make it shorter.

"Fresh from an inexplicable month long burn out, Nic and I set off to Fontaintainebleau as the first stop to our two and a half month trip. I promptly became ill but, despite climbing badly, slowly the sun seeped into my muscles and I started to pick up very gradually. A week on we found ourselves at St Leger in the south of France.

Katherine on Iceberg 7A Fontainebleau, France - Click to see big

Various muscles still hadn’t woken up but by the end of 2 weeks there I had more or less remembered how to climb again. Our days included relaxed starts, sunny cafes and fruit that tastes like its supposed to (unlike British imported pretend fruit). Here was the inspiration we were looking for with routes of all styles and lengths, the climbing wall a distant memory. With my body only just remembering how to climb I did nothing particular of note as I had to go through the process of scraping up 6b+ to 7b feeling like it should do over the 2 weeks. But then back to Fontainebleau.

I spent a week coaching on a planetFear coaching holiday. To be honest repeatedly climbing the blues and reds improved my climbing too and with a couple more days tagged onto the end of the coaching week I impressed myself with a tally of 7 7as and 2 7a+s over my total time in Font. My faves were Chasseur de prises 7a and Iceberg 7a+. Having not been to Font for 4 years I finally felt that I had truly got to grips with the nuances of the climbing style there.

Katherine on Chassuer De Prises 7A Font - Click to see big

My arms were in pieces and sadly I was in no shape to fully appreciate our couple of days at Berdorf, a beautiful and fantastic bolted sandstone venue in Luxembourg. Having visited this place 10 years ago I had always had it in the back of my mind to return. Everything from grade 4 or 5 upwards can be found here on clean off vertical walls, stepped overhangs and shaply arêtes. I already want to go back.

An enforced few days rest were needed so via Cocoon nightclub in Frankfurt we headed to Prague to visit our friends Sam and Martin. Lazy is the only way to describe us. On one day we barely left the flat and watched the two Bridget Jones Diary films in a row. Oh what it is to be on holiday and have all the time in the world.

But then we turned our attention back to climbing. The Czech’s are very fussy on foreign pronounciation of their language. Repeatedly we would ask in climbing shops about this place near Dĕčín, pronounced Dechin. “No, no idea where that is”. We had been recommended this place in France by some travelling Czechs. Finally, after pointing to a map, a huge laugh and rolling of the eyes followed and they said the word marginally, to our ears, differently and sold us a guidebook, which curiously was new in the shops that week. We did wonder however, when we arrived whether it was of any help to us whatsoever when it seemed that there were no topos and few diagrams, but just lists and lists of climbs all in Czech.

The cliffs sit either side of the very fast flowing and often prone to flooding river ‘Labe’ (or Elbe in German), very close to the German border directly north of Prague. You could easily compare the climbing to grit as in some areas it was black and very hard, but with square cut arêtes 3 times the size of Stanage, in other ways you couldn’t compare.

A classic view of some of the climbing areas of the Elbe river

Unlike the famous towers further to the east this place has lots of bolts, but since it’s the Czech, nevertheless sometimes not enough. Climbing classic features such as cracks with bolts 6 metres below always gave you a feeling that you were on trad route rather than a bolted route.

Finally I got my head together in the latter part of the week and climbed a few things that seemed more like E4s than 6c+, culminating in one of the best routes I have ever done: Korist VIIc (about 6c+ or E4) a soaring arête with the technical barn-doory lay back arête to finish. Of course the real crux was the quite hard move at the top of a run out near the ground!

Moving on we changed our climbing style once again and wondered why we left the most powerful and physically demanding climbing to the 2 last weeks of our trip: the Frankenjura. This was a shock to both our minds and bodies.

Katherine on Korist 'one of the best routes i have ever done' Czech republic....

First the routes were tiny (compared to the Czech) and secondly I lost all sensation in one of my fingers on the first day from pulling so hard on a pocket. Pretty much immediately I decided I couldn’t be bothered with onsighting so adapted to quick redpoints. I finished with some 7b+s and the classic Chasin’ the Train 7c. We didn’t have the best weather in our final week. It thundered and rained, we went to the cinema twice in Nuremberg, the crags seeped again but we enjoyed plenty of cakes and beer.

A last minute change of mind, in search of sun lead us to the Schleierwasserfall in Austria where we found a lot more rain and a really wet crag. But, despite our bodies being at breaking point, it certainly left us wanting more. The left hand grey wall, whilst soaked on our visit, is one of the best cliffs I’ve seen in Europe.

Wow, I guess there’s always somewhere to go back to…

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