Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Iceland pt. 4 Sundlaugarparty

Yes, I already did it!
One of my missions in Iceland was to climb an old trad route in the climbing area Hnappavellir.
The route used to be trad, opened over 20 years ago in two pitches. It's on the tallest cliff in the area just over 30m in height.
It had been bolted a couple years ago. Re-opened, re-named and just a bit of text in the topo under the 'new' opener and name of the route reminds of the history of the route.
It's now called Sundlaugarparty, swimmingpool-pary (because of the big waterpool often to be found under the cliff).
After climbing it on trad I even figured tradclimbing the route is even safer then climbing it with the bolts. Some parts are quite 'spaced' bolted resulting in probably broken legs if you'd fall in the second crux... I remember being scared climbing it on bolts years ago and placing really long slings with draws to avoid the dangerous falls...
I'm happy I did it so easily.
After a while I also climbed the bolted route Djásn and tried another one but bailed because of the extremely spaced bolting...
Later we opened some new trad lines in the area.
Barad-dûr (5c) on a pillar that looked like the tower from Lord of the Rings.
Lundi (puffin) (6c) a beautiful bouldery route on rarely formed Basalt blocks.
And later we found Damocles Camping-fridge (6b) on the end of the Hnappavellir cliff.
See video's for more details of the climbs :)


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Iceland pt 3 Hnappavellir trad Svart Regn and Sundlaugarparty from Marianne van der Steen on Vimeo.

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Iceland pt 4 new trad routes around Gimluklett from Marianne van der Steen on Vimeo.

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