Mouth shut

After quite some back-talks and very angry reactions on my recent blog posts there won't be any posts here for the next months.

Apparently I'm not allowed to say what I think.

You reached your goal. Thank you for trying to destroy my opinion and all that comes with it.

Now next step I saying it in my face instead of behind my back. I thought we're Dutch. Honest.

F*.

Starzlachklamm

Every weekend I try to make most of the free time I have.
This saturday I had the chance to go for an easy ski-tour. Fantastic! It was my first time to just go ski-touring for the ski-touring instead of using it as a tool to  get to an ice climb. I first was afraid on not being able to keep up with the group, being too bad of a skier but... I actually did totally fine!
Motivated to do this more often now :)

Saturday was dry tooling day. Some people promised to join but in the end they couldn't for several reasons. Which was okay because now we had more time to focus on the climbing itself.
The missing hold I was writing about last week is now replaced. I was too scared to drill the hole, afraid to destroy the rock (something in me says drilling holes in wrong). Dennis made the new hole on the place where the hold had broken off and I was happy being able to make the move now :)

I made a little video to show more of the area. It was way too warm so there isn't much ice now and topping out is too dangerous in the roof-routes because of the constant melting and falling ice and rocks from above the roof.
Too bad we couldn't top out the M12 because of that.
As you can see there's more then just M10 and M12.
Contact us if you need any route details as the most up-to-date topo can't be found online (yet).



Starzlachklamm Drytooling from Marianne van der Steen on Vimeo.

Fit at the start and then it gets canceled :(

This evening was a romantic Dennis and Marianne evening.
As Dennis really struggles with all his bad luck and his injured leg, I thought it would be good to go out for dinner.
We discussed all kinds of things, like how nice the route Tomahawk is, and I wanted to see a picture.
Got on the internet and... all over Facebook, Twitter and other social channels: Worldcup canceled.
Nooooo!
I feel so fit, strong and super motivated!

The Rabenstein ice tower yesterday. Today theres even more snow. 

Herman, from the organisation, working hard to make a path to the ice tower. 

Rabenstein is a tiny place on the Italian- Austrian border between Ötztal and Meran.
It's always rough there in winter times but this weeks was more then usual. And this time it is more then just rough: 2m of fresh snow and more to come. Closing off the village and making it a hazardous place because of the avalanche danger.
The guys there were working super hard to get the roads free again. But, they're predicting more snow for the upcoming days, getting the avalanche danger to the highest level.
Logically for our own safety they had to cancel the event.

This week has been just for climbing:
With Saturday some new bolts on the Rubihorn Nordwand thanks to Daniel Gebel. Ritchi our roommate invited us to go with for a midday tour on the Rubihorn. I couldn't resist although I knew I was going to be on for three days more after that.
In the evening Roland arrived. He bought new iceaxes and needed to try them. I took some days off and went out.

It's quite overhanging there for Roland

Hanging out the toprope-gun ;)

That Sunday we climbed in Starzlachklamm. I taught him some tooling and skills but the M8 I hung out was still a bit too hard for him.
For my feeling is was (is?) quite an established alpinist and not a bad rock climber either. But this drytooling was different. Still we had fun.

We heard the classic Hangende Garten was very climbable at the moment. So it was easy to make the Monday-plan: Austria :)

Hangende Garten

Roland still getting used to his new iceaxes fiddled his way up the first pitch (WI3).

Roland on the first pitch.

I ran up and got ready for the real stuff. Thanks to our roommate we had a double 60m. rope. Enough to climb the WI6 and the WI5 all in once.

This WI6 is fun! 

I left a tiny bit of easy stuff in the end for Roland to lead.
"I would have placed more screws then those four" was the first thing he said when he came up.

Roland in the snowy last bit of the WI5

I just felt fine and the two abalakov-thread ropes on the way up looked fine as well. The route felt super easy but so fun to climb!
Satisfied we drove back to Germany.
Today we actually wanted to climb in Eptingen but logistically it didn't seem to work out well. Closer it seemed most places were missing the crucial ice so in the end it became Starzlach again.
Having dreamt of how to climb the seemingly impossible M12 I headed up. Without warming up I stepped into the route and got pretty far.

Hanging around, confused on how to stick the next moves.

Meanwhile Roland managed to climb M7 and got motivated for an M8. The M12 moves still seemed impossible! I felt rather defeated. How could these moves be so, so long?!
After a couple tries I decided a dyno would be the only option to finish the route. And so I did. Just barely hanging on I stuck the impossible move but not from the start of the route yet.
I came down and wanted to take some pictures of Roland in his climb and then I saw the text: "...hook is missing. I broke it about three weeks ago. I will drill something where it was."
Ah, so it was impossible after all.
Well good Worldcup preparations. Too bad the Worldcup is canceled now.
Time for a rest day. Time to get back to the real world: work.