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.

Starzlachklamm - drytooling

When most iceclimbers now climb at the Bozeman Icefest (we don't have the money to go there) we enjoy the snow, rocks and ice in Germany this weekend.

Living in Southern Germany gives advantages and disadvantages.
One of the great advantages are the magical climbing areas; of which one of them a dark cold wet, if luckcy frozen, cave with loose rock a.k.a. Starzlachklamm.

Last weekend our colleagues wanted to go there and we were really curious.
Our roommate didn't want to go at all as he just found it an ugly dark hole.
After a slippery icy walk in we figured he was right. And we loved it.

We started with an M8. Daniel Gebel, who bolted most of the routes "commanded" and forbid us to break any of the growing icicles. So it became rather tricky to climb around the fragile curtain instead of into the curtain. Fun!
I think we'd get fired at Edelrid if we'd touch that icicle. So, after some clear comments by Daniel in another route ("don't touch it!") Dennis managed to break off an icicle. Daniel watched it happen. He closed his eyes and shook his head. He mumbled something about "tourists" and "less salary"...

Daniel pointing out how to climb the route. Simon climbs.

Dennis yoga-ing around the curtain.

And then there was this new route Daniel bolted, an extension/direct start of an already existing route. If Dennis could please climb it first so he could flash the route he joked to us.
And so Dennis went up and unfortunately popped off a sketchy tricky hold on one third of the route.

Dennis clipping in one of the safer points of the M10, Daniel belaying.

The tricky route traversed the roof just above the ground. If you'd fall you almost hit the ground making the name rather fitting the route: Arsch bumpe (or something like that). Every clip in the roof was a 100% grounder.
My turn.
I used a different hold in the roof, not really knowing if it was any better then the thing Dennis had popped off. But it worked. Flash :)
We guess, but I have to say I'm not too good in this guessing game, that it's around M10.
Daniel himself was rather ill and the antibiotics gave him too much gravity force around him. The flash attempt unfortunately didn't work out for him.

Daniel figuring his way up the M10.

The next day we were convinced by Ritchi to join him at Chinesische Mauer (Chinese Wall) a beautiful sportsclimbing area in Austria not far from Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Dennis isn't very fond of the vertical stuff and really didn't get it how we ended up here. Icicles and snow all around and we are sportsclimbing?!

Ritchi in his project. He took an extra day off this Friday to try it again. Maybe he did it...?

I didn't do a very good job either and felt rather challenged in the 7a's and 7b's that I climbed.
Maybe climbing and running every day and working long days for a whole week doesn't help much either. Guess we just needed a restday.

Next weekend. "Fully rested" after the annual Vaude Christmas party with our colleagues. We went to bed around 02:30 and promised to go climbing at Starzl again. Simon and Simon would pick us up around 11. It took us a while to drink enough coffee and eat enough Brezen before we finally headed for Starzl.
On the way in I read Will Gadd's blog-post to the others in the car. It's about modded tools, grading routes and the Olympics. A fantastic honest piece of writing about all the things that also have been in our heads the last weeks. The ridiculous grading of some routes (like the M12 I onsighted in Ouray, which I wasn't allowed to donwgrade), the 'tweaking Worldcup rules' by adding extra length to your iceaxes and the "so called" iceclimbing at the Sochi Olympics where some iceclimbing athletes are going. But also the feeling of recognition in the writing about the Gecko sisters and the failing&falling issue I also feel when I climb.
It's a must read for every mixed climber.

Rather broken, even after all the good coffee, we slowly hiked up to the dark hole again.
The ice had clearly grown and the curtain that we were forbidden to touch was twice the size now.
Meanwhile Simon (Herr Graf) promised himself the only thing he came for was drinking good coffee.
Still he managed to find himself swinging his way up the classic WI4 on the right side of the cave. More then he ever expected to do this day.

Herr Graf and his coffee

Meanwhile we climbed the M8 again without touching the curtain. "Dennis, your helmet almost hits the curtain now!" With his head turned in a awkward way sideways he yoga-ed his way further up.

Now the goal was to climb the big roof. Traverse from right to left through the whole cave. Michi Wohlleben bolted his M13 called "Pray for Power" in there. Crossing all the "easier" roof climbs (M11, M11+, M12...)
We looked, walked up and down, watched and discussed all possible ways and figured we'd need a local for figure how that thing would go. Suddenly the roof looked like a big mess of bolts and pitons without a proper line in between.
Defeated we decided to go up a line that we tried at the end of the day last week. "Pappi's kleine Liebling" an M11 yet again bolted by Daniel. He told us that once you find the right sequence it's not that hard anymore. He was right, we didn't find the right holds and thus didn't figure the right sequence back then.
One small hold at the start. You step on a bunch of balancy stones to reach the thing, then hang yourself in a figure of four and reach for the next thing. And then you hang yourself a big bunch of figure of fours and figure of nines to reach the end of the roof.
Right there, if you don't have the right hold your axe with you hand still fixed on it will get stuck, squeezing off your fingers causing rather bruised knuckles. So I failed. I had to kick the axe out with my feet to get it back again...
The clipping is as tricky as in the M10: fail and you'll hit the ground.
I wasn't that scared actually.
But Dennis was.
He held the rope so tight that I had the feeling I was pulling it out of the grigri myself when climbing. At one point the rope was kind of stuck in the grigri. Hanging in a figure of four, having cold hands and having to pull the rope out of the grigri without falling off didn't really help me. Fail. Again.
Meanwhile Dennis did climb the thing. Making gorilla-tennis-player sounds on his way up the route. A good mixture of scare and power. "Clipping, no not clipping, you got me, got me, watch me now, ergh, clipping, okay, okay, urrrrgh, uhhh".

Dennis at the end of the negative roof in the M11.

Meanwhile it was dark and snowing. I really was frustrated. I wasn't even too pumped, could do all the moves static and none of the moves felt really hard. Okay, let's just take the headlamps out and give it one more go. Now rather give me a grounder instead of a tight rope, now I know that I should skip the nuckle-duster hold and then it should just be fine.
And it was. Completely silent, the two Simons were surprised of my silent climbing, I figured-of-foured my way easily through the moves. The long, long move after the roof bit was just a nice static lock-off and I didn't use the tree that was silently calling "kick me, swing your axe in me". Top. What a hassle.  Tum, di, dum, dum, dum. Suddenly the song "Clint Eastwood" from Gorrilaz popped up in my head after watching the pictures of my own shade on the wall in the dark. Reminding me of the videoclip of the music. The song stayed.

Tricky clipping in the darkness. Picture by Simon Graf.

Awkward shadows in the dark hole. Picture by Simon Graf.

Now one question remains: how do we need to climb this M13 roof thing? Because I need a real project now :)

Read Dennis' view on this Saturday here: dennisvanhoek.nl

Ze Zermans

I've been in Germany for a week now. 

And so much can happen in one week time.

View from our new home in Kleinweiler

We arrived last Monday evening. Pulled everything out of the car and went to bed. 

The whole bedroom was filled with stuff and we realised that giving away furniture results in a lack of furniture... We should have more drawers, shelfs and cupboards to store all our gear. 

On Tuesday I went to look for a job and instantly found one. It's so nice when people keep their promises! As freelancer in the last three years so many people have promised me work and then suddenly when they were supposed to have work and I kept my agenda free for the job they canceled all. And then there I was again; no money and no job. 

But the Germans seem to be accurate and honest so here I am behind my laptop in an office. Strange to have an office job again, but one with benefits. And after one week I can clearly say I have super great colleagues!

Now what do I do?

I have to say, for as far as I know, I'm sponsored by Petzl. Although I haven't seen any new gear for a year now and haven't even tied a knot in the new Petzl ropes yet, I want to stay true to my brand: Petzl. 

But, work and sports is something that's hard to combine. Petzl doesn't provide me with a salary, so I have to work somewhere. 

And that somewhere has just become Edelrid. 

I'll be a 'manusje van alles' (jack of all trades) within the company and support the team wherever needed for three days a week. 

The culture within the company is open, friendly and colleagues become friends. 

A short sketch of this week: 

Tuesday: running to work, bouldering in the midday, coffee made on the gas stove in the office, and climbing again in the evening. 

Wednesday: Drive to work, meetings about work definitions and introduction to the Edelrid product range, climb in the evening. 

Thursday: drive to work, meeting about industrial gear, boulder a bit in the midday and go the the opeining of the Christmas-market in Isny with colleagues.

Friday: run to work, edit some vid's, and rest for a bit.

Saturday: Outdoor climbing with colleagues in Starzlachklamm

Sunday: Outdoor climbing with roommate/colleague Ritchi at Chinesische Mauer

Monday: Run to work (8km), boulder at work, climb in the evening

Tuesday: Skiing with colleagues :)

Wednesday: Drive to work, work... climb, drink gluhwein in the climbinggym

Thusday: Cycling to work, work till 20:00 and restday evening

Friday: Cycling to work, work a lot and go the the companies christmas party...

I guess my week is quite fine like this. 

Would love to climb on more regular basis and I still have to find the right balance between personal interest in climbing materials, work and sponsorship. But give me another week and I'll be happy. 

Though... I really miss my old climbing gym and friends/family are suddenly very far away again...

The very secret German Gluhwein recipe

Training with the Furnace DryIce tools

The famous tower of Isny 

Skiing in Damüls, Austria

We miss the Dutch St. Nicholas on Dec. 5...

How they celebrate St. Nicholas in Allgäu

Thank you Gertrude

The opening of the Christmas Market, with 'EngelenFliegen'

Mixed climbing at Starzlachklamm