Weak go home

Reaching the new 'super crag' above the Spanish town of Oliana the first thing you see is a huge tufa, like a fat drainpipe of poured grey concrete stretching down from the summit. Automatically you see the weakness, finding the link between the ground and the top. You want to get up this cliff and this is the way!

“Roca Dels Mora”, the name of the cliff according to a map, but whatever, it’s a world of hard routes. Dani and Chris have spent a bunch of time here on the hard routes that don’t seem to have any holds. 'Humildes pa Casa'  is one of the hard routes that does have holds, one hold anyway, the tufa. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite reach the ground, in fact it stops short by about twenty metres and getting to it involves some gymnastic climbing on F8a/F8a+ terrain. It also unfortunately doesn’t quite reach the top, stretching up to within a metre of the belay but leaving a desperate crimpy pull just where you don’t want anything taxing at all.

However, in between the top and bottom of the tufa are 30 metres of pure feature, and in my case 30 metres of desperate out of balance thrutching! Translated the route name is something like “The weak stay at home”, wish I’d known that before I’d started. Sharma was at the crag the day after I’d redpointed it, obviously he could understand the route name and knew it didn’t apply to him. He’d been waiting for some idiot like me to go up and clean off any dust and chalk up all the holds before going for an onsight. In true rockstar style various camera men positioned themselves before Chris did battle. He even seemed to try slightly too, which was nice for me to see, though to be fair it never looked like he was close to coming off. Impressive indeed, his performance matching the quality of the line. I slid off to find some crimps and promised to bolt a banister rail to the ceiling and hang off it a lot before coming back to this super crag again!

image - Pete O'Donavan