Exploring Sweden, vertical this time
Days start to show first signs of actual daylight again, which is an unmistakable sign for: Spring is knocking! And of course, the winter was hard, implying that everyone who dedicated her life to touching as many rocks as possible is now super-psyched to get out again & rockin’. Some happenings:
A few weeks ago, an international expedition (Romania, Germany, Spain, Austria) headed up North, mere 300km towards Sundsvall, to take on the challenge of working some ice, vertical this time. The fact that I used to ride my bike for 3km to get to a bigger waterfall should not influence the greatness of the weekend. Hey, ice climbing in Sweden, how’d thought that? To make things more exciting, Team Austria quickly realized that it had, brilliantly, forgotten to pack a harness (see, that’s what Sweden does to me!) and had thus to climb in painful slings. Live and learn.
After that, the Swedish weather goddess seemed to finally show signs of a guilty conscience after weeks of pure dark- and greyness and tried to make up for that by blessing us with two weekends of cloudless (!) sunshine. She better did. So what inevitably followed were strong signs of spring depression amongst all of the Uppsala climbing community (read: we really really can’t be inside today; we really really need to absorb that sunshine right now; all of it;) and thus a bouldering-climbing hype. Season starts in March, apparently.
Apart from the usual bouldering sessions at Källberga, there were to incidents of actually clipping rope through quickdraws: A magnificent day at the trad-climbing crag Runsa, featuring the ultra-classic Vampiren and my first-ever approach that involved walking over a frozen sea. What to add to that. Finally, last weekend featured both brilliant ice skating (långfärdsskridskor), winter campfire (grillkorv!) and sport climbing at Fjärdhundra. An impressive 15 meters tall, it was enough to get us pumped half way up. Usch.
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To make a long story short and to remind you all, in case someone forgot: More chalk, less talk.
