Mountaineering Open and Repeat...on the side of the Wrong

We Prorock Guides, it may seem strange, but we often climb for our own pleasure and above all we love to share with our Colleagues and Friends beautiful days of climbing, opening routes, bolting, investing in the terrain and maintaining crags, climbing routes... our game, our art, our passion and that of all those who read us.

On a fantastic day, Cristiano and I decided to repeat an itinerary in the Apuane Alps that we don't want to mention simply because in a place where unfortunately it seems that we climbers are more distracted than the quarry trucks that pass under the walls... I have long since stopped interjecting myself into the human mind.

It is a beautiful route on excellent 'Invisible' rock, with difficulties up to 7c+. Unfortunately, the first two pitches retrace several sections of one of my routes, opened many years ago with my friend Davide Della Valle, where my bolts and even a belay were removed and replaced with newer ones and positioned differently.

At the beginning of the 2000s I had written some thoughts about the opening of bolted routes from below: rereading them today I still agree with them... I'll post them on this blog... just in case someone can't sleep at night...

Happy climbing to all! Roberto and the @teamprorock:

On the wrong side

A few years ago, in the Rivista della Montagna special issue of Roc, Andrea Gobetti, a friend and writer of a certain level, wrote a piece entitled 'On the side of the wrong'.

This story was about a guy who liked to be on the side of the wrong; while everyone was going in the 'RIGHT' direction, respecting the rules and behaving in a certain way, he, realising this boring respectability, decided to avoid everything that the community considered 'politically correct'. So I felt less 'alone' when, as a very young man, I climbed classic routes in the Apuan Alps with my first climbing shoes instead of boots, and immediately went 'on the wrong side of the fence'. Now such a way of climbing in the mountains is common practice, it would make one smile to see someone climbing with boots...

This introduction is meant to make it clear that what I am going to write in this piece is not meant to be an exaltation of our work but rather a clarification of what Rolando Larcher and I have done in these 'opening' years.

Our quest for an 'opening style' has seen us as one of the first in Europe to give ourselves rules for 'free' climbing walls using bolts for protection and the drill to put them in. Many people criticise us because we open routes protected serially with bolts but most of those who speak have never repeated any of our routes.

Those who have done so have found that even with bolts, these routes respect certain ethical rules that are well reflected in our style. Last but not least, with this type of route we are not trying to kill mountaineering and we do not even pretend to call it such, but rather to enhance the modern possibilities that technique offers us to push forward the (our) limits in climbing 'free" on multipitch routes.

• Before tackling a wall, we read up on the existence of other routes and take great care not to change any of them if we ever come across them.
• our routes seek compact, high difficulty wall sections where mobile protections would be of little use if not impossible.
• the progression between the belay points in the opening is done in complete free climbing and the use of cliffs is only for hanging when piercing the rock to place the piton.
• After the opening (which then takes place by resting) we return to repeat our RP routes and assess the actual difficulty of the pitches climbed in continuity by at least one of us. (Here Rolando beats me in terms of determination and level!)

 'FREE'this famous and repeated little word that causes so much discussion.

free from what?

Even those who claim to be purists and intergralists of the clean what are they free from?

Man is not made to climb walls completely free. He is too intelligent not to understand the meaning of a word.

Free means "without anything forcing him to be different from the way mother nature made him!"

The hands are the hands, the feet are the feet, no means must intervene to impede man's 'Freedom'.

In climbing if we are talking about free climbing we should be intergralistic and not use any means to help us climb better. Shoes, harness, rope, pitons, carabiners, friends, etc. are means that we need to overcome the walls with less difficulty and greater security.

Technology, from the earliest pioneers of mountaineering to the present day, has made great strides and the difficulties overcome have gone hand in hand with the technical advancement of the available means.

Most of those who criticise our use of bolts by advocating the use of traditional protections, as I have already said above, have never done our routes; moreover, where almost all of these gentlemen put friends or pitons in cracks, we, in most cases, go from belay to belay without protections or almost.

Those who chatter on specialised site forums and shoot off their mouths about bolts go and repeat our routes.

They go to see if there is more risk of hurting themselves on the Fish or on the L.V.

Let these gentlemen try to open a bolted route, from the bottom, climbing on virgin terrain and in our own style to see if it is easier than climbing an articulated wall full of holes where friends or pitons are put in every metre. Certain people accuse us of opening via ferrata routes and arrogantly threaten to unclimb them without realising that the Alps are full of super routes opened in the 60s, 70s and 80s full of expansion or crack iron climbed in aid climbing and then, demonstrated in the present day, free climbed.

Why don't these gentlemen, champions of mountaineering, start cleaning up these real ferratas and wait a few years to unclimb ours? Let someone prove that they could be climbed in clean style and then unclimb them! Of course, even today there are exaggeratedly bolted routes and I too am the author of some routes defined plasir for the amount of fixed protection in place but this was by choice and to create routes that could also be frequented by non-Braveheart

It is no coincidence that the latter, generally of moderate difficulty, are repeated and frequented routes, while the difficult and bolted routes are repeated infrequently and only by climbers of a certain level.

We started opening routes with bolts more than 20 years ago and only after much refinement of the technical level, both in terms of climbing and method, were we able to open routes of the calibre of the Switzerland e of High Noon in Sardinia.

Those who repeat them will appreciate above all the quality of the climbing, the perfection of the line and, not least, the psycho-technical commitment required by these true musts of the multipich.

Perhaps to many these remarks of mine will seem arrogant, but before saying such things, Rolando and I both repeated many routes opened by others who used the same style (to name a few - from the pioneers to the present day - Mariacher on Tempi Modernisimi, Martin Scheel in Ratikon, Piolà on Mont Blanc, the Remy brothers in Wenden and many other places, Kammerlander again in Ratikon and Mussato, lastly on Marmolada) and we can say with certainty that 'our' routes are, as the late P. Berhault would say, 'MAJEUR'. Berhault, are 'MAJEUR'.

On the occasion of the opening of the L.V. in Marmolada, I had already written that we open these types of routes in the mountains for us and for those who can enjoy them by climbing from the base to the summit, and we do not expect anyone to go there to praise our work (even though those who have repeated them have also done so enthusiastically). We, like others before us, have done something that has brought us 'on the wrong side' and who knows, in a few years' time, perhaps someone will say that on the wrong side we are less bored!

Roberto

Roberto Vigiani