Hitzeschild: first route with a haul bag
A hard route on the Steinplatte. Cold start on the grade 8, a lot of hanging on the 9- and 8+ pitches.
Machine-translated from the German original. The German version is the one I actually wrote.
Hard route, and the first pitch is straight into a grade 8. Cold-starting at that grade doesn’t work for me, and the first pitch looked accordingly.
I sat on the rope a lot on the 9- and 8+ pitches. That’s part of it when you try a route well above what you climb through on a normal day.
It was also my first route with a haul bag. I promptly got it stuck on the rappel — a haul bag doesn’t behave like a rucksack on a wall, it behaves like a second, uncooperative climber.
Lesson: practise with it before the first time you actually need it.