Schwarzgold: two pitches and done

The hardest route in the area. We did the first two pitches and left it there.

Machine-translated from the German original. The German version is the one I actually wrote.

The hardest route in the area, and we didn’t get far — two pitches, then that was that.

The 6a was hard friction, and correspondingly unpleasant in the heat that day. The 6b afterwards was paradoxically easier: a single move on crimps, and crimps work fine at thirty degrees.

That’s the interesting thing about granite — the number tells you little about whether a pitch will feel hard. Friction is a question of conditions, crimps are a question of fingers.

After that we’d had enough and moved over to Kristall.