Siciliano: the last pitch is superb

Approach botched, first pitch bypassed, cold, one wet grade 8 — and then a finish that makes up for all of it.

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

We botched the approach, and climbed around the first pitch from the side rather than doing it. Not a good start.

It was cold as well, and one of the grade 8 pitches was wet. Wet at that grade means, in practice: you try once, realise it isn’t happening, and work through some other way.

And then the last pitch is superb. That sort of thing rescues whole days — you climb the final thirty metres and forget that everything before it went sideways.