Visitors from Finland

My brother, his wife and her brother visited us here about a month ago.

Their timing was great as the weather was really nice. Sunny and dry, but not too warm. And it rained for about a week starting from the day they left.

They of course ticked some nice problems, being as strong as they are. But I had also a nice weekend as I could do three new problems.

Below is a video from one of them, Damaszenerklinge, where my brother climbs it.

It is a compression endurance problem. The two crimps for the left are pretty much the only holds, otherwise it is mostly squeezing with hands and feet. No move feels particularly hard alone, the thing is to have enough strength left for the final move. I did not have the strength to lift my left hand and to press the wall before the final move to the top as my brother does on the clip. I did it as more dynamic (i.e. desperate) move from lower. So I really needed a spotter for that one, as there is a nasty rock under your back in the end, and was really happy that I could exploit the chance of having one.




Damaszenerklinge from jeguri on Vimeo.


There is also a couple of pics from the visit in my brothers blog.

A weekend with Hanuman

It was about one and a half week ago Saturday when I decided to take a chance with the winter weather. Then it was quite wet and even little misty at where I live, but +200m of elevation difference however made a big difference to the conditions and this is what it looked like in Wartenberg:
Luckily the boulders are on a south facing slope, so the conditions where about perfect.

My target was to climb the sit start to a problem called Hanuman. And really to climb it and not to "work on it". I had done all the moves on earlier visits and climbed the stand start version. It had took a couple of visits to find "the right moves", but this clip helped a lot. But now I had managed to lost all the moves to the sit start. I could find them after a while, but getting tired I realized that I had to change my target for the day. So I decided to refresh my memory on the stand start and do it for the video.

When I had done the stand start for the first time it had felt even a bit soft for a 7B. Took only a couple of tries with the "right moves". But now, well, you can probably see the frustration on the clip when I start to realize that it will be no go for that day and the weather forecast was looking bad for the next n days.

Encouraged by the weather finding on Saturday, I decided to go try it again on Sunday. I left already when it was still raining (water) at where I live. The gamble with the weather really paid off this time.

The weather was nice and with some study of the clip mentioned earlier, I had realized that I was using wrong foot hold(s, I tried several) on Saturday. For me it was about putting the right foot more to the left, so you are more under the hold and you can get the hook to hold easier.

Anyways below is the clip. Watch out for some bad language. I will try to cut it down. I promise.
You can find the original in .mov here. It is better quality than the embedded ones, but its 1900x and around 190megs. If the link stops working as I suspect, you can find it in the lower right part of the Vimeo page.



Hanuman, stand start from jeguri on Vimeo.

Quick Intro

I will be writing about (mostly) bouldering to this blog. Since I live now in the forest of Pfalz, I guess bouldering in Pfälzerwald will be the most seen subject.

I will try to stick to little commenting around video clips and pics, but I suck at writing shortly, especially about bouldering.

But enough with the intro, I have a couple of clips already on Vimeo that I want to comment on.