For Bennett

I'll bet you've noticed. I've not written anything here. Admit it, you've missed me. The thing is there's only so many tall tales I can spin out of a yarn of "got up, went to work, went training, ate cornflakes". In recent months my life has bored even me, so I figured I'd spare you the same fate. I wasn't even going to write this, but Bennett wanted to see the pictures.

Eventually the training has to be for something - and it was for this.

That's White Zombie in Baltzola there folks. The first 8c to be 'onsighted'. 78 horizontal moves of pure juggy pleasure. Tell me that's not worth a few hours of endurance training a night? Jules and I were both mega-psyched to have a redpointing holiday, so we preselected our routes. I chose the Zombie, naturellement, whilst Jules picked a nice 8a right in the bowels of the cave. And when I say the bowels of the cave, you know I'm serious. Baltzola is a proper cave. If it's cloudy you need a head torch for the routes in the back. It's dark, steep and full of goat shit. Parisella's devotees - book your tickets today.

Turns out we chose badly - Jules' route had a massive ledge fall off it, removing a rest and replacing it with two hard moves. This bumped the difficulty up a notch. My route had two flaws. Flaw one was that the local climbers were debating if it was 8b+ - a problem they neatly solved by sika'ing over a natural pocket on the crux! Ergo, my route was also a bit harder. Flaw two was more serious - from a cave full of dark shady roof climbs, I chose the only one with a crux in full sun. Muppet.

Still, we both battled valiantly on and suffered through the hot and sticky conditions until the very last day of the trip. With no ticks to show for our week, we were a bit nervous and got to the crag pre-dawn to maximise the number of goes we had before catching our flight. Good call. Whilst I killed the Zombie in the dawn light, Jules had literally minutes to spare, ticking her route on her 6th go up of the day. Hurray for us!

Anyway - all that dull pre-amble is an excuse to post the pictures below. Suffice it to say that Baltzola is amazing and if you like steep climbing and goats (and don't mind the odd bit of sika) you should go there tomorrow.

More pictures here.