04.01.2010

We finally gave up on the weather in font after 5 days of rain and no sun in the forecast. Here’s a shot of our last ‘good’ climbing day in font, notice the tarp we setup over the boulder and Justin escaping from the heavy rain!

Wet l'Angle Parfait

We headed off to Switzerland two days ago and managed to find clear blue skies just 10 minutes south of font.
It seems font is in a bubble of non-stop poor weather. The weather was looking good on our drive to Southern Switzerland up until we made it to the other side of the 17 kilometer tunnel and entered the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. It started raining as we passed buy Chironico on our way to Bellinzona. We camped out that night in the rain for a whopping price of 18 francs ($17 US) each! As you can imagine we weren’t keen on paying that kind of money to camp for the duration of our stay even though it was at the base of a beautiful waterfall and had nice views of the valley.

Campsite in Claro

The following day we set about finding a place to stay. We hit up the tourism office of Bellinzona for assistance. After calling half a dozen property owners with nothing available (it’s Easter) she finally found one that was available and it turned out to be the same price as camping. So as long as it had enough beds and a roof we were psyched! But when we walked in the door to see a brand new sparkling apartment, we couldn’t believe it!

Kitchen

Our friendly mumsie Hah

The living room with heated floors

The GIANT Bed

A shower...finally!

The Swanky Bathroom

Fair dinkum that's a clean bathroom!

View from the Front Door

As you can see in the photos we managed to con our Aussie friends Doug and Andrea into coming down to Switzerland instead of returning to sport climbing in Spain! We have an awesome crew and we’re all really psyched to actually pull on some holds instead of squeezing up slopey problems! Yesterday we had beautiful sunny skies so we headed up to Chironico which is higher altitude and cooler than Cresciano.

View from Chironico

View from Chironico

I had a good first day flashing Doctor Crimp 7b+ and sending No Mystery which I think is 8a, not 8a+. The first move is really hard but the rest is pretty easy. A cool problem whatever the grade is.

I’m pretty stoked about all the rad looking hard lines here. It should be a good month!

Here are a couple screen shots from the video:

Doctor Crimp

No Mystery 8a

Posted by Alex Savage | Filed Under Switzerland 

Comments

  • http://kuridza.si david

    man, looks much better than my own place :) where is this exactly?

  • David

    Im very interested In taking a trip to switzerland and figuring out a realistic price of what it would cost to stay in the ticino area of switzerland for about a month. So how much is that wonderfully lush apartment per week/month and where exactly is it located? Any other tips for figuring out the logistics for a trip to switzerland would be awesome.

    sorry about the bad weather in font, crush ticino!

  • Carlos

    A short bouldering film (27 min) shot in Ticino, Switzerland and Maltatal, Austria. Starring Nalle Hukkataival and Kuutti Huhtikorpi.
    http://vimeo.com/8382230
    The problem “Special Edition” looks amazing you should see if you can get on it.

    Best of luck.

  • http://www.savageclimbing.com Alex Savage

    Our place is a one bedroom flat just across from Bellinzona. It’s 500 francs per week which we are splitting four ways. It’s a good central location for hitting brione, chironico, and cresciano. You can buy the guidebooks for Cresciano and Chironico at a climbers hostel in Cresciano called 1001 Bloc. Supposedly you can also get them at a pizzeria in Chironico but I can’t confirm.

    Carlos, yup watched that a few times and Special Edition is pretty high on my list!