It’s only natural that people forget skills they don’t use on a regular basis. I guess I’d even forget how to tie a figure 8 knot eventually, no matter how simple it might be. But when it comes to complex procedures like self rescue scenarios, that hopefully you never actually need, it’s nice to be reminded occasionally and do some practicing.

It’s also natural that people, who get their first taste of rock climbing, might develop a curiosity to learn more. If nothing else, to understand how things work and make their new hobby safer. That said…

No video, sketch or photo can replace a proper course conducted by professionals. In other words… don’t trust your life to something you read on the internet or at the very least try things on the ground first. I practice hanging off an apple tree about 2m above ground. Other than falling on my dog barking like mad below there’s no danger if I mess things up completely but absolutely realistic in every other way.

So more as a bookmark and a reminder to myself than anything else, the resources below could serve as a refresher course. I certainly found them very useful the first time around.

Animated knots – climbing knots
UK Climbing – climbing skills articles
Chockstone – tech tips
Petzl – rope techniques for multi-pitch climbing
Petzl – multi-pitch tech tips 2010 (pdf)
Petzl – sport climbing tech tips 2010 (pdf)
Libby Peter – articles from Climber magazine

And some nice videos:

How to tie off a belay plate from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Escaping the system from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Lowering a climber off the crag from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Abseiling past a knot from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Prusiking up a rope from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Assisted hoist from Steve Long on Vimeo.

While UKClimbing Logbook Crag Finder has served me well for locating climbing opportunities on a number of occasions, it is still a limited service (as are many online climbing resources, ClimbinBaška and SLOUPPI the very welcome exceptions to the rule). So I hope what you find below will be of some use to anyone who decides to go on vacation or a business trip to Tenerife, but also do some climbing when the opportunity presents itself.

When researching what to do on the island on the off days, I managed to discover there’s also a lot of climbing potential so we decided to take some gear with us. Might as well make the most of the opportunity. But however minimal the gear might be, it is still never lightweight, so we rationalized to include the following:

• 60m rope + bag
• 10 quick-draws
• 1 ATC
• 2 dyneema slings
• 3 carabiners
• 2 harnesses (used by 4 people)
• 3 pairs of shoes (again, used by all 4)
• chalk bag
• some tape

That in itself will fill a decent sized backpack and make the Ryanair gate agents happy to charge for extra weight so we divvied up and it worked. But that rope was still a pain to stuff…

Without any doubt UKClimbing is my favorite crag finder whenever venturing into the unknown. I love the geolocation based service but crag descriptions leave a lot to imagination. However, in some places just knowing the location might be good enough if you combine it with another location based service… Google Street View! It has helped me in Corsica and it worked in Tenerife. Well, at least partially. Park at a switchback 2.2km out of Cruz de Tea suddenly sounds much better if you can preview the description in Street View… when you have that much information available. If not then the only way is to find some road that gets you nearby the marked location and go from there. You can always ask… (not that it helped much as the grandpas we met couldn’t understand us and I barely understood them) :)

I was never hung up on route topos, grades, beta etc. so the location and the approximate number of routes available is really the only information I want to have. I climb whatever looks nice from below and that’s good enough. At least on vacation or a first visit. Obviously access notes and the aforementioned information is always welcome but not crucial for my choice. It’s fun to explore! :)

UKClimbing and Rockfax mention several times that the place to get climbing information is Tenerife Outdoor in Granadilla (and now also in La Laguna). As it turned out their opening times didn’t coincide with out timeline so we only managed to visit them on one of our final days on the island. But the visit was nevertheless very helpful as they let us take some photos of the guidebook and we were able to find and climb some previously unknown crags.

The best surprise was that the lovely La Martella canyon, one we somehow managed to find just by following parking information, isn’t mentioned in any of the guidebooks. The guys at TO will be more than happy to provide the unpublished topo of this secret gem.

Without venturing too much into guidebook publishing territory I thought I’d assemble some basic information for the areas visited (and some that we didn’t). It has to be said though that it’s probably best if you purchase or borrow a guidebook. It will save you some time and potential problems. But as we were just as happy to explore the canyons for several hours and finding just about nothing climbable with minimal gear it wasn’t a problem for us. It just added an element of surprise and pleasure of exploration. So for those like us, here’s a map to get you started:

And to end this, a slideshow…

Hardest route done?
Plezanje pika kom in Šoder graben, supposed to be 6a+, I’d give it 6c at least.
Second place goes to an attempt at first pitch of Schanigarten (VII) in Kugelstein that I mistakenly though it was the first pitch of Ameisenriss (IV). You would think I’d soon figure out something was wrong :) I did, but I still wanted to go all the way. Had to give up 2m from the anchor after a swinging fall.

Longest?
Steber in Vipava, IV+/III, 160m

Most enjoyable?
Impossible to say. I’m somehow partial to easygoing multi pitch routes but there were quite a few nice 6a/b overhangs in Trenta, Martianez and Vistamar that I liked.

A map:

View Climbing 2011 in a larger map

And a slideshow

I’ve been home for almost a week now and very busy. So many things to do… not enough time to write a summary.

First things first:

(click to open larger)

My beloved Columbia Beartooth GTX mid did not survive the 3 months of ordeal that is named Ikaria. Unfortunately they do not make the same model anymore, or the previous incarnation called Tigertooth (luckily I still have those around) as this was one of the best shoes I ever had. Extremely comfortable, amazing grip on rocks, very light, waterproof (although not anymore obviously) but sadly all those amazing properties must come with a downside. They are simply not durable enough to wear them on rough trails and off road everyday. The sole was very worn out and the first hole (big one on the photo) appeared after only 3 weeks on the island, followed closely by another one where the toe cap meets the leather. I tried to repair them as best I could by stitching up the leather but given the uncompromising location I only prolonged the ordeal for two more weeks. After that the holes just kept spreading and multiplying. Eventually I was walking around with what felt like a GoreTex sock with amazing breathability. ;)
Poor protection against spiky shrubs that are inevitable on Ikaria… But all that complaining somehow fades in comparison to Johanna’s footwear saga.
I still love my Beartooths though but unfortunately I can’t find a replacement pair anywhere. I guess I can wait while I still have the Tigertooths…

(click to open much larger map)

This is a sketch showing what I think are almost all the routes I walked, drove or otherwise visited while on Ikaria. Obviously it is not accurate and obviously a lot of those lines were walked and driven at some point (Suzuki Jimny baby, sorry Dimitris) ;) but I wanted to keep the map simple so only one color per road/trail. And obviously we repeated a lot of them multiple times.
The background is a photograph of Road Editions map of Ikaria.

(click to open larger)

Above is a similar sketch showing the roads driven on Samos while we were coming back from Turkey. It was easter weekend and no ferries went back to Ikaria… so what can you do but rent a car… Again, background by Road Editions.

(click to open larger) copyright Archipelagos/Jernej Burkeljca/Road Editions

This slide from my final presentation for Archipelagos is a collection of all the GPS measurements I managed to either record on my own or dig up from old reports. Most of them are mine but I wish I recorder many more…
Recorded on Garmin e-Trex legend or Qstarz GPS receiver linked via BlueTooth to Garmin Que running under Windows Mobile on Dell Axim X51v.

Which one is better?
Well, the eTrex series are nice little units, much more useful in the field compared to my own setup (which is normally used in a car not while hiking) but the one I used had some serious connection problems at times. It had problems with terrain, with vegetation, with my pockets, clouds…
This could all be excused (since the GPS does need line of sight with the satellite) but not if the Qstarz managed to stay hooked on throughout even if I carried it at the bottom of the backpack.
I can’t comment on accuracy since I don’t have anything to compare it against. Qstarz did report about 50% lower error though (but I don’t really trust those numbers).

On my last weekend I finally managed to slip underwater with a camera to take some photos of underwater photography fieldcourse but since the camera I was using was crap that takes 3 or 4 seconds to take a photo and I didn’t have any lights (a must underwater) the photos aren’t any good. To put it plain and simple – they suck… at least I saw my first Triton’s trumpet (Charonia tritonis).

Scorpaena (porcus?)

Charonia (tritonis?)

Below is the other movie I was working on towards the end… we had visits by two groups of children from schools in Perdiki and Agios Kirikos and I just basically followed them around the base and areas around it. The movie is supposed to be a short overview of what these environmental education visits are about so there’s no major editing involved. Just a nice soundtrack and voices of children in the background for a nice summer feel.

copyright Archipelagos/Jernej Burkeljca

So to end this… thank you all that made my stay on Ikaria so enjoyable and memorable! Hopefuly you know who you are. Thanks to everyone who helped out in whatever way, to everyone who picked us up when we were hitchiking (some should have the title of our regular drivers), to all that made hiking on Ikaria what it is, to everyone who cooked such nice food and everyone else that made sure I’ll come back someday. Hopefuly nobody feels left out but there’s too many of you to name and this is not an academy award speech ;)

Še en teden mimo… smo na 18. dnevu in hrčki se pridno bližajo magični meji 1kg. Pravzaprav sem pričakoval, da bo Hanibal to mejo dosegel že danes pa je bil očitno na nedeljskem postu. Homer je po seriji nekoliko počasnejših krogov zopet v igri za prvo mesto z minimalnim zaostankom, Heli pa z velikim napadom iz ozadja v stilu Valentina Rossija (glej MotoGP v Assnu) po dolgem času spet vodi. Neopazno a vztrajno pa se vodilni trojici po dolgotrajnem ogrevanju približuje tudi Hana. Najbolj urejeno prebavo s skoraj linearnim trendom rasti ima vsekakor Hooch, žal pa je revež še vedno na zadnjem mestu po skupni teži in si deli zadnje mesto po relativnem prirastku.
Vsekakor bo zanimivo videti koliko trenutni trendi nakazujejo naslednje tedne in mesece.

Namesto tabel v obliki slike tokrat v ta namen uporabljam Google Spreadsheet, upam da je bolj pregledno in uporabno. Žal mi je edino za grafe, ki jih Google samovoljno odstrani pri uvažanju iz xls datoteke. Sicer bi jih lahko naredil na novo z uporabo njihovega čarovnika vendar zaenkrat ostajam pri screenshotih. Glej thumbnaile spodaj…

Prav zanimivo je opazovati spremembo vedenja odkar so vsi spregledali, počasi se postavljajo na majave noge in lezejo iz pomožne košare (v uporabi med čiščenjem škatle itd.), predvsem pa so postali nekam bolj glasni (a kljub vsemu še povsem spodobno mirni).

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It’s that time again… weight watching time.

Rather than uploading weight tables as images I’ve uploaded the behemoth (to be) to Google Spreadsheet – view it here. I’d do the same with charts but I haven’t figured out how to do that (yet). Google docs naughtily removes any charts contained in the xls file. Sure, I could make new ones using google interface… someday maybe. But for now I’ll have to make due with images, see below:

Skupna teža / Total weight

Skupni prirastek / total gain

dnevni prirastek / daily gain

Relativni prirastek glede na začetno težo / gain relative to birth weight