Our First Thanksgiving..

Up until this weekend we have been sat in the Chironico car park in Switzerland, skipping between Brione, Cresciano and Chironico climbing areas, making the most of the perfect climbing conditions (freezing) hence this…..

I didn’t even know oil could freeze!

Paul has written two posts covering our last stretch of Swiss climbing for this road trip and they make for great reading, so i wont repeat him. You can find the posts at the following links:

From Switzerland to Germany and back again

Round 3…let the battle commence

We had a number of friends crop up whilst we stopped in Chironico, we caught up with Ixi (the brilliant photographer \climbing guide extraordinaire) who did not disappoint, climbing with him as our personal guide in Brione meant we got to find some of the more obscure boulders, and of course he took some fantastic photographs. At the same time we randomly bumped into Alex, a super strong tea drinking climber, we met (what seems like and age ago) in the first month of our travels. Nicole and Gogi made their second appearance this road trip and sacrificed a whole week of their holiday time to come play with us in Chironico and show us how this climbing malarky is done. We also met John and Ella, two like-minded climber Brits, who had a real thing for Stollen 🙂 it was a brilliant crowd to climb with and a great end to our time in Switzerland.

Autumn Colours

When Switzerland skipped Autumn and went straight to Winter, we didn’t expect to find the vivid colours of Autumn just across the border in Germany. We only explored a small part of Southern Germany, rich with forests, quaint little villages and rolling meadows. Our first stop was the Black Forest, we hopped between villages and enjoyed a few walks, some cake, and a browse round a picturesque town, here are some of the highlights..

Triberg and its crazy cuckoo clocks, every clock was hand carved with fantastic detail, but i think we nearly choked when we read a price tag that said 11,000 euros!  Triberg also had Germany’s largest waterfall, and for an extra euro you can purchase monkey nuts to feed the squirrels. Only we couldn’t find any squirrels to feed (probably the rains fault), but for most of our walk you could see and hear these very noisy black birds. Turning to Paul i was asking “do you think this bird will want the nut?” Paul only got the words “I doubt” out before the bird swooped down and nearly took my fingers with it! Turns out these birds are nutcracker birds, and it didn’t take long until they had demolished my little bag of nuts.

Cuckoo Clock Crazy

Cuckoo Clock Crazy

Largest German Waterfall, Triberg

Largest German Waterfall, Triberg

Largest German Waterfall, Triberg

Feeding the Nutcracker Birds… by accident!

Oi thats for the squirrels

Black Forest in colour

 

Seriously Switzerland!

This is our second attempt to climb in Chironico and Cresciano this trip. First time = +30 degrees with insect infestations (rookie error, arriving in summer), second time = -4 degrees with wet slushy snow!

But the weather has been impromptu, and we are slightly frustrated with our lack of climbing, the last couple of weeks has been littered with thunder storms, extensive rain during the night, and when you wake in the morning the rain has turned to snow and we are sat in a beautifully cold and wet winter wonderland… beautiful but not ideal for climbing.

Our Brief Stay in Austria

Paul recently wrote a blog post regarding Austria, it can be found on his blog Paultheclimber titled “And So we Venture to Austria” and is a very good read, if you havn’t already read it 🙂 it detailed his climbing success in Silver Park (Silvretta) and the dismal weather in Zillertal hence our very brief stay in Austria.

I therefore don’t want to repeat him too badly so prepare yourselves for lots of photographs….

Austria

The Cloud Line in Silvretta

Creepy Crawlies

Sorry it’s been a while, we do have another post in the pipeline about our stay in Switzerland, but in the mean time we have this treat for you all..

Since we left the UK and found some sunny weather, we have been plagued with insects, and like most girls I spent the first month being terrified of the majority of things that lived/landed on or near me. But its seriously hard work being that scitish/frightened all the time, and I soon got too lazy to care. So now we’ve become like insect paparazzi and we snap most of the weird/wonderful and sometimes pretty things that land on us before it bites or flys away. So we have found some disgusting looking insects and between us (inc Jase and Claire) we have managed to photograph the majority. So check out the photos and we challenge anyone to try and identify them!

Switzerland and Sun

Ok so it’s been a while since I last wrote, to be honest I have struggled to pull myself away from sunbathing at the riverside 😛 It’s a hard life! so as mentioned before we were escaping the sweltering heat of Val Masino and heading for slightly higher ground in Val Daone.

Val Di Fumo / Val Daone

The valley has climbing at all altitudes, the highest being 1500m, and the conditions were notably cooler. Down jacket came straight out of storage! We spent a week in this valley having a look at a couple of different areas, but our motivation was running low and we spent most days dodging unexpected mountain rain showers, eating copious amounts of food and searching for dry wood to have evening campfires/BBQ’s. The weekend brought lots of boulderers and the campfire was a little busier with a couple of friendly Austrian climbers joining in with the hunt for dry wood.