Steve McClure climbs Sardinian F8b+ multi-pitch
- Monday 24th October 2022
Steve McClure, climbing with Ethan Walker, has just climbed a multi-pitch F8b+ at Punto Giradili, Sardinia.
The South West face of Punto Giradili, a 400m high pillar of immaculate grey limestone overlooking the Mediterranean, was first breached in the early 1980. In spring 1995 Enzo Lecis made the first ascent of the 12-pitch classic route named in homage to Wolfgang Gullich. To the left of the grey pillar an enormous overhanging cave has increasingly been drawning attention. Between May 2012 and March 2013, an Italian team comprising Gianni Canale, Aldo Mazotti, Stefano Salvaterra, Franco and Stefano Cavalaro established Oiscura, a seven-pitch route up the right-hand side of the cave. Although the Italians were able to climb the moves free they weren’t able to redpoint the route. The first redpoint, by Alex Huber, came just two years ago. Huber confirmed there were two pitches of F8a+ and others up to F7b+.
Oiscurra pointed the way to more development. Four years ago, Jan Kares bolted Nike, a line which goes through the massive overhangs. In spring 2021 Alex Huber went to try the free Kares’ line but switched to establish a three-pitch finish to Nike instead which he considered to be ‘the line of least resistance’. Huber returned in October to try to redpoint his route but it was wet. Finally, Huber returned in January of this year and, climbing with Ricky Felderer - a local climber and photographer, made the first ascent of La Bavaresa (F8a+, F8b+, F8b, F8b+, F7b+) in early February. Huber’s route shares the first two pitches of Nike before taking a rightward rising line through the steepest part of the enormous overhangs. Having redpointed La Bavaresa, Huber was clear about the difficulties of his route saying, ‘The whole is much greater than the sum of the individual parts: the four extremely pumpy pitches greatly increase the overall difficulty when compared to the grade of each single pitch.’
Steve McClure was alerted to La Bavaresa when he met Alex Huber on the Petzl Rock Trip to Manikia earlier this year. It seems Huber’s comments fired Steve up and in mid-October Steve and Ethan Walker arrived in Sardinia with just one route on their mind. Climber have been in touch with Steve and Ethan for the low-down on how their ascent progressed.
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Here are Steve's thoughts first...
So what exactly did Alex Huber say to you that got you hooked on La Bavarese?
Way back in May this year, whilst out in Manikia in Greece, Alex Huber took me to one side and insisted I studied the images on his phone. They were amazing, pictures of Alex throwing wildly exposed moves through a massive roof with incredible views behind. “It’s one of the best routes I’ve ever done, it has to be one of the most outrageous and hardest of its style anywhere”. Straight away I was hooked. It doesn’t often happen like that, where you are instantly drawn in, but I could tell this route had exactly the right ingredients for the kind of challenge I was psyched for.
Typically, Huber routes have a fearsome reputation. Any qualms about La Bavarese?
The pitch breakdown was perfect, at least on paper, with 8a+, 8b+, 8b, 8b+, 7b+. I’ve done a lot of on-sighting this last year but was after something different that would take multiple days. Any harder and it would be too hard, and much easier and I’d be aiming to try each pitch on-sight, or to do it from the ground in a day. That would be cool, and someone will be able to do that for sure but it’s too hard for me. This pitch breakdown was exactly what I wanted, without doubt a challenge and something that would take multiple days or even a few trips, and even then it was far from even ‘likely’ that I’d get it. I wanted to get involved, to be hanging out up there taking it all in. When you spend days on a wall you get really attached and really get a feel for it.
How was it getting a team together to go with you on the trip?
Finding a partner was no easy task! Ethan Walker was up for it, a solid trad climber, and with loads of hard sport climbing up to 8c+ he is more than qualified and a fun dude to hang with. That’s important! And then literally at the last minute while I was chatting to film-maker Ben Pritchard about something totally different, I mentioned this route, he saw the pics, and was instantly psyched! But I have put in a big shout for Ricky Felderer, owner of the awesome Lemon House BnB which is perfect for climbers. He was Huber’s belayer on La Bavarese. He totally sorted us out with a place to stay (good rates), gave us the beta, loaned ropes, quickdraws… I reckon he’d have even carried in all the kit too if he hadn’t injured his leg.
On Day 1 you on-sighted the first (F8a+) pitch, worked pitch 2 (F8b+), and then the third (F8b) pitch. How did they feel?
I’d planned to warm up slowly on the 8a+, figure it out, rest on the bolts lots. But it starts quite easy, maybe 7b or so, and I just couldn’t get off, it was so much fun. And then I was fighting hard and going for it! A great start, or not a good start depending on how you look at it. I knew I’d missed the most efficient sequences and so had to go back on the whole route again, to learn how to climb it with the least effort, since that was going to be essential when we went for our ‘big push’. Pitch 2 is short and bouldery, like something from the Peak with tiny edges, and quite out of character with the rest of the route. Good pitch for Peak climbers! Pitch 3 is back to normal super steep tufa 3D craziness!
It sounds like route finding gets complicated after that with La Bavarese splitting off from Nike, the original bolted line by Kares. Can you tell us what happened when you tried pitch 3 (F8b) and pitch 4 (F8b+)?
It’s actually not complex at all, if you have even a vague idea of the topo, which we didn’t! All we knew was La Bavarese split from Nike, that was it! I thought it would be obvious from the pictures, but the cave is so massive everything looked different. (With my topo now it will be MUCH easier to know where to go). On day 2 I redpointed the 8b+ (just wanted to know I could do it!), then redpointed pitch 3 to the Nike belay (maybe 8a+), then reverse climbed to the junction on pitch 3 and went up La Bavarese version. It was all a bit of a mission moving static ropes and changing quickdraws etc!
Pitch 4 was totally out there! The first half is on decent holds but basically roof climbing. Then there is another junction, which was totally unexpected. Straight up looked better but harder, but a bolt stud without hanger persuaded me to head right. Rightwards was also hard, but the rock deteriorated a little as it traversed way off sideways. Eventually at the belay I could find no trace of where to progress onto the next pitch and had that sinking feeling of having gone wrong again and burned a ton of energy in the process! (dogging an 8b+ with 50m of static rope hanging off your harness is no fun!). Then followed a scary reverse down-climb to the junction, and a quick look up the left version.
This proved hard, some moves I couldn’t do, and to be honest I’d kind of had a sense-of-humour failure. It was getting dark and basically I’d had enough! But even getting down is hard, its WAY to high to just abseil off, and we had to abseil in stages, going down and back up ropes and moving between different ropes, almost as hard as climbing!
Having worked both variant pitches you had a decision to make as to which line to follow. What was your thinking?
So, we’d had two days on the wall, and then we took a much-needed rest day, using plenty of it trying to get some knowledge of what is up there: where does La Bavarese actually go, how hard is Nike, is there a topo for Nike? In the end it was as I’d began to suspect: La Bavarese did in fact go way out right, and the left version was unclimbed. In fact most of Nike was unclimbed, including the pitch above the 8b+, though that was estimated at ‘maybe 7b’.
It sounds like an easy choice for P4…. Go right along La Bavarese. After all, that was the route we had come to do, I had it worked, and figured I could do it, and after that pitch there was just one more to do. However, the draws were now out, and instead they were hanging in the Nike way, along with a static rope at the belay, which someone had to get out (i.e. – me!).
On your third day on the route you went for the redpoint. Having already on-sighted the first pitch (F8a+), redpointed the second pitch (F8b+), and redpointed the ‘wrong’ third pitch, how confident were you heading into the third (F8b) and fourth pitch (F8b+)?
I figured I’d get the first pitch, after all I’d on-sighted it, but you never know! Basically I thought there was a decent chance of getting to the 4th pitch, but I had no idea how tired I’d be, and still didn’t have a plan for that pitch, and thus the rest of the route. This had been nagging away at me for a while, as the left hand way into Nike is clearly (I think) the absolute challenge of the cliff: it takes the best rock and the best features and is relentless in difficulty. The position is so out there, with 100+ meters of space below as you quest out on crazy tufas.
The dream for a route like this is to climb every pitch in a day with no falls. But its kind of standard acceptance that a fall is OK, so long as each pitch is climbed without a fall on that day. My vague plan was to have a crack at P4 the hard way, possibly work it and go for a redpoint, and if it all went pear shaped try the La Bavarese way. But I was all too aware that it was all a gamble. Setting off up P4 with the fatigue of three hard pitches, and feeling like I’d prefer an extra rest day or two, I knew it was on a knife edge: ‘Who dares wins’, or ‘he who gets greedy goes home with nothing! ‘
In the end, I chose the right (the left) way into Nike. But man, did I have to fight, and man, was that knife edge between success and failure sharp!!
Once you’d redpointed the first four pitches you still had three pitches to go – they’re written-up on a topo as an F8a, F7a+ and an F7c+. How did those pitches go?
Pitch 5 was way less steep, it felt like we had already done the route. I felt any tension slip away, we even had time on our side. But setting off on what ‘might be 7b’ very quickly became a total sandbag, with the total previous traffic amounting to just Jan Kares dogging his way along. I put in the battle of my life; maybe I went wrong, but Ethan following was cursing and very glad he had not led through. The next pitch was OK, another traverse on really sharp holds, techy wall climbing. And the final 7c+! Zero chalk and in the sun. But what a finish; a sit down on the top of the cliff with that vast view below.
Overall then, it seems like you climbed a combo of Nike and La Bavarese; is that correct?
The topo shows our path! Basically there is just one way up for the first two and a half pitches. Jan Kares had bolted these and Alex ‘borrowed’ them for his route La Bavarese. But I think he made the first ascent of these pitches (not sure). In the end I guess we did a bit of a combo, though the way we took was awesome, and actually, thinking about it, is pretty logical and direct. HUGE respect for Jan and Alex for their efforts with the exploring and bolting.
So on your six day trip you were done early; that must have been amazing! On your last day you climbed in Millennium Cave at Cala Gonone. Enjoy that? Small by comparison?
The plan was always to have two days playing on the route, a rest, then a burn if we were confident, then another rest, and then a ‘last day’ effort. As it turned out there would have been zero chance on the last day, we were all exhausted and the conditions had gone awful, really hot and humid. We had really been on a knife edge on our ascent. Sometimes you only realise how close you are after the event. I really was SOO close to falling, chances are if I had fluffed it, I’d have not done the route, maybe not ever!
Millennium Cave was amazing too. It is vast! And a surprise mix of grades for such a cave, in fact most of the routes are not that hard, with a load of 6’s. But there are some monsters there for sure, and potential for literally hundreds of new lines! I’m well keen to get back there. And just back to Sardinia. As a country its quite amazing, mountainous but with the most amazing beaches, and more climbing than anyone can do in a bunch of lifetimes!
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Finally, we asked Ethan to sum-up the trip and how it was climbing with Steve...
Sounds like a gruelling mission; an amazing route but hard work given the overhanging terrain making other than leading very difficult?
It was quite a tough few days. Hard on the body in general really. The rock is sharp and brutal on the skin. We ended up being on the wall for around 7 hours during the final push. It's a long time to be dangling in your harness in such steep ground. Your legs start to numb out!
What was special for me and something that really hit me while belaying on one of the higher pitches, surrounded by the occasional pigeon and many swallows, was the fact we were most likely some of very few people to have ever been up there.
An amazing effort by Steve in such a short space of time?
Ah yes, he is such a machine. A Duracell bunny. I knew he was in pretty good shape and I fully expected him to get the job done. The ability to hang on forever and make up complex sequences on-sight is a skill he excels at. Great job from him.
Would you like a return trip back to Sardinia with a bit more time to get back on this route or focus on some of the other routes/crags you visited?
Absolutely. I would love to return in the near future. The whole place is just filled with rock. Crags everywhere, stunning settings. We visited a couple of other spots and I was particularly blown away by the Millennium Cave. The most amazing, tufa dripping, enormous hole in the coastline. It appears to have grades across the scale too, from 6's to 8b+. Nice that such a steep and stunning cave is welcoming for people operating across the grades.
To be fair I'd go back just for the snorkelling! The sea is pure bliss after a hard day climbing.
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A film by Ben Pritchard will be released on BMC TV film soon.
An article on the Millennium Cave by Keith Sharples will be published in Climber in a forthcoming issue.