It was sunny when we started, but the light is fading fast and we still have one more rappel to go
This is at Frontales, El Chorro. When we started climbing this (bolted) route, we thought that this was "Quatro Elephants", 30 m, sports grade 5.
Jan climbed first, and after a fairly easy start he soon got to a belay. He certainly wasn't 30 m off the ground and it was clearly easier than grade 5. He spotted more bolts higher up, so he continued.
He climbed and climbed, and less and less rope remained at my feet. I was starting to wonder if it would be enough, or if I would perhaps need to scramble up the first bit of the route to give him more rope to reach the top. But it turned out fine, and before the rope ran out, he reached a belay. Obviously I couldn't lower him all the way down, but the solution for that was obvious to both of us: I would follow up to the belay that he had passed, and from there I could lower him down. Long story short, that's what we did. When he stood next to me, there was less than a meter of rope left - just look at the short loop of purple rope! Assuming that our rope was indeed 60 m long, that meant that the top part of the route was almost 30 m, and the whole thing probably 50 m or more. What route had we climbed???
9 December 2014.