Santa Linya, Siurana and Leche Caliente

This winter we visited Spain again. We started from the Pfalz with Timm and Sebi. We drove down all the night and reached the cave at 10 in the morning, a good time for a long climbing day. I really like the cave, there were not that many tufas and not so overhanging as I expected and a good first climbing day!



But in the evening bad luck began.. When we started to cook our new MSR cooker directly broke down. For this case we had a campingaz cooker in addition, because we had had some bad experience with the MSR before. Unfortunately -7°C was a bit too cold and that cooker didn't work either... Finally we made a campfire and everything was good.



Having frozen milk and muesli wasn't very comfortable but it was very nice to climb with this tamperatures in the spanish sun.
Sadly it started to snow and we had to spend our first restday in the tent. In the evening we recognized our second problem.. There was no dry wood in the snow and still freezing cold. We were lucky to have enough pasta left from the day before. It was one big funny ice-block which I had to break! Eating it and the weather on the next day was't funny.. We were lucky to stay in the cave so we could climb all day there in spite of the rain. Finally our third day in Santa Linya was our last day on dry rock.



But at least it was getting warmer and the gazcooker worked :-) We were very happy when Blomu dryed during one dry day. Markus and me tried this nice line before.
After three tries I had enough endurance to climb to the last move. Thats the hardest one and very funny. I walked up all the way to caressed the last hold three times, so it was nice to stuck the next go. Nice route! Markus happily send it also that day...


Here he is just at that point where it is going to be pumpy.

... it was the last dry day for Blomu...

After some people had told us that there would be a lot of rain the next days, we turned to Siurana and better weather.
I wanted to take a look at a project which Toni Arbones had proposed me two years ago... It was a project which was bolted by Christian "Pinky" Winklmaier in "grau del massets" a few years ago. Happily he also was there and showed me the moves of his line. I really like it, short bouldery and really nice typical Siurana rock. The hardest is to jump up from a spiky two fingercrimp to catch a sloper. Very nice move! After three detailed workouts I was lucky to catch the sloper and send the route. I really enjoyed this climb, sending was much harder and exciting than Blomu which I had done the day before. When I ordered a leche caliente that evening the bargirl taught me that it was dangerous to order this. It also means "slap in the face", so we thought that this is a nice name for the route, were you have to slap a sloper.

We had some nice days in Siurana, but the day before we planned to drive home it started to snow.



It was snowing so much that there was no chance to climb or to drive down to town. So, we were stuck on the campground. In this region 50 roads were closed, 11 towns without electricity and only two snow ploughs. We had around 60 cm snow and there was no way to drive.



It wasn't boring, there were some more people having the same problem and we were diggin the whole saturday to clear the camp street and get out all cars. Finally Sunday afternoon the snow plough reached the campground and we could drive home.



When the first Uni lecture started we were still on the road. But at the end I only missed one of my three lectures :-)