Sarca Valley, 18th - 21st May 2023

Ascension Day is a bank holiday in Bavaria which gives a four day weekend, and the plan was to get down to the Dolomites for my first time climbing (apart from two or three visits to sport crags) since the Fussstein in 2010. Unfortunately the weather had other ideas, with snow falling and lying all the way down to the valley, so, as so often, the solution became Arco.

On the first day we climbed the Via Teresa (VI) on the Sonnenplatten, as they are known to German-speaking climbers, or the Parete Zebrata as the Italians call them. This was a nice length at 400 m / 15 pitches, and the grade VI pitches were sort of fun, but the experience taken as a whole didn't have me itching to get back there. What came next was more fun, however.

 I had first heard the name Heinz Grill from a non-climbing neighbour who used to like going to Arco for yoga courses with him. At that time almost all I knew about multi-pitch climbs in the Sarca Valley came from the Versante Sud guidebook Pareti del Sarca by Diego Filippi and that meant fairly steep and serious routes starting at about VI+ with peg belays and maybe a few more pegs in between, such as Cesare Levis or Via del Missile. To cut a long story short, Heinz Grill has been pretty busy with his Hilti over the past twenty years, and the fruits of a lot of his labours are presented in the new guidebook Arco Plaisir by Florian Kluckner.

The first of these we tried was the Via Helena on a valley-level crag with the grandiose name of Monte Colt, for which you park next to the river and walk all of about three minutes to get to the start of the routes in some dense bush. This is an eight pitch route graded VI+, on which we learnt what is meant by the Heinz Grill protection style: bolts on the hard bits, a lot of in-situ threads, and every now and again a crack left alone so that you are glad you brought your rack along after all. The highlight of the Via Helena is a large overhang with the most enormous jugs which I have ever experienced outside of a climbing wall. I climbed this in a hurry, fearing that it had to get harder at some point, but it just didn't. Another time I would take my time and enjoy it some more.

On the last day we climbed La Luna Argentea (VI/A0) on the Piramide Lakshmi, another super route with some lovely pitches easily as good as anything on a single pitch sport crag and the same style of protection as on the Via Helena.