Psyched from the trip to Magic Wood, we were hungry for more. The weather forced us to move to the Southside of the Alps to escape the bad weather on the Northside. So we switched our planned trip from Magic Wood to Chironico in Ticino. A good choice: bouldering in Ticino on the warm and sunny autumn days is quite amazing with all the brown leaves in the forest and the sweet chestnuts lying around.
Chironico is way more challenging for me than Magic Wood: somehow the boulders afford way more technical skills than the athletic boulders in Magic Wood. Nevertheless, it is always a good opportunity for me to improve my technical skills and to try some of these impressive boulder problems there. One of them is ‚Delusion of grandeur‘ [8a+/b] which we tried already earlier this year. It’s an impressive boulder with a powerful start and a long top-out slab. This makes this boulder longer than some climbing routes in Frankenjura.
For me, this boulder was and still is quite challenging. After multiple sessions, I could climb all the isolated sections, but still, struggle t climb it in one part … This time, Paul showed his full potential: he was already super close to the send last time and did not want to leave it another time unclimbed. And indeed, climbing the lower part from the ground, he kept the focus and climbed into the top-out section. And if you did the moves into the top-out slab, there is no way back as you can’t jump down anymore. 🙂
The next day, we made a stop at the ‚Willenberg Dach‘ [7c+/8a] – a fancy feed-forward roof climbing. I had already tried this one in the years before, but somehow I found it quite difficult. So I was quite excited to try it one more time. Together with two friends from Stuttgart, Thomas and Sebastian, we figured out how to do moves. This was quite a funny session as we just joked around and played around to develop an easy beta. And suddenly Thomas and I just climbed the boulder – and this time it felt so easy as this boulder problem should feel.
Big props Paul for sending ‚Delusion of grandeur‘ – I quite psyched to try it again and I am already looking forward to the next weekend in Ticino …
