It was last year on our Felskader Trip to Iceland when I met Max Räuber – a funny, super strong boulderer from Erlangen- for the first time. It was a nice time in Iceland and I was looking forward to the next climbing trip with Max. And because Max is super scared of rope climbing, we went on a boulder trip to Switzerland after passing our exams of the last semester. Our preferred boulder destination was Magic Wood in the Avers valley. It’s not only called Magic Wood – indeed it is a really nice place to be. The wood is very nice with lots of small paths through moss fields and around every corner there is a new nice boulder problem to do. I have only been once there, so I had a lot of boulders to discover and to do.
The first boulder I tried was „Supernova“ (7c) – a sloper rail at the very beginning of Magic Wood. Nearly everybody I know did it as a Magic Wood must-have boulder. But last time I was there I was not able to do it (indeed Gabrielle Moroni did SuperSupernova without feet last time, while I was not even able to climb the easier version). Happily, I could do it this time, although it is still not my style 🙂 . Max on the other hand side did it every day as a warm-up for his projects: „Steppenwolf“ (8b) and „Neverending Story“ (8b+).
With Max, I met there some super nice guys from Innsbruck – Laura and Oskar. It was kind of fun to hang around with them and bouldering a bunch of problems in the first days e.g. From „Darkness to Sunshine“ (7c) or „Minisex“ (7c). In the first days, I was more motivated to try a lot of problems than to try one single hard project.
I really enjoyed it to meet a lot of people from all over the world (Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Israel, Russia) and to try some of these boulders with them. Sadly these first days in Magic Wood ended abruptly with a cold front in North Europe – the temperatures went down for twenty degrees and it started snowing in Magic Wood.
