Babsi And Jacopo Ignore The Bolts On Gondo Crack

Most of the time we are on the road, travelling around and climbing in different places and we are really thankful that we can do this because it's a really cool way to live our life. So I first came to Australia because a good friend of mine told me about this area. At that time I just discovered crack climbing and trad climbing and I was curious to try it and improve in this kind of style. I found like a little paradise with a lot of granite, really good granite, which was perfect for trad climbing. In the past I spent a lot of time in Ticino, but I never knew that just one hour away there is a really good place for trad climbing. And I really enjoyed the time around Ossola to climb here because we don't have a lot of crack climbing cracks in Europe and this is really special. In Ossola there are a lot of hard, bolted routes which also work on gear. We climbed other routes like Lappo Terapia, Profondo Rosso, Denti Stretti in Valma Grazie Ricchi in Cadarese. There are really a lot of hard routes which are also possible on gear and for us it's just a challenge to climb in a different way. Gondo Crack is a good example for climbing in Ossola. The route follows a really obvious crack, it was a really old project, it was bolted because probably at the time, trad climbing was not so famous in Italy. So we went there with the idea of climbing in gear. The first time when we saw Gondo Crack, I thought it looked really easy. It didn't look super hard. But as soon as we tried the crux moves, we recognized that it's really tricky to find the perfect solution for the crux. Gondo Crack is a short route, it's not so overhanging, just slightly overhanging. The first part is quite easy, it's not so hard compared to the difficulty of the route. You have this really bumpy climbing on good poles, until a rest, and I think it's 70 up to there. And then the last 10 meters are the real crux of the route, so you have some first hard moves, then you reach a good slot where you place the last piece of gear and then you have a really hard boulder sequence at the top and that's the crux of the route. The real challenge for the future would be to find difficult routes or even harder routes which are possible on gear and and not to bolt them and just to climb them like that.