There are many things which make a route special - line, position, continuity, exposure, rock quality, history, location and climbing quality. It is rare that all of these come together in one route to such great effect as they do with Vestpillaren. The route has a perfect line up the most striking rock feature in the area, the rock is of immaculate quality, the pitches are all around the same difficulty, the position and outlook are majestic and the climbing absorbing throughout. The upper section has a few pitches that take the only lines of cracks and grooves up an otherwise blank sea of rock - all natural and little fixed gear.

We were also blessed with perfect weather for our ascent and, like the side-bar advert I set up over a month ago, I have now experienced a story I’ll be telling my grandchildren. I won’t go on about it since the ascent was pretty straightforward, just make sure that if you have any ambitions for big rock routes in Europe, you put this one on the list.

Here are some more pictures (click for bigger versions):

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Climbing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.