Multi-pitch and Mountain Goats

As planned, after our Spanish lesson the other day we came back inland to a national park near Murcia. We are about 3 hours away from Finestrat, so still in the same region but it feels quite different out here. In parts it looks semi dessert, with nothing but dry dirt landscapes and nothing else. In these regions it obviously gets quite hot because we noticed many houses have been dug in the side of the clay hillsides similar to what you see in Turkey. Some were quite elaborate with chimneys poking out and seemed quite big.

We are in a national park called Sierra Espuna and we are staying in a campground in a small village called El Berro. From what we have seen El Berro consists of one shop, and one pub (neither of which we have seen open yet). The campground in contrast to this, is incredible. It is by far the best we have stayed in. The people working here seem to clean non stop, so the place is spotless and for us it is pretty handy to the climbing area that we came here for.

Yesterday we decided to have abit of an adventure and instead of our usual 20 metre sport climbs we decided to get on a multipitch climb which this area is renowned for. For those who don't know, a multipitch is where one person goes up 30-40 mtres or so until the rope runs out, then they anchor themselves to the rock and bring the 2nd person up who takes all of the clips out of the rock on their way. This is called a pitch, and you continue doing this till you reach the top. We picked a route that was 200 metres high, and was a grade 5+ (Australian 16) which is a very easy grade that we normally would consider an easy warmup. The reason we don't do harder grades on multipitches is mainly due to the fear factor. Both of us, believe it or not, are still scared of heights and so you don't want to be that high up pulling hard moves otherwise you just don't enjoy it.

So we set out, the first mission was to walk the 40 minutes uphill to the crag which we found quite tiring especially the last 10mins steep walking up a steep scree path through a pine forest to the base of the cliff. We have become abit too accustomed to opening our car doors and walking 2 minutes to the cliff face so this was abit of a shock to the system! Anyway we get there and set up our ropes and sort out our equipment and Ed starts to lead the first route which was about 40 metres in length. It was quite easy climbing, you just had to be extremely careful as it was covered in alot of loose rock. The ledge that he belayed Deb up on was very large which was nice as it gave us room to move and sort the ropes out for the next pitch. Ed led that as well (Deb doesn't do leading!) and this one was meant to be a grade 5+ but felt 2 grades harder. It was very smooth rock so you couldnt' get a positive foothold, with holds only as big as the first joint of your finger to pull up on. Very balancing but possibly if we were lower to the ground on our normal sport climbing we might not have noticed it so much. At this point, we were about 55metres off the ground, but you felt that much higher because you also had the steep 100 metre scree slope under that as well. The belay ledge was abit smaller, about the size of a dining room table, but still plenty of room to move on and set up for the next pitch. The third pitch was a very easy but very exposed 1.5 foot wide ridge. You climbed up this ridge for 20 metres, which was scary but made much scarier due to the amount of loose rock - everytime you reached for a hand hold it would wobble so you had to feel around for another more solid hold. Eventually the ridge turned into a wider face which scrambled up into a tiny sloping ledge approximately 1 foot square (roughly the size of a large bathroom tile, only sloping downwards towards the abiss). Ed clipped in to the rock to make an anchor and then hangs into the air while he belays Debbie up, the only part of him on the wall was his feet and the harness clip. At this stage he was 120 metres off the ground and the exposure on this belay ledge was enormous. The ledge was so small that there was only just enough room for one person so when Debbie came up and saw how awful it was, she decided there was no way on earth she was hanging around on it so she continued to lead the next pitch. Deb finds leading very scary at the best of times, but she thought leading this next pitch 150 metres off the deck was the less scary option of the two. The climb was again pretty easy but with that dammed loose rock, and a dead shrub suspended on the side of the cliff that you had to stand on (waiting for it to pull out) increased the fear factor. The belay ledge was bigger than the ledge below, but it was still small enough that we had to do the same hanging belay stance as there was not enough room to stand normally. The final pitch was quite long as in the old days it used to be climbed as two separate pitches which are now joined together. You start by traversing to the right and then continue up by climbing up two parallel cracks and then finally coming into a slightly overhanging chimney to top out. This pitch while it was the highest off the ground, was actually the best section of rock and we both enjoyed it and didn't even notice that we were 200mtrs off the ground.

When we got to the top the views were insane. We had 360 degree views as were sitting on the top of a mountain and could see behind it now. Looking down from the climb we just did, the road and trees appeared so tiny you couldn't really put into perspective how high you were and couldn't really imagine that a few hours earlier we had walked up that. We had lunch looking over the back of the mountain down into farmers grounds and then walked off the back of the mountain. On our way down we saw a large herd of wild mountain goats. Goats, as we all know, are kind of boring. When you see them in the zoo you normally walk right past their enclosure and go "yeah, yeah, whatever", but when you see them in the wild it is quite unique. They are quite large and very lean, with a rather large set of horns on them so thankfully they appeared to be fearful of us and ran away from us. When we wallked down the back of the mountain we realised how agile these creatures are to live on this terrain. It was really steep, really chossy rock and yet these goats walk up like they are just going to the letterbox. It took about 30mins for us to climb down the back, and then hiked the 40mins back to the car. Both of us enjoyed the day, but think we will stick to our usual sport routes for the rest of the trip as heights just don't really do it for us!  In the next day or so, we will upload a few photos we took on the climb.