Adventure was at home

Traveling to discover new mountains, new walls, suggestive scenarios where to play the game of mountaineering or climbing, long ago ceased to be an obligation reserved to the elites: globalization, information on the Internet and cheap flights immediately took hold. at the base of the pyramid. In the last two decades rock climbing (and also mountaineering) has broken down the borders of the everyday to open up to all kinds of places on the planet where it is possible to be strung. If the Spanish climb in Utah, Yosemite or the Canadian Bugaboos, the North Americans frequent the Mallos de Riglos, Siurana, the Verdon or the Dolomites. What used to be an expedition,It is now a tourist trip and getting on a plane is part of the routine of the climber traveling to Greece looking for extraordinary rock formations or sandstone fissures in Indian Creek. And if before a mountaineer spent two months waiting for four days of good weather in Patagonia, now the reliability of the meteorological reports allows lightning flights from Europe to climb a specific mountain and return within eight days.

The pandemic arrived and severed the habit of completing up to four trips a year, a circumstance that forced everyone to look with new eyes at the scenarios attached to their places of residence. The pause has also generated a current of thought linked to the ethics of the discipline (it is assumed that climbers love nature) and climate change to launch a couple of questions: do you really need to travel that much to enjoy climbing or climbing? the mountain? Doesn't the playing field at home already serve us, the one where we learned to love outdoor spaces and vertical life? Cecilia and Pedro are two mid-mountain guides based in the French Pyrenees who have decided to relate to their passion from a different approach: always sharing a car to go climbing, making fewer trips but longer,cut off lightning trips and thus curb an inertia of life in which finally the mountain is another consumer object and not a way of understanding life.

Like them, relevant figures from the world of climbing try to create new challenges that allow them to sleep at home, such as the Frenchman Seb Bouin, one of the strongest climbers on the international scene. Bouin could not find climbing routes difficult enough in the surroundings of Montpellier, where he lives ... until he remembered a project for a wall that he knew well at Pic Saint Loup. After weeks of preparation, rehearsals and training, the Frenchman managed to climb a route that is among the most difficult on the planet: 9b ​​/ b + (the maximum graduation is 9 c). “This experience was very special for me. At first I thought that it was not possible to find the same sense of adventure and excitement that I felt when visiting a new road, far from home. Although, once I got so involved and immersed myself in the process,I fully lived the adventure next to my house. Perhaps it was even more intense than many of the great trips I had previously made. I rediscovered the Pic Saint Loup, as if it were a great new challenge in front of me. I enjoyed the hike to get to the top of that mountain every day. I rediscovered the warm-up routes and even began to visualize new lines and possibilities to open new routes in the mountain. That experience taught me a lot: there is always something new to find, even if you know the place very well. There are always new adventures to live. Sometimes you just need a new perspective. "I enjoyed the hike to get to the top of that mountain every day. I rediscovered the warm-up routes and even began to visualize new lines and possibilities to open new routes in the mountain. That experience taught me a lot: there is always something new to find, even if you know the place very well. There are always new adventures to live. Sometimes you just need a new perspective. "I enjoyed the hike to get to the top of that mountain every day. I rediscovered the warm-up routes and even began to visualize new lines and possibilities to open new routes in the mountain. That experience taught me a lot: there is always something new to find, even if you know the place very well. There are always new adventures to live. Sometimes you just need a new perspective. "

Like Bouin, the mountain runner Hillary Gerardi, belongs to the Black Diamond team, a company founded in the United States, a country where the ethical debate about the climber's relationship with the environment ensures hours of discussion and fiery speeches on social networks . Gerardi moved to Chamonix a decade ago, possibly the most comprehensive and accessible alpine pitch out there. During confinement due to the pandemic, many suffered from the loss of the possibility of travel: “instead of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to really savor the privilege of living right under the roof of the Alps and realized that in a day I could run away from the door of my house, step on the top of Mont Blanc and return in time to prepare dinner. Namely,to fully experience the contrast between urban life and the most beautiful nature in a few hours, an experience that for many means days of travel and hours of preparation ”, explains Gerardi. Dressed in sneakers and shorts, Gerardi closed the door of his house at two in the morning and began to run. Hours later, she roped herself to her husband who was waiting for her in the shelter of the Eagle's Nest and together they reached the top of Mont Blanc, unleashed after the descent and Gerardi trotted home, which he reached in the middle of the afternoon.she roped herself to her husband who was waiting for her in the refuge of the Eagle's Nest and together they reached the top of Mont Blanc, unleashed after the descent and Gerardi followed at a trot home, which he reached in the middle of the afternoon.she roped herself to her husband who was waiting for her in the refuge of the Eagle's Nest and together they reached the top of Mont Blanc, unleashed after the descent and Gerardi followed at a trot home, which he reached in the middle of the afternoon.

The sense of adventure is intimately linked to the imagination. Nowadays many climbers simply follow a fashionable circuit that takes them on a roaming route from one climbing school to another without looking for scenarios near their homes where they can feed their passion. James Pearson and Caroline Ciavaldini have traveled as a couple the most famous walls on the planet and the most elaborate territories to agree that one of their most special adventures took place very close to their home in the south of France ... in a cave. The Grotto of the Salamander, near Méjannes le Clap is a tourist destination that hides huge stalagmites and a 90-meter rock chimney only climbed by rodents that choose that margin of the cavity to shelter. Pearson and Ciavaldini managed to escalate the difficulty without placing expansion insurance,that is to say, leaving no more trace of their passage than the magnesium with which they soak their hands and the memory of an adventure lived at home.

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