A two and a half month journey to climb the most difficult route in Yosemite and fail on the last move

Imagine that the cyclist Primoz Roglic goes to the Tour that he could win, walking from his native Slovenia, but despite the beating and the lack of training, he is able to finish second.

Belgian climber Seb Berthe imagined something similar last fall: his Tour would be the most difficult wall route on the planet, located in California's Yosemite Valley.

And he would not travel on foot, but on a sailboat, crossing the Atlantic in a very long journey.

And he didn't manage to free climb the wall either because he fell a thousand times in the last step of the key pitch.

So, it can be said, he was second in his particular Tour.

All this, as a protest and action against climate change.

The mountains, once majestic and intimidating, now appear as great wounded animals that crumble before our eyes: the

large block of ice fragmented by major cracks in a glacier]

they fall like rotting crusts, glaciers agonize like fish washed up on a beach, towers of granite and limestone crumble and the ice retracts and disappears.

More information

Sébastien Bouin, the climber who has chained a 9c: "I barely had a 1% chance of success"

The climbers are left without a playing field and the human being without a planet.

Does anyone care?

Almost two years ago, the Belgian big wall climber Sébastien Berthe decided that something had to change in his life.

His own contradictions and the generalized hypocrisy in the world of mountaineering seemed so uncomfortable to him that he decided to follow the message of his sponsor, the mountain equipment firm Patagonia, at face value.

Since then, he hasn't traveled by plane, he travels in the most sustainable way possible, he tries to have goals close to home, he fights not to be an unbridled consumerist.

Suddenly, the how is once again more important than the what.

And it's not just a question of climbing style, a matter of purists, but a way of understanding the love for the mountains.

Mountaineering has always had to explain itself,

to justify himself, to dissect the ins and outs of an activity in which tragedies cause both rejection and admiration.

Now, the time may have come when its actors only have to be activists of their passion for the mountains and that each ascent, each new record, is just the excuse to shout in defense of a natural environment on the way to collapse.

The hardest known wall route is called Dawn Wall and is located in El Capitan (Yosemite Valley, United States).

Its key pitch has a difficulty of 9a and its creators and first to climb the route free (without hanging or holding on to the insurance) were Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgenson.

They invested seven years of work to open this route and climb it free, something they achieved in 2015. In 2016, the considered best climber in history, the Czech Adam Ondra, achieved the second free climb after a week on the wall.

Seb Berthe wanted to be the third, but his way: he had to travel from Belgium to California without flying... So he convinced seven friends, one of them a sailor, to cross the Atlantic in a 15-meter sailboat .

The ship had been in dry dock for a decade:

it had to be conditioned to sail and to be equipped with facilities in which to train.

But Seb Berthe could hardly train: when he was not sick or seasick, the sea would get rough.

He soon assumed that he wouldn't make it to Yosemite.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sébastien Berthe (@sebertheclimber)

They sailed for a month and docked the ship in Mexico, since the three-month permit to stay in the United States did not allow them to dock in one of its ports.

From the time they set sail from the Canary Islands until they reached Yosemite, two and a half months passed.

It didn't seem like the best way to approach one of the toughest climbing challenges out there.

Berthe and his friend Siebe Vanhee worked the route for a month and a half and when they launched their final attack, they got stuck on the key pitch.

Here they remained for two weeks hanging from the wall in hammocks.

They climbed the same pitch for seven days and rested another seven.

Inevitably, Seb Berthe fell on the last step.

“I almost went crazy up there.

I think I could have made it

but we were already without food and without water and it seemed unethical to me to ask our colleagues to bring us groceries.

And I didn't want to spend two months on the wall either, so I decided to quit.

It is a route that is at another level in terms of difficulty and would have needed a different approach to the challenge, ”he explained on his social networks because before embarking in Mexico again to undo his trip.

For decades, mountaineers refused to be recognized as athletes: theirs, they claimed, was not a sport but a way of life, a way of relating to the natural environment and escaping, to a large extent, from a society in which they found no authentic stimuli.

Today, things are changing rapidly and many mountaineers are beginning to embrace conscientious training to take on increasingly complex challenges, while trying not to abandon the essence of their activity.

The supposed failure of Seb Berthe appears more like an achievement worthy of admiration because it refers in part to the pioneers of a world that has not yet globalized.

Not so long ago, before flying by plane was ridiculously cheap, climbers, mountaineers or alpinists spent months on their trips, but they conscientiously squeezed the scenarios they had at hand.

The Schmid brothers traveled by bicycle from Munich to Zermatt to sign the first ascent of the Matterhorn north in 1931.

They did it forced by their circumstances.

Now other circumstances oblige.

Perhaps Seb Berthe will be remembered as the man who fell on the last hard step of the Dawn Wall or as the guy who encouraged the rest to rethink their consumerist approach to the mountains.

You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes on