Hate Winter? Love Sicily Instead.
My trip to Sicily’s sport-climbing paradise, the fabled limestone of San Vito Lo Capo, started with a massive disappointment—a reminder to not fly too high until you could—nothing major and nothing to do with mother Sicily, since it happened in the Rome airport, but it was aggravating because I had to relearn a universal truth first debated at length by Plato and Aristotle in their 4th century B.C. philosophical Academy. Never expect great things from airport pizza.
~~~~~~~
At the airport I had ordered a pizza margherita, the Toyota Camry of pizzas. Simple, reliable, time-tested. In my mind, I was already in Italy, and, to be fair, I was inside its borders and keen for the best food the Mediterranean country had to offer.
What was put before me two minutes later—yeah, it was microwaved—was a sad sponge, the cheese little squares of bland something-or-other and the sauce … a watery, tomato pasty wash.
Never expect great things from airport pizza. It is a truth as verifiable as the second law of thermodynamics, and yet, smuggled within this truth is another, secondary truth—one that didn’t immediately occur to me, the pizza thing led to it—a truth of climbing, and onsighting in particular: Don’t let your guard down until you clip the chains. Freud’s reality principle meets climbing.
The last day of the trip
A high plateau rimmed by craggy limestone the color of burnt skin, dried orange peels and pan-fried cheddar soared above me. Bristly green grasses held where they could, between, below and above the crags—dig down only a few feet anywhere in this part of Sicily and it’s rock.
Below the expanse that sauntered out of sight to distant crags and sheep trails and carved into the limestone hillside via millions of years of geo-human forces, was an overhanging amphitheater, the Lost World crag.
The Lost World dripped, literally and figuratively. Literally because of a cold rain the night before and the occasional shower that taunted our otherwise stunner of a day. Figuratively because tufas are geological marvels, inverted drip-castles kids make on beaches, minerals in creative posture, things that, I learned, to use successfully you must be awake, not in a yogic sense of being “woke” to the enlightenment of climbing, but three-dimensionally awake. Tufas can grow behind you when you climb. Awake means knowing how to navigate them.
On those tufas in said cave, high drama was unfolding. Cognizant of it being my last route of the trip, I was desperate for a knee bar on an epic 5.12b, pumped out of my gourd from 35 meters of tufa wrangling, easy, yes, but 35 meters of anything ain’t so. And you can bet your shit I wasn’t going to botch it. Remember the secondary pizza lesson?—don’t let your guard down until you clip the chains—I was putting that into practice.
Tu Ri, a local Italian we befriended, had told me the route was 11d, but he also downrated everything with a dismissive shrug of the shoulders in what can only be called the local’s sandbag, the belief that something is easier than it is simply because you’ve done it dozens of times. That’s like believing that everyone should be able to juggle four balls since you’ve been doing it for 10 years.
On an adjacent route Ben Rueck was cruising a super steep 13b, but the last-move crux loomed just above him, a rare crimpy sequence, the gatekeeper, and he was resting, shaking out.
After a mutual “Come on man, you got it,” we both clipped the chains. My forearms were so wrecked I promised myself I’d take a month off when I got home. Which of course I didn’t.
Throughout our day at the Lost World, a scrappy little wildfire had been wreaking havoc on a hillside a few miles distant, flaring up, calming down, raging, abating—a little smoke show. As I lowered, I noticed that the wildfire was out. Curtain closed.
The Toe of the Toe
If Sicily is the toe of the Italian boot, San Vito is at the toe of the toe, peacefully residing on the far end of a small peninsula, a beach town with a crescent-shaped shore on its northern edge, the Zingaro nature reserve to the east, a multi-pitch limestone sentinel, Monte Monaco, at its rear. An abode where middle-class Italians escape and trade their polished leather scarpas (shoes) for flip flops and a lipsmack of Limoncello. Here, you can be sinking your toes in the sand of San Capo’s beach and in 15 seconds by foot be downtown, but not before encountering gelato stalls and plein-air cafes, which, since it was off season when we were there, were boarded up.
As the crow flies, San Vito is 30 miles from Palermo, the big city to the east—yet home to only two rock gyms—but San Vito is an hour and a half drive on one-laners that slice through the heart of every village, town and hillside curiosity. My partners for this sojourn were Ben Rueck, whom you just met, Lena Palms and Jeff Rueppel: friends, crushers, artists.
A pro climber, Ben wears a shaggy, half-mop of brown hair, hails from Grand Junction, Colorado, and is rather serious except when he’s not, then he’s 12 and as giddy as my eight-year-old daughter. He’s a friend of years, a top all-arounder, equally at home on hard Indian-Creek splitters as he is the dura of Céüse, and always climbs as if he is setting a speed record. Typically, he’s clipping the chains on his warm up, something in the 5.12 range, by the time I look at the guidebook. On a given year, he teaches courses at five or six Craggin’ Classics. Ben and Lena just got married. In addition to being a climber—she just sent her first 5.13 this past year—Lena is half Japanese, half Canadian, a former on-air news reporter, and translates Japanese news stories to English, which she would do throughout the trip. Lena is tall and lean with straight dark hair and climbs deliberately and boldly.
A San Fran native, Jeff Rueppel was the man behind the lens. Jeff is forever unshaven and has studied, focused eyes and is always down for an adventure. He has been a Rock and Ice photo-camp instructor for years and has two Masters degrees under his belt, one in Computational Linguistics and another in French Literature, which explains why he is in his element—at least when he is not editing photos, which he is constantly doing—when discoursing about the finer points of Brexit and United States trade policy towards China.
The post Hate Winter? Love Sicily Instead. appeared first on Climbing.