Day 3 - Cortina, Hexenstein

We awoke rested, cold and very psyched. The hammock city was packed up quickly and we drove on down into Cortina. We wandered around until we found a supermarket and stocked up on a couple of days food, investigated a few climbing shops where James bought a hammock and retired to the carpark for breakfast. Chris brought his chef skillzooorzzzz to bear and fried egg, tomato and cured meat were gratefully received.




We then headed up out of Cortina, into the mountains, heading for a route called Hexenstein. The weather was hot, hot, hot and the very steep walkin was really tough. A popular route it seemed as there were teams on every belay and two queueing in front of us at the base.

We climbed as two teams of two, one ahead of the other. The rock was of excellent quality, compact and not polished but gear placements were few and very far between. Belays were bolted and there were sparse pitons and bolts as runners but it still felt like soloing a lot of the time. Crux move for me was an awkward step into a squeeze over a massive jammed boulder - as I committed, the hex I'd placed rattled down the rope to the belay which wasn't ideal! I ran the end of pitch five and the final pitch together, I placed a hex near the belay and ran out a whole ropelength up a choss-gulley to get to the summit cross on rope stretch! Awesome! Except we took 7hrs all in to do 6 pitches with a ridiculous guidebook time of 1.5hrs. We need to get our speed up if we've any hope of doing the Stella Towers traverse.

Walked off by headtorch down WW2 tunnels and via ferrata, cooked in a lay-by and set up the hammocks in trees a bit further down the road.

Didn't take any pics on the phone unfortunately!


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