I would have liked to write a nice little story about my recent trip to Swizzy, about hard sends and all that. The trip at the end was a little bit depressing, i must say. I got a bad flu with fever. The whole package you don’t wanna have while at a beautiful place like the alps. It stopped any of my climbing and skiing ambitions after the first day. Anyway, enough of complaining. Let’s focus on some other things like: The Dagger, one of the big hardcore classics in Cresciano, first done back in 2003 by my old mate Toni Lamprecht.
It was back in the day before the big hype around bouldering in Ticino. I was there for maybe the second time, more focusing on routeclimbing at this time. Toni was one of the big figures in german climbing and one of my homegrown heros, when i was walking up to Dreamtime one early morning. Dreamtime at this time was the first problem graded Fb 8c and was one of the most aesthetic lines i had seen. The whole boulder is lying on top of this small penninsula in the woods, on every side there are steep slopes and you have a nice view down the valley. A great place even to hang out. This morning i was pretty sleepy while walking up and did not expect anyone being up there. When i came to the boulder Toni was sitting under what is now The Dagger. We just greeted each other shortly before i laid a eye on Dreamtime (not for trying, just to feel the power of the hardest problem in the world). I remember Toni looking spick and spanned and totally fit, which was kinda weired, ’cause it looked like he had slept nearby in the mud somewhere. Later he told me, that his morning routine before trying the Dagger included a short shower under the waterfall. It was the beginning of march by the way. F***ing hardcore guy!
The Dagger was found when Dave Graham and Toni were sitting below the big roof, maybe a little bit stoned or just in the climber’s madness mode as so often. Something like that. Dave: Hey Toni, have you seen the spceship? T: What spaceship? D: There, the huge dagger! It must have been something like that and the guys started trying. And remember that this two guys are two of the most motivated climbers on this planet.
The Dagger at this time was something new, something spectacular and something the climbing world was looking at. Some might have climbed equally hard problems at this time, but the Dagger was different. Toni worked the Crux sequence for some time before finding a way through it by climbing mainly the whole problem with feet first. When you look on this firework of heel-, toe- and other hooks, you get a sense for the technical difficulty of the Dagger. Some might say the Dagger is a bit dabby at the end. Who cares, nothing you could not handle if you want.
Toni climbed the Dagger a couple of weeks later from an obvious hold in the middle of the roof. The sitstart was left undone. A year later Toni, like it’s normal for Toni, returned for the sit start. There are two possibilities for a sit start. The really hard one from the left, adding more or less a problem as hard or even harder than the Dagger or the shorter sit start variation from the right, just adding two big spans into the classic start. Toni made the right start and the story of The Dagger was written to him. A nice beautiful problem with a obvious sit start. Fullstop.
But the story was not told for Dave at this point. Living in Ticino for nine month and more or less crushing every problem he found, the left sit start was on Dave’s agenda. The interesting thing is, that Dave had to climb a full different method of the Dagger as Toni, also because he comes into the problem on a different sequence, means with the right to a crimp Toni takes with the left. Dave climbed the sit start after some effort, calling it the new standard for Fb 8c, initiating a new discussion about grading, and giving it the name Story of two worlds.
In the meantime Dreamtime was chipped. This is one of the saddest stories in climbing history i know. It’s the perfect line and as Fred Nicole said after the first ascent: The line deserves the grade not only because of it’s difficulty, but also because of it’s beauty. The change of the holds were not big, nothing you see, when you don’t know the problem, and years later i had more than one chat with Toni about that, both of us unsure which holds changed. On some it was obvious, on some not. But on problems that hard it’s all about the little things, maybe the rock has this small new line that allows you to put a little bit more skin on the hold or you can change the angle of the fingers a bit. It’s all about details that make the difference between climbing the problem and failing. Some might say that it could have come from hard brushing or stuff like that, but even when the changes are small, it is obvious that it was changed with an idea behind it. So sad that now one of the most perfect problems ever found is destroyed and with it a big part of climbing history.
I met with Toni and a couple of young guys from Munich at the Dagger shortly after we arrived in Switzerland on my last trip. Toni had come down not to try something hard. There was much of snow around and the conditions were far away from perfect, but Toni, psyched as always gave the Dagger some shots for photos. Toni is maybe one of the best models for climbing photos you could wish. Always uncomplaining, always open for ideas and always willing to give it another try. At some point you feel bad, thinking you just destroy him totally, but Toni just smiles and jumps on the problem another time. And this day it was not only me, giving him directives, but also Fred Moix, a swiss photographer, shooting for his Switzerland portfolio in the next photo issue of the climbing magazine. Thanx, Toni!
For myself the rest of the trip was far away from perfect as mentioned before. After putting a little bit of effort into Dreamtime that day before the photoshoot with Toni, we headed to Chironico in the night, the night i got sick and from that point the whole rest of the trip was more or less over for me. After a day sitting around in Chironico we drove north to a little hut in the mountains near Altdorf to meet some friends. Beautiful place and the rest of the pack went boarding, while i was lying in bed for three days straight, not seeing the sunlight the whole time once. On the last day i had a look outside. This is what i saw:
[...] of two worlds’ is a sitstart to a boulder called ‘The Dagger’ fb 8B+ that was first climbed by Toni Lamprecht in 2003. After making the first ascent of ‘The story of two worlds’, [...]