Alpstein Marathon (6b+, 21 pitches)

Adrian and I took a day off work to go do a climb that he'd had his eye on for months. A 21 pitch monster called "Alpsteinmarathon," it's the longest climb in the Appenzell Mountains of Switzerland. Over 800 meters of climbing through long and sustained pitches, it wouldn't be easy as we both felt a bit out of rock climbing shape despite being in peak condition a month before. Activity had fallen off to nothing! Oh well, let's see what we can do...



We drove down after work and hiked in to the Bollenwies Hut under the stars, arriving at about 10:30 pm. After many admonishments to remove our shoes and put on our pants (well, for Adrian. It's a long story, but he was kind of just hiking in shorts that looked suspiciously like underwear), we were allowed up to a room to sleep. In the morning we hiked for 15 minutes along the beautiful narrow lake to the start of the route, only about 50 meters above the lake and a small sheep farm.

I got the first lead, a 6a+ "entry test," that was indeed a good test. Strenuous but fun too. I combined with the next pitch and ran into what would be a common problem on the climb: awkward bolt clips. In fact I had to climb up and down 3 times to feel secure enough to clip this particular bolt, which required pasting feet on a crumbly, sandy slab, and making due with an equally crumbly handhold. Above this clip the pitch was enjoyable again, going over a little roof to broken face.




Adrian continued and we swapped leads for a while. The sun was getting uncomfortably hot, and this part of Europe has been in a heat wave for over a week. Our energy already flagging, we worried about being able to finish the climb. Increasingly, I thought hiking or swimming was the right thing to be doing now!

Pitch 6 was an amazing steep face which required some commitment. A long (8 meter?) runout between bolts mandated a nut placement, thankfully bomber. I really enjoyed the continuous 6a moves on this pitch. Adrian took the next, at similar difficulty, then led the crux pitch with it's outsized difficulty of 6b+. Aside from this pitch, the route is 6a+. Adrian used an aider to get past most of the pitch, which was fairly sustained. Following, I could climb free until a brutal transition out of a crack to a face and slabby terrain on the right, then I was happy for the etrier Adrian had left me. I remembered that aiding is pretty tough too, twisting around on slings and basically doing pull-ups on occasion. Emerging at the belay short of breath, I was happy for Adrian to lead again.

At pitch 10 we started swapping leads again. In here, beaten down by the heat, I started pulling on draws reflexively. How would we possibly finish? We had a fair amount of water left, but were conserving it. The rubber in our shoes heated up so much that we had to try to keep the toes out of the sun to prevent painful burns. A few days later, I've got a nasty blister on the back of my ankle where I missed a spot of sunscreen. Only our stubbornness kept us on the rock for the next few pitches. We slowed down, cheated liberally and just tried to keep moving. The forecast called for some clouds in the afternoon and we were counting on that! I try to write down a detailed pitch description right after a climb, but for the life of me, I can't remember a stitch of pitch 11 (5c), which Adrian led. Was I a zombie?

Pitch 14 was cruxy at 6a+. I climbed enjoyable slab, then had a heart stopping moment traversing to the left with a crumbly undercling hold and slowly slipping-off feet. Although mostly a bolted climb, it's not "over-bolted" at all. A fall in here wouldn't be great. I pressed my cheek to the wall and contemplated the few millimeters of skin and rubber holding me to the wall as I pawed for a right handhold. Whew! That was a certain kind of fun! At this point I started cursing like a sailor and would continue for the rest of the climb. Me and Adrian both, actually.




But some shade was sent by deities unknown, and did so much to improve my spirits. Adrian hit "the wall" a pitch or two later, feeling unable to free climb for a while and making strenuous moves in slings. Stubborn man, he pulled through and regained strength as we climbed in shadier conditions.

Pitch 16 climbed a runout face (well, I missed a bolt, that's why!) to a steep chimney with a tough exit. Pitch 18 featured a slabby buttress, a dicey move around into a gully (I pulled on this draw), then a fantastic overhanging crack. Finally, a "sting in the tail" with a really difficult traverse of a steep slab to reach the belay. This route makes you work for every inch!




Adrian came up, asked me to sign the route book at the belay, and set out on a hard move right off the belay (6a+), going past an overhang via crack and face. After this workout, thankfully the long pitch moderated considerably on a left-leaning journey to easier ground. Another pitch led to the grande finale: the 15 meter pitch 21, rated 5b.




Here we had a hilarious argument, though we were really mad at the moment. I felt it was really important to clip these last two bolts, but Adrian wanted to do a "walkaround" of those final moves. We hollered at each other heatedly for a minute, me demanding to lead the pitch if he wouldn't, and Adrian pointing out I was being an unreasonable son-of-a-bitch. Finally he told me to f*(k off at which point we both broke up laughing. We were tired, strained and at the end of our tethers...finally we'd been able to step outside ourselves for a moment and see the ridiculousness of the situation. "Okay, I'll clip your bolt, but MY WAY!" he said with a smirk. In the end he didn't clip it. As I followed the pitch, flipping the rope over the buttress crest so I could follow the bolt line I had to admit it was both hard and contrived. I guess the routesetter wants to make sure that the last move feels the hardest, because 5b after 20 pitches will certainly feel like 6a+, at least.






We were all smiles on the summit, happy to have a lot of work done with, enjoying the evening air and lack of hot sun (it was 7 pm, the climbing took about 11 hours which was 3 hours over "normal time"). We shared Adrian's sandwiches, looking out to the Bodensee, and in to Saentis and other Appenzell peaks. We saw gaemse grazing steep meadows. We hiked down, reaching the Bollenwies in an hour, where beer and coffee restored what was missing. Laughing and talking with two women on a multi-day hike, listening to an impromptu men's choir, we watched the light fade from the dark water. Hiking away, 23 hours after we arrived, we made the long drive home.

Thank you Adrian for a good adventure! Thanks to the weather, the mountain and the route.

Detailed description below. A PDF is here.

Pitch	French	YDS	Meters	Leader	Description
1	6a+	5.10c	20	Michael	Short, sporty moves up a pillar and into a gully
2	5c+	5.10a	40	Michael	Continue up a gully wall, awkward clips but a nice roof
3	5c+	5.10a	50	Adrian	Faces with water runnels in a grassy garden
4	5c+	5.10a	45	Michael	Follow a buttress up on slabs with holes
5	5c	5.10a	40	Adrian	Short slab with water runnels to a grassy exit
6	6a	5.10b	35	Michael	Beautiful steep slab with good holds. Nuts required.
7	6a	5.10b	25	Adrian	Continue up the slab with a few tough moves
8	6b+	5.11a	45	Adrian	Crux pitch, we aided liberally
9	6a	5.10b	40	Adrian	Initially difficult Wasserrillen on a smooth slab
10	5c	5.10a	40	Michael	Straightforward rock avoiding grassy sections. Ends with a hike up the 4th grass band.
11	5c	5.10a	45	Adrian	I have no memory of this pitch! It was very, very hot.
12	5a	5.8	50	Michael	Pleasant climbing staying on clean rock with occasional grass. Ends with an interesting traverse into a gully to belay.
13	4c	5.7	30	Adrian	Climb easily left to connect with the main summit buttress
14	6a+	5.10c	35	Michael	Very nice face/slab climbing, with a real "cruxy" move traversing left with a tiny undercling.
15	5b	5.9	50	Adrian	Follows good rock left between grassy bands. Pretty sustained for the grade thanks to this "always seek the best rock" principle.
16	5c+	5.10a	50	Michael	Excellent pitch up a featured face, finishing with a few steep moves in a chimney.
17	5b	5.9	50	Adrian	Climb easily left again on the increasingly defined summit massif.
18	6a+	5.10c	35	Michael	Nice moves on a slabby pillar to a hard traverse left into a gully, then spectacular steep crack climbing. Ends with a difficult moves across a slab to the belay.
19	6a+	5.10c	45	Adrian	"One move wonder" very hard move climbing above the first bolt, then easier terrain up and left.
20	5b+	5.9	50	Michael	Up and left to the first bolt, then traverse hard left for every subsequent bolt. I missed this, and was soon walking grassy ledges.
21	5b	5.9	15	Adrian	Somewhat contrived difficulty clipping two bolts on a ridge, then begin scrambling to the summit.

Finally made the video

It took a few days, but with the able help of Kwansei we made this video of me playing the Incantations Part 3 solo. I overlayed the video with snippets of the sheet music I uploaded for my previous blog entry:


Michael playing "Part 3" of Incantations from michael stanton on Vimeo.


I hope I didn't butcher the song too greatly. As I said in the last entry, intonation is kind of a problem. I altered the guitar part a bit here and there to avoid high notes on low strings, where the problem is worse. Kwansei recorded me twice, so I had two videos to splice together, but I just took the soundtrack from one video. I couldn't resisted embedding a few photos from my weekend trip to the Wilder Kaiser mountains.

Thanks to Kwansei for the help, and the rest of the family for putting up with my constant practicing! Thanks to Mike Oldfield for an amazing song from an incredible album.

Transcribing Incantations

Incantations is an album by guitarist and composer Mike Oldfield. I've loved his music ever since my dad introduced me to Ommadawn, which is still probably my favorite album of all time. Mostly instrumental quasi-folky music with occasional ripping guitar parts, these album-length songs really impressed me when I was learning the guitar. Still, most people I knew never heard of this stuff.

Recently I bought Incantations, which I'd never heard before. I was inspired to transcribe the guitar part starting at about 3 minutes into the song "Incantations 3." I didn't even look around on the net to see if anyone had done yet, I really just wanted to do it myself for fun. I used the charming music notation program Lilypond, and wore out my mousepad going back and forth over the faster guitar parts to write them down.

I wrote down the music in ordinary notation with pencil and paper, and learned the guitar part at the same time. I made a synth loop to be able to practice the harder parts at a slower speed. I took a break from transcribing at about the midpoint of the guitar part (about 5 minutes of music) in order to memorize and consolidate what I'd learned so far in my mind. This was hugely entertaining, but a bit irritating for Kris who got tired of hearing this song over and over!

Finally, on this holiday weekend I transcribed the 2nd half of the solo, then entered all the music into Lilypond, in what reminded me of my days of typing in programs from "Antic" magazine as a kid. Just look at it! Now you know why I have a headache.

Here is a picture from the first page of the transcription. The PDF is here.

I was hoping to benefit from Lilyponds automatic tablature support, but the strings they chose were always terrible, so I just decided to specify which guitar string every note appears on. I did this while the family watched "50 First Dates," so it was about 2 hours of entry and occasional puzzlement just to get that feature done.

The music could use more expressive marks, for sure, but it doesn't make much sense to learn without being able to hear the original song anyway.

All markings on the high E string that are higher than the 24th fret are actually achieved by bending the string up. Careful...you have to reach a high G...I broke a string at least once trying to do this! You really need a 24-fret guitar to be able to play this piece unless you occasionally transpose something down by an octave.

Another interesting thing about this song is that Mike Oldfield apparently had a Gibson SG guitar with amazing intonation in the high fret region. I, sadly, don't have this, so some of the sweeps of 5ths and 4ths near the end just don't sound as good when I play it.

I'll follow up with a video of playing over the song. Anyway, if you want to see the music, it is here.

Predigtstuhl Nordkante (IV)

David and Mike were going to fly into Munich to visit the Eastern Alps and Eastern Europe more generally. As it turned out, I could take a day to climb, and the weather forecast looked pretty good after many days of rain. They came over Friday afternoon, and we headed out to the Wilder Kaiser and the Griesener Alm Saturday morning. Knowing these guys are hella good rock climbers, I was thinking we could climb the Duelferriss on the Fleischbank, which has been on my wish list for years. But to my dismay, the expected light rain around 2 am had extended through the morning, and we soon found ourselves a bit shell-shocked in the Gasthaus at the Alm, drinking coffee and wondering when the rain would stop!




Finally, at about 10 am, the sky looked a little brighter. We packed the piece of bread and butter I'd bought as our sole food for the trip, along with another piece of bread with the anis spice in it (not a great idea!).

No sooner did we start hiking, but it rained again. I talked a lot about how English climbers are very hardy and climb cheerfully in the rain, hoping we'd be suitably inspired. No one was fooled by such play acting! Still, we kept hiking up, wondering what we'd actually do in the end. We'd already eliminated the Duelferriss as an objective, and settled on two ideas: The Nordkante on the Predigtstuhl (IV) and the "Via Classica" (V+), the former a beautifully scenic but easy mountain climb, the second a modern bolt-protected rock climb. Having decided the Nordkante would be better in the rain, we walked under Via Classica" and saw two parties starting the route, to our surprise. "Glad somebody is optimistic!" we thought.






We hiked up into the Steinere Rinne, it was cool to show this interesting landscape to Mike and Dave. Mike got some good pictures of climbers on the Fleischbankpfeiler with his enviably cool camera. I'd climbed the route before, taking a variation start that is suggested for when there are parties above (and potential rockfall). This time, for variety, we'd do the normal start. We scrambled up the first pitch, but pretty soon the loose and occasionally wet terrain made the gully feel insecure. We roped up and belayed the rest of the gully to the notch. Another pitch, this time on solid rock got us to where the two starts join.



"You mean we are only at the top of pitch 5?" said Mike. "And there are 16 pitches?"

"Uh...yeah."

His dismay was justified. We were a little behind schedule, but I hoped to make up time in a block of easy terrain ahead where we could short-rope and simul-climb. Pretty quickly, we reached the first "real" pitch of the route, the "Matajek Traverse." This is a really entertaining pitch, where you have to traverse a smooth wall to reach a hidden crack that takes you back up and right of the belay. Mike and Dave were happy to let me lead this, being in "euro-tourist" mode! It was really fun, and Dave found a better way to climb it by traversing considerably lower. Well, I hope his variant was as fun as ours!





Another really nice pitch followed, with sustained but easy crack climbing. We continued around a corner and ran into some difficulties gaining the easy scrambling terrain. We had to downclimb a short but loose section of rock that seemed unjustifiably ridiculous. We did kind of a cool move where a sling on a horn allowed Mike to lower past the section. In general, we had to use a lot of gear on this route for a supposedly "bolted belays" climb. Often we didn't find the belays, and just as often I blindly missed them, only to sheepishly see the bolt across from my sling and nut belay 20 minutes later! At this particular difficult point, our topo marked a belay where there was none. The uncertainty of our absolute position added to the stress of the downclimb because it made it easy to think we were in a wildly bad location.

But once past that pesky spot, we could short rope for a few pitches. A cloud had bedeviled us for a while, but now it was gone and we knew it wouldn't rain for some hours. We'd been granted a reprieve from rainy retreats and other such nasty difficulties!

Really nice, easy climbing on the ridge led to a notch, then a short pitch below the infamous "Oppelband." This is a 7 meter crawl around a corner with massive exposure. I tried to get Mike or Dave to lead but they successfully evaded my charms. I started crawling, and soon was bringing the guys over to hilarious grunting noises and soft cries of supplication. Dave got a pretty funny video of Mike coming across. This was fun. Overall, we'd suffered the stresses of bad weather and bad rock. Now, close to the end of the climb, with decent weather, we could laugh a little bit. In fact the next pitch, the last, was really good and gave a nice finish to the climb.

We joked around a bit on the summit, finished our anis bread, and admired the "New Age" crystal that was embedded in the formidable summit cross. The things people think of!















I hazily remembered the descent, but it's amazing how much you forget in a few years. Still, we found the scramble down and around the Middle Peak, to reach the Botzong Chimney. We decided to be conservative and make single rope rappels, not knowing how 60 meter raps would work. But with three people the setup time for each rap is high. We thought about changing over but didn't. At the bottom, I'd lost count of the raps, and after skipping an anchor landed perfectly at the bottom of the part of the chimney we descend. The topo doesn't make very clear, but you are supposed to leave the chimney at this point and follow a scramble route around to the side to reach hiking terrain. Due to confusion about this, Mike and Dave reset the rappel and made one more needlessly. I blame my food-addled brain for not being able to explain why one more rap wasn't needed. Still, soon we were on hiking terrain again, and watching a beautiful sunset paint the walls around us orange and finally a muted pink.

The hike down felt long, and Mike had a bothersome old knee injury. We were happy to reach the stashed pack with hiking poles, and the piece of bread with butter which we shared happily. Now a long march out in the dark. We chatted about various things, and somewhere in here Mike turned into a speed demon with his hiking poles and zoomed past me and Dave. That was funny, then, a creepy voice croaked in the darkness. It was some young fella hiding in the bushes hoping to scare us! "We're gonna kick yer ass!" said Dave. I complimented the young fellow on his timing and timbre. Back at the car, we tried to see if the restaurant would serve us but it was after 10. Oops! That's okay, Burger King awaits!







We enjoyed the climb and the company. I wish I could have shown more splitter cracks or clean dihedrals to these guys used to climbing in Yosemite all the time. But our scruffier mountains would have to do, they have their charms! We all came back to Munich, Mike and Dave crashed in the guest room and we enjoyed spicy scrambled eggs in the morning with hot peppers from grandpa's backyard on Oahu. Thanks to Dave and Mike for a good adventure in the mountains, till next time!

Pictures by me, David and Mike. Awesome to have 3 cameras!