SUMMIT '08

Last weekend, the Flemish Klim- & Bergsportfederatie (Climbing & Mountaineering Federation) held its first big annual fair, called SUMMIT'08 to promote its activities in the field of mountain sports (in dutch: stagebeurs)
All trainings, educations and expeditions were introduced to the audience, people were able to subscribe also, clubs presented themselves and workshops were given.
Next to that, there was also an active part, with a mountainbike tour, an adventure circuit and at least 3 different indoor climbing walls! There was a boulder wall, a simulation of artificial climbing, and.... an iceclimbing/drytool wall.

I was asked to cooperate for that last one, so together with partners in climb Gerrit and Geert, and a bunch of workers from BVLB, we built a slightly overhanging 6.5 meter high wooden wall from scratch on saturday, created 2 routes on it with wooden "holds" saturday night, and belayed and let people try climbing with axes on sunday. Those who brought their boots or who were lucky enough to fit in one of the few pairs of boots we had with us, could also try climbing with crampons.

Plenty of people passed by to try, and of course we hadn't made the two little routes too difficult (but there was a nasty "missing" foothold in one of them - grin) so everybody with a little bit of climbing experience was able to top and ring the cow bell I had found on my parents attic.

Next to that there was of course the opportunity of seeing back a lot of people, meeting new people, and "networking" in common. I got a nice tip of where to sleep in Canada, and guess what, C1sc0 had booked a couple of nights in that very spot the day before! Speaking of coincidence...

Another part of the fair was an exhibition about the history of Belgian climbing & mountaineering. Due to the fact I was "on duty" I didn't have time to visit this exhibition extensively, but I briefly walked through. Most of it I had already seen a couple of years ago on another fair.
But it was very interesting indeed! Those of you who know a little about Belgian history, or have been climbing in the Alps, might have heard of Ernest Solvay, a Belgian industrial who sponsored the Solvay bivouak on Matterhorn, or our fromer king Albert I (grandfather of Albert II) who gave his name to the Refuge Albert Premier in France, and died in a climbing accident in Marche-les-Dames, near Namur in Belgium. Also his son king Leopold III was a good climber, well known in the Dolomites.
Don't be afraid, I'm not going to write down Belgian climbing history(link in Dutch) here! But holding the Kings Ice Axe was a strange experience indeed (it was behind glass at the exhibition, but yeah... the day before... :-) ) and to my pleasant surprise, one of my photographs -about iceclimbing- was used at the exhibition too.

If anyone's interested, I can do a next post about how we set up our iceclimbing wall, with some more pictures.

Drytool competition

For once, I will do a post in Dutch, as I just take it from the organisator's website:

Wanneer? Vrijdag 25 januari 2008 om 20u
Waar? Recreatiedomein Breeven te Bornem

Naar jaarlijkse gewoonte organiseren we ook binnenkort onze dry-tool wedstrijd.
Telkens treffen we hier talloze liefhebbers die streven naar de overwinning en vele mooie prijzen, maar ook vele nieuwsgierigen die eens van deze klimtechniek
willen proeven.

Inschrijven via info@berghut.be of 052/47.85.22
Gratis deelname

In short: fridaynight january 25, there is a drytool competition in Bornem.
If you go take a look at the website, you can see two small pictures I made last year...

General repetition

So we ended this year's climbing where we started it: in our favourite of the Alps' ice climbing eldorado's: Kandersteg. As Francis said, temperatures were better -colder- than in january, and there even was ice, although not as plenty of it as we would have desired. But it's still early season, everything's gonna be alright!

As the title suggest, our small trip can be considered a repetition for the big trip in february. We were able to check where we stand regarding physical and mental condition, climbing techniques, team spirit, material and whatever.

Making my own count, I was pretty surprised with my physical condition, and my climbing was almost as it should be. Mentally I am not completely satisfied with myself, I was feeling a little unsure and a bit reluctant leading long steep pitches.
Talking in my favour, the ice on the less steep parts of those routes was in very unsafe shape: a thick layer of soft loose snow beneath a very thin layer of ice! Hardly possible to find a reliable spot for a belay.

It might as well have been a healthy sense for safety that kept us from those higher pitches...

But we climbed, and enjoyed! I guess you want to see some pictures now? Well... there's another point we need to give attention: the lazy automatic lighting programmes on photocamera's don't deal with snow and ice very well! It's very easy to fix it using manual lighting and knowing what needs to be done, but you have to do it! So it's due to my own laziness I have very few photo's I can show without an extended postprocessing session I don't have time for right now. We will have to do better in Canada!

Photography & filming in the cold

Had a chat with Wannes this morning, mainly about photographic issues.

It always seems to be a problem combining serious climbing with taking decent photographs, left alone filming, especially when you are a party of two. Either you are climbing, either you are belaying the climber. Usualy the only moments one is "free" to take pictures, is while both climbers are at the belay, and of course these are not climbing pictures.

Climbing in a party of three can help, but then you have the drawback of decreased speed, which takes a lot of -longer- climbs out of reach.

But there are more issues on ice climbing photography:

The cold, a conditio sine qua non for iceclimbing, can be a problem with modern camera's, either with a lot of electronics inside, either completely digital. Low temperartures not only reduce battery life drastically, but as we noticed some winters ago with Francis' video camera, can make the whole thing malfunctioning. Keeping the camera warm inside your coat needs to be avoided, as temperature changes often result in condensed lenses and foggy pictures.

Winter lighting conditions are also not as optimal for photography/filming as you would like them. At least in the Alps most frozen waterfalls are out of the sun, like on north facing walls or in narrow gullies. So the contrast is often extremely high between the icefall in shadow and the bright snowy environment reflecting the winter sun. This is the case for both digital and classic photography.

The whole world seems to have switched to digital by now, rendering classic photo film more expensive and hard to find. In this light it is quite remarkable to see the founding of The Black & White Factory, a center for the promotion and conservation of artisanal (film) photography.

A good friend of mine (and also a climber), Geert Vanden Broeck, is involved in this center and so I was invited to the opening a couple of weeks ago. I went to have a look and took my father, who is an amateur photographer for more than forty years and although he switched to digital some time ago, was very interested. We were both very impressed by Jed Freudenthal's photographs, landscapes taken with a large format camera. His photographs show an amazing atmoshere and extreme detail in both the very light and very dark zones. Computers and Internet are too limited to reproduce his images.

It might sound crazy because it is most probably very hard to combine with climbing, but I am thinking about taking an old 6x6 camera to the mountains and expose myself to some B&W landscape photography. I still need a cover for the electricity cupboard at home, and a large photo would be nice for that. No way a digital or even 35mm film capture can provide a high enough resolution for the size I need.

A lot of climbers seem to be interested in photography, or turn into more "serious" photography next to their climbing career. Let me conclude with some friends' websites worth looking at..
- Geert Vanden Broeck
- Werner Van Steen
- Reginald Roels
- Johan -Wannes- Cré
- Werner De Wael
- Kurt Pas