A hour or so later, we unrolled our sleeping bags and inflated our sleeping mattresses as the nighttime darkness gave way to sunrise.Ī few hours later, my 20-degree sleeping bag started to get heat up in the summer sun. We all stripped naked and jumped into the cold inky black water under the starry early-morning sky. Sometime around 3 am, after the band stopped playing and the crowd started to disperse, we set out for the lake with a handful of other climbers. We talked with climbers, local and international, exchanging stories, stoke, and close calls. Drew and Carl stripped naked and jumped over the bonfire outside. We drank and danced deep into the hours of the early morning. Under the roof of an abandoned farmhouse, a Czech band played a mix of English-language and Czech classics. The locals invited us to a party up the road, a few kilometers out of town, as they described it, ‘for climbers, not tourists’. We regrouped with Brittney and split a pizza between us. That night, we dropped our bags across the street from the local climber’s hangout - a cafe / restaurant just down the road from the forest.
We climbed until sunset, packed up, and hiked out of the forest. are not allowed, and the use of chalk is forbidden.ĭrew and Carl followed the new route, named “Cortex Dynamics”. However, metal gear pieces - cams, nuts, hexes, etc. This means that routes are exceptionally run out, necessitating the use of trad protection. There is a minimum distance between bolts on all route, there’s usually at least 10 meters of unprotected climbing to the first bolt, and its common to find 100 - 300 foot towers with only 2 or 3 piece of fixed protection. Due to the rock’s delicate and brittle nature, massive bolts are used for fixed protection, and protection is sparse at best.
This type of rock has fostered a very unique set of climbing ethics in the Ardspach / Teplice nad Metuji area. I found out later that it was pulverized rock from my foot-smearing, I was crushing the rock into sand as I tried to stand on it. During a particularly slabby portion of my first climb, I kept slipping on what I thought was dirt and sand on the hold. The Czech climbing scene has developed and thrived on the sandstone towers of Teplice nad Metuji and Ardspach. Along the border with Poland and Germany, grey sandstone cliffs, towers, and hoodoos can be found, pocking the otherwise flat countryside, and lurking the verdant forests.
#Climbing knotes crack
Turns out, some of the best sandstone crack climbing in Europe is just outside Teplice nad Metuji. But Teplice nad Metuji - a town of barely over 1,000 people in an otherwise predominantly flat country? What’s in Teplice that draws an international crowd of mountain people every year? Skiing has High Fives in Annecy, France (just down the road from Chamonix) and IF3 in Montreal, Canada, while climbing has film festivals in Banff and the touring Reel Rock Film Festival which lands in climbing hotspots like Boulder, and Salt Lake City. Before I arrived, I had no idea there even eas climbing in the Czech Republic, especially enough to merit an international film festival. We were there for the climbing.Ĭompared to the limestone test pieces in Spain, the boulders of the Fountainbleu, or the alpine granite of the Alps, the Czech Republic’s climbing is significantly less known than its European counterparts. Drew’s Reel Rock: an Urban Climbing Experience was being shown as a part of the festival. This was the second night at the International Mountaineering Film Festival, an annual gathering of climbers, mountaineers, and other outdoors-motivated vagrants in Teplice nad Metuji in the northeast corner of the Czech Republic. Now, with dawn rapidly approaching, Drew, Carl, Brittany, and I climbed into our sleeping bags, strewn about the grass only a few meters from the road and someone’s farmhouse. We’d left the party around 2 or 3 and stumbled our way to the Adršpašské pond for an after-hours dip. It was past 4am when we made it back to camp the sun had already begun to rise.
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