It’s only natural that people forget skills they don’t use on a regular basis. I guess I’d even forget how to tie a figure 8 knot eventually, no matter how simple it might be. But when it comes to complex procedures like self rescue scenarios, that hopefully you never actually need, it’s nice to be reminded occasionally and do some practicing.

It’s also natural that people, who get their first taste of rock climbing, might develop a curiosity to learn more. If nothing else, to understand how things work and make their new hobby safer. That said…

No video, sketch or photo can replace a proper course conducted by professionals. In other words… don’t trust your life to something you read on the internet or at the very least try things on the ground first. I practice hanging off an apple tree about 2m above ground. Other than falling on my dog barking like mad below there’s no danger if I mess things up completely but absolutely realistic in every other way.

So more as a bookmark and a reminder to myself than anything else, the resources below could serve as a refresher course. I certainly found them very useful the first time around.

Animated knots – climbing knots
UK Climbing – climbing skills articles
Chockstone – tech tips
Petzl – rope techniques for multi-pitch climbing
Petzl – multi-pitch tech tips 2010 (pdf)
Petzl – sport climbing tech tips 2010 (pdf)
Libby Peter – articles from Climber magazine
DMM Climbing – knowledge articles (gear failure testing is especially sobering)
Black Diamond QC Lab journal (more fascinating gear failure testing)

And some nice videos:

How to tie off a belay plate from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Escaping the system from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Lowering a climber off the crag from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Abseiling past a knot from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Prusiking up a rope from Steve Long on Vimeo.

Assisted hoist from Steve Long on Vimeo.

While UKClimbing Logbook Crag Finder has served me well for locating climbing opportunities on a number of occasions, it is still a limited service (as are many online climbing resources, ClimbinBaška and SLOUPPI the very welcome exceptions to the rule). So I hope what you find below will be of some use to anyone who decides to go on vacation or a business trip to Tenerife, but also do some climbing when the opportunity presents itself.

When researching what to do on the island on the off days, I managed to discover there’s also a lot of climbing potential so we decided to take some gear with us. Might as well make the most of the opportunity. But however minimal the gear might be, it is still never lightweight, so we rationalized to include the following:

• 60m rope + bag
• 10 quick-draws
• 1 ATC
• 2 dyneema slings
• 3 carabiners
• 2 harnesses (used by 4 people)
• 3 pairs of shoes (again, used by all 4)
• chalk bag
• some tape

That in itself will fill a decent sized backpack and make the Ryanair gate agents happy to charge for extra weight so we divvied up and it worked. But that rope was still a pain to stuff…

Without any doubt UKClimbing is my favorite crag finder whenever venturing into the unknown. I love the geolocation based service but crag descriptions leave a lot to imagination. However, in some places just knowing the location might be good enough if you combine it with another location based service… Google Street View! It has helped me in Corsica and it worked in Tenerife. Well, at least partially. Park at a switchback 2.2km out of Cruz de Tea suddenly sounds much better if you can preview the description in Street View… when you have that much information available. If not then the only way is to find some road that gets you nearby the marked location and go from there. You can always ask… (not that it helped much as the grandpas we met couldn’t understand us and I barely understood them) :)

I was never hung up on route topos, grades, beta etc. so the location and the approximate number of routes available is really the only information I want to have. I climb whatever looks nice from below and that’s good enough. At least on vacation or a first visit. Obviously access notes and the aforementioned information is always welcome but not crucial for my choice. It’s fun to explore! :)

UKClimbing and Rockfax mention several times that the place to get climbing information is Tenerife Outdoor in Granadilla (and now also in La Laguna). As it turned out their opening times didn’t coincide with out timeline so we only managed to visit them on one of our final days on the island. But the visit was nevertheless very helpful as they let us take some photos of the guidebook and we were able to find and climb some previously unknown crags.

The best surprise was that the lovely La Martella canyon, one we somehow managed to find just by following parking information, isn’t mentioned in any of the guidebooks. The guys at TO will be more than happy to provide the unpublished topo of this secret gem.

Without venturing too much into guidebook publishing territory I thought I’d assemble some basic information for the areas visited (and some that we didn’t). It has to be said though that it’s probably best if you purchase or borrow a guidebook. It will save you some time and potential problems. But as we were just as happy to explore the canyons for several hours and finding just about nothing climbable with minimal gear it wasn’t a problem for us. It just added an element of surprise and pleasure of exploration. So for those like us, here’s a map to get you started:

And to end this, a slideshow…

Hardest route done?
Plezanje pika kom in Šoder graben, supposed to be 6a+, I’d give it 6c at least.
Second place goes to an attempt at first pitch of Schanigarten (VII) in Kugelstein that I mistakenly though it was the first pitch of Ameisenriss (IV). You would think I’d soon figure out something was wrong :) I did, but I still wanted to go all the way. Had to give up 2m from the anchor after a swinging fall.

Longest?
Steber in Vipava, IV+/III, 160m

Most enjoyable?
Impossible to say. I’m somehow partial to easygoing multi pitch routes but there were quite a few nice 6a/b overhangs in Trenta, Martianez and Vistamar that I liked.

A map:

View Climbing 2011 in a larger map

And a slideshow