drilled pockets at Bataan!

Yesterday I finally had a chance to climb "Jacob's Ladder" at Bataan, after it was seeping since May. It was rumored to be a good route and rated 13a this spring (first asc. J.D. Le Blanc rated the route 13c!). My friend Paul and I where able to climb it 2nd go and confirmed the grade. Now here comes the catch! We both noticed 2 obvious drilled key pockets around the second and third bolt, which have not been mentioned by J.D. or any of the handful of climbers who did the climb this spring. In "Sportclimbs in the Canadian Rockies", routes with chipped or drilled holds don't recieve a star rating, Jakob's gets 2 stars though. What's that all about? I'm not so much obset about the pockets, more so about the "route builder", who did not have the guts to report it.

Austrian Visit

Paul and Ossi came to Canada for a 3 week stay, to check out the climbing around Canmore. The guys are mainly craggers, but like to toss it up with some multi pitching too. Unfortunatly the weather was not always very cooperative (read f... cold), but we managed to get out quite a bit without losing any limbs. Multi pitching was kept to a minimum so far, insteaed we are hitting the crags close to town. The picture above is taken on one of the routes in the upper Colliseum, which we visited 3 times the last 2 weeks. In between we managed to get to climb some routes in Planet X, Acephale, Grasi, Grotto Canyon and Back of the Lake. They will be here for another week, so we see what the weather does. The forecast is crap, but hopefully I have a chance to show them Bataan before they leave! So far they seem to be pretty psyched in the climbing Canmore has to offer. That's pretty cool for guys, who are used to climb cliffs like Ceuse and everything in Italy. The picture below shows Paul on his favorite route "Naiccance de la femme" 13b at the lower wall of Acephale.