Start-of-the-mixed-climbing-season, unfortunately for us we were still in summer gear and had 1 icetool between us, brought to use as a piton hammer. Snowed up holds made life a tad interesting.
We climbed P1 in a version that felt more like 5 UIAA on account of needing to skip a bunch of good but slippery-when-wet holds (leader needed to do a rather iffy traverse, I went more straight up. Aided my way through the start by means of footloop through the piton since there was no way in hell I was switching to climbing shoes and getting frostnip on my toes as well as on my fingers.
For P2, Edy initially tried the Nae Dimitriu crack version, took 3 lead falls on it (the crux is an overhanging move that was tried with a single icetool in a really dirty portion of the crack), then changed plans and traversed into Hornul Ascuns and climbed that. We left a piton a few meters below the crux in the Dimitriu crack, it had been equalized with a DMM #5 wallnut when holding the falls. If using a non-extending quickdraw in the first piton in HA after the traverse, the rope will likely end up in a stone V and make life relatively unpleasant.
Fell on my tools once as I blew a foot when the thin ice I placed it in peeled off.
2M4Alpine
lead by
andrei badea
Interesting leftward traverse right at the start of the pitch (we protected it with a small friend a couple of meters above the belay, allowing the leader to do the traverse on toprope, then the leader clipped into the first piton and I went and recuperated the friend while tied in to the belay with just enough rope to reach it,to prevent the rope literally going Z-shaped).
Interesting exit to the belay too, in summer you chimney it, leader did a pull-up on tools stuck into frozen turf (taller than me) and I did a summer-winter maneuver where I hooked an icicle with one tool (instead of the summer hold, now iced up), to allow me to layback my feet on the left wall for a couple moves until I could reach the chimneyish part.
Took the lead on this one since it started with 10m of downclimb. Funtraverse, felt significantly easier than Acul Mare.
72
40m
Second
lead by
edy
Horizontal wall traverse on good holds, with an annoying iced-up portion 30m in. We only had a 30m half-rope, btw, so we ended up doing a 2-stacked-pitons-and-1-icetool belay (not left in place ) right after the icy bit (which we avoided by climbing below it) and then we switched leads for the 10m up to the boulder belay at the entrance in Valea Tapului but that was a 1 UIAA portion where the only difficulty of making sure the snow didn't hide ice
We climbed P1 in a version that felt more like 5 UIAA on account of needing to skip a bunch of good but slippery-when-wet holds (leader needed to do a rather iffy traverse, I went more straight up. Aided my way through the start by means of footloop through the piton since there was no way in hell I was switching to climbing shoes and getting frostnip on my toes as well as on my fingers.
For P2, Edy initially tried the Nae Dimitriu crack version, took 3 lead falls on it (the crux is an overhanging move that was tried with a single icetool in a really dirty portion of the crack), then changed plans and traversed into Hornul Ascuns and climbed that. We left a piton a few meters below the crux in the Dimitriu crack, it had been equalized with a DMM #5 wallnut when holding the falls. If using a non-extending quickdraw in the first piton in HA after the traverse, the rope will likely end up in a stone V and make life relatively unpleasant.