Oh yeah some bad news guys!! It’s the end of the world! Women can pee standing up!! I swear it! We’ve seen Silvia do it! The only consolation to us men, is that she needs aid (some kind of tube) (yes even for peeing she needs artificial aid!)Who is Silvia Vidal? A climber form Spain, oh err sorry from Catalonia, she’s probably one of the best aid climbers in the world right now. She might look normal when you see her for the first time… don’t be fooled: she’s completely crazy! In Pakistan she put up a route spending more than 20 days all alone (!) on the wall!
To make the story short: when Silvia heard we where going to Baffin, she decided to travel with us because it would be easier for the organization, formalities, etc. Her plan was to aid-climb a big rock face solo. However when we got to Weasel valley, she wasn’t feeling any connection with any of the closer rock faces and being alone she didn’t have the time to ferry all her gear too far up the valley. She decided she wasn’t going to climb, she was just going to hang out. So we invited her to come along with us. Crazy as she is, she accepted, probably not realizing what a kind of a mess she was getting herself in to.
Turns out that having an expert aid climber tag along can be pretty handy. When the free climbing was too dangerous or too impossible we just attached the rope to Silvia and she would go upwards pulling on copperheads, RURPs and skyhooks that would only barely hold the weight of a fly and fix the rope on the belay above… Next we could check out the moves holds etc and try to free the pitch.
The route we choose to climb in big wall style in a team of five was the Bavarian route. However the start of the route (3 bolts) was now 15m higher than when it was put up in 1995 due to the melting of the ice and snow. This section was too hard and dangerous to onsight free climb, and we would have had to either add a bolt… or stick clip the first belay. Instead we sent Silvia up there and she aid climbed it (at about A4+!) so we could check out the moves.