3/08/08 — For the next month Climbing.com contributor Bruce Willey and his wife Caroline Schaumann will be sending dispatches from Sardinia—an Online exclusive. This is their story: A story of average climbers, with average means on an average quest to explore the uncommon island off the coast of Italy. 

Dispatches from the Island of Sardinia
Overlooking the orange groves and pastures just outside Quirra it becomes clear: we sound like sheep. The quick draws tinkle like the sheep bells, and after a week of climbing we begin to feel as though we are blending into the Mediterranean landscape. Each day has brought a new crag of limestone to explore. And here on the island of Sardinia, or Sarda as it’s called, the days pass gently into the next, making time answer to a sublime old-world version itself. 

Yet despite my wistful slide into the pastoral when I manage to find a good stance and look around, I have to admit this (6a/b or 5.9/5.10) climb Spit’s Family in the Sárrabus region of southern Sardegna has me plenty gripped. And what exactly is a 6a/b anyway? The ratings here are often lost in translation. Furthermore, just as I’m about to clip the last bolt before the anchor and reel up some rope, a large white owl flies out of its nesting hole at my head, glances my shoulder and neck with a wing and shits on my pants. I nearly do the same. 

In a split second before the owl had made its escape, I’d registered two large yellow eyes peering at me. It just didn’t seem possible that I’d be sharing the crux with a large bird. So I must have written that possibility off. In Sardegna it’s easy to fall into bucolic complacency. On the one hand Sardegna seems tamed by the thousands of years of civilization. In fact, above this one crag there’s a Neolithic tower and at the base an archeological dig in progress. Moving further out in the historical continuum, the Carthagians, Romans, Egyptians, Spaniards, Moors all settled, pillaged, or occupied the place. 

And then there are the plants and trees that make it entirely too easy to draw comparisons to California from where I hail. Palm, olive, eucalyptus, fig, and oak trees cloak the landscape or take it over all together. The weeds look the same too. And the plants that Californians buy in the nursery grow wild—rosemary, eccium, narcissus. Prickly pear cactus grows in the lower elevations of the coast, and in the fields and orchards the farmers grow lettuce, artichokes, strawberries, and oranges. It’s California before urban sprawl, before the population boom, before freeways. A California that I only got a brief glimpse of when I was a child growing up in San Bernardino before developers chopped all the orange trees down to make homes and large box stores.