4/04/08 — For the last month Climbing.com contributor Bruce Willey and his wife Caroline Schaumann have sent dispatches from Sardinia—an Online exclusive. This is the conclusion to their story: A story of average climbers, with average means on an average quest to explore the uncommon island off the coast of Italy. 

The best thing about a hanging belay on a multi-pitch climb is the promise of a nice, semi-spacious belay ledge above. A place where you can kick off your shoes, have a sip of water, look around. That, and the hope that when you’re swinging leads with your partner, your pitch ends at one. 

We’d gotten a late start due in part to losing our dirt road after some misleading signs led us astray over the farmland and vineyards. After a few weeks of one-pitch sport routes we started craving a long route that would get us in the air a ways. By the time we got to the base of Compagni di Viaggio (6a+) and pondered the next sustained twelve pitches above, it was late morning. 

So we headed into the limestone valley of Sùrtana and quickly lost our feeling of disappointment. There, on either side of us rose perfect limestone walls. A small trail led through the valley and more than once we commented to each other that it felt like Yosemite. And more than once we were loath to compare the two. 

Over long after-dinner chats out on the porch we had mused over the tendency of the traveler to find the similarities to another place. After all, no place is a metaphor of another place but wholly distinct. Nevertheless, the impulse to categorize is unavoidable I suppose, part of an essential need to encounter the familiar wherever you are. Not unlike the Spanish who, upon seeing the Sierra Nevada for the first time, thought it looked like the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain. 

So we started up a seven-pitch route Cervo di Piazza (6a), one of the longest and most classic lines in the Sùrtana. The rock was perfectly clean, and we found ourselves in one of the most remote areas in Sard that we’d been. No little towns below, no sight of roads, no sign of civilization save for the sunken cave of Triscoli where it is thought a tribe of Nuraghic people hid out from the Romans. 

Two pitches up we reached nice belay ledge and looked around. I knew Caroline first through her words. In the beginning we seduced each other with long and crafted emails. She lived in Georgia; I lived in California. And we found ourselves Online looking for a steady climbing partner. She wrote about Joshua Tree which gave me nothing short of thoughtful feelings in my loins. Timidly, I wrote about being up high on a multi-pitch climb on a ledge with a life-long climbing partner. Someone like her, preferably. And it must have worked. We met in person in Joshua Tree and a few weeks later got engaged at the top of JT’s Heart and Sole (5.10b). Soon after we were literally tying the knot in our rope at a small wedding ceremony in a High Sierra marriageable meadow. Since then we’ve been spending a lot of time on belay ledges together. But looking out over the Supramonte and the valley below we concede this is one of the better ledges we have encountered in our lives.