We are not superstars, and our sport-climbing conquests are American trad-climber style: dramatic, deep-digging onsights of the island’s easy classics. The Europeans around us are performing at a considerably higher standard, voiding our bragging rights — which we work to our benefit. Instead of attempting to milk our unimpressive achievements for ego gratification, we focus on making new friends and looking for whimsical significance in other realms, such as the mythological names of the climbs we try.
Tracy’s project is called Daphne, which literally means laurel, the twigs used to make the little wreath that Olympians wear. Long and technical, earthy and elusive, Daphne is proving a worthy opponent. This, we discover, is her mythic nature. In ancient times the lovely nymph Daphne, a disciple of Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt, used all manner of evasion before finally turning herself into a laurel tree to flee the attentions of Apollo — just as this beautiful climb seems to throw trick after trick to thwart my determined partner.
Priapos, a route I am eyeing in the incredible Grande Grotta sector, is named after a comically uncouth god of fertility. Son of Aphrodite and either Zeus, Apollo, or Bacchus, depending on which myth you read, Priapos is so massively virile that in practice he is sterile. The route holds a similar paradox. It is so steep that it allows you to beat gravity. You climb as much out horizontally as up, gaining half the height you would on vertical moves, so it takes surprisingly little power to pull from feature to feature. Instead of pulling up for the next hold, you lean back to it. Plentiful stalactites provide all manner of exotic and erotic rests. I was used to climbing at “slabbier” areas such as my local crag, Rifle, Colorado, and it took me a while to learn to think in three dimensions, the most significant being out.
In the many hours when we were not actually gripping steep rock, we found the Grande Grotta to be an excellent place for people-watching. At certain times, the spectacular amphitheatre became a virtual planetarium of elite Euro-stars contrapuntally onsighting the wildly overhanging 7c to 8a+ lines. On one visit to the cave, I watched François Legrand working his way through the routes. I had seen this man climb once before, at
the Rockmaster competition in Arco, Italy — the see-and-be-seen Wimbledon of sport climbing, held outdoors beneath the castle-encrusted cliffs lining the Sarca River at the foot of the Dolomites. The most memorable thing about that competition had been watching Legrand. “He never bends his arms,” someone put it to describe his style — which was part of it, but there was a further effortlessness that defied description.
Being a cynical trad, however, I assumed that Legrand, the ultimate French plastic competition climber, would be less impressive on rock. He looked good on the trade routes well within his grade, no doubt, but surely he’d be too irritated by awkward holds or smudges of dirt here and there to really perform on something as raw as the seldom-tried project in Kalymnos under which he was soon stacking his rope. Yeah, right.
The route in question, Fun de Chichunne, was of historical interest. Bolted in 2001, it had been tried by many Greeks and foreigners, but never thoroughly cleaned and never redpointed. The journalist in me also had identified the climb as a potential source of mini-drama.
The original equipper, Guy (“Gee”) Abert, was on Kalymnos and had plans for the route. The scraggly, old-school Marseilles climber had thrown in the towel for routes in the 8a-and-above range, but was traveling with the extremely motivated Daniel Dulac. Abert’s passion now lay in photographing the various unclimbed projects he had left scattered across Europe, and Dulac was happy to assist. The younger climber bagged gem after pre-equipped gem, while Abert derived vicarious pleasure from his protégé’s success — and shot many saleable photos in the bargain. Abert had intended Fun de Chichunne for Dulac.
