Comici, at last
we beat the rain by one pitch
There are walls you climb and walls you carry around with you for years first. The north face of the Cima Grande was the second kind. I had stared at it from the Forcella Lavaredo path as a hiker, as a hut worker, as a second, and every time it looked the same: too big, too smooth, too much mine to leave alone.
The forecast gave us until two o’clock. That number shaped the whole day — the alarm, the pace on the approach, the decision to swing leads instead of blocking them, the short conversations at belays that were really just one question asked eight different ways: are we still fast enough?
The climbing itself is old-fashioned in the best sense. The holds are there, but you have to trust sixty-year-old logic to find them, and the exposure on the traverses is the honest kind — the valley floor directly under your heels, nothing between you and it but the rope and your own arithmetic.
We topped out as the first grey walked in over the Cadini. The rain caught us on the descent, where rain is allowed to.
What stays with me is not the grade and not the summit. It is the tidiness — of the rope, of the decisions, of the fear, which never went away but stayed exactly the size we needed it to be.