A climber sandwiched between giant sandstone rocks some almost 1,000ft above the ground is shown in the dramatic picture. 33 year old Swiss climber Rahel Schelb scaled the the epic de*@th-defying sandstone walls of the Li Ming region, in Yunnan Province, China. She has climbed around 60 route in over 25 years. The routes range from crevices 65ft-100ft high to cracks that stretched all the way from the bottom to the top of the rock face.
Rahel said, ‘For single pitch routes we normally had between 30 and 60 minutes. If the crack led all the way up until the top, it was a day project. That means that we started at the bottom of the wall in the morning and reached the top at some point in the afternoon. And of course to get back to the ground would take us a few hours too. I guess with every route we climbed there we learned a new way of climbing. Once we started a climb the only way was to get to the top which forced us to use all our imagination and creativity to find a way to overcome the difficulties. Widening cracks are rather challenging climbs and therefore only a few climbers like them. Most climbers prefer parallel cracks. I like all kinds of cracks – therefore I would go for a widening crack from time to time too. Crack climbing demands a certain amount of pain resistance. If you don’t want to sacrifice a little of your skin or a pair of pants, you shouldn’t start crack climbing.’
To Rahel facing with a mixture of widening and narrowing cracks presented a different challenge to what she used to back home in Switzerland. Rahel works as a teacher.
She added, ‘’In crack climbing you use your hands differently compared to the normal climbing where you use holds to climb a route.‘You try to jam your hand in the crack. If the size of the crack fits to the size of your hand, that works quite well. If the crack is smaller you use your fingers only trying to jam them. If the crack widens then it gets harder. For example I figured out that sometimes I can even use my elbow to jam. Or the whole arm. Sometimes you have half of your shoulder in the crack, trying to jam somehow. But if the crack becomes that wide, that’s when we worried most, because it didn’t feel very safe. And sometimes we had no idea how we should be able to get up there.
But somehow we finally figured out a good jam that worked. Sometimes we reached the top after an hour of fighting, feeling completely exhausted and with torn pants. But I guess it was most satisfying to reach the top of a route after a hard f!*ght, hardly believing that it’s possible for us to get up that crack. These are these moments that stay in our memories for a long time. ‘I guess that’s part of the fascination in climbing. If it was very easy it wouldn’t be as satisfying as a route that is earned by a hard f*!gh*t. As a climber it’s all about challenging yourself. The harder you f*!gh*t, the sweeter the success.’
Rahel said, ‘For single pitch routes we normally had between 30 and 60 minutes. If the crack led all the way up until the top, it was a day project. That means that we started at the bottom of the wall in the morning and reached the top at some point in the afternoon. And of course to get back to the ground would take us a few hours too. I guess with every route we climbed there we learned a new way of climbing. Once we started a climb the only way was to get to the top which forced us to use all our imagination and creativity to find a way to overcome the difficulties. Widening cracks are rather challenging climbs and therefore only a few climbers like them. Most climbers prefer parallel cracks. I like all kinds of cracks – therefore I would go for a widening crack from time to time too. Crack climbing demands a certain amount of pain resistance. If you don’t want to sacrifice a little of your skin or a pair of pants, you shouldn’t start crack climbing.’
To Rahel facing with a mixture of widening and narrowing cracks presented a different challenge to what she used to back home in Switzerland. Rahel works as a teacher.
She added, ‘’In crack climbing you use your hands differently compared to the normal climbing where you use holds to climb a route.‘You try to jam your hand in the crack. If the size of the crack fits to the size of your hand, that works quite well. If the crack is smaller you use your fingers only trying to jam them. If the crack widens then it gets harder. For example I figured out that sometimes I can even use my elbow to jam. Or the whole arm. Sometimes you have half of your shoulder in the crack, trying to jam somehow. But if the crack becomes that wide, that’s when we worried most, because it didn’t feel very safe. And sometimes we had no idea how we should be able to get up there.
