Epic Multi-pitch

Today was a really long day... My team (me and two freshers: Will and YY) started walking in at 7:30am and we were climbing by 9. It was surposed to be a nine pitch route with easy pitches at the top... we had 11 hours of day light and were doing about an hour a pitch if not better until we met the crux pitch.

The crux pitch was an off-width but the major issue was getting into the crack to start... I was too short to reach the good holds or clip the bolt and the foot holds were pretty much non existant... After a while I managed to figure out what to do and cranked through to the jug... I only then had the whole crack the shuffle up.

Even with me and both the freshers taking their time on the pitch we were only half an hour or so behind schedule, however our problems were only just starting.... YY lead up the next pitch following some obvious bolts which then disappeared, after 30m of finding nothering he came back down... taking a nasty fall into a tree and scarying me and Will quite a lot.

At this point two turbo Germans turned up and passed us who hadn't even bothered with the crack and seemed to be making their own route up.... They led the pitch and couldn't find the bolts either so just placed trad gear... Following their lead I went up using my own gear, however they were off really quickly.... so following them for the rest of the route was not an option and daylight was running out.

After leading 4 mystery trad pitches, where I found a total of 3 bolts (all together) in about 120m of climbing and constantly racing the sunset, we finally toped out and had enough time to coil the ropes and find the path in the dusk.... Two hours of a very rocky down climb with no water lead us back to the main path, one more hour and we were back at the villa.

11:30 when we got back... so 16 hours... I was nakerd.

The shot is from about a third the way up and the climbers you can see are friends who beat us to the top by a considerable amount