Saxon Sandstone | chossclimbers.com

Go back to Europe.

Kleine Herkulessaule.

Family time.

The idea behind this trip goes back to early spring when the family decided to have a get-together in Europe; an easy choice given that a good portion of the members were already there. With a bit of convincing, we got our way and picked the Elbe River Valley as the venue. Long before the EU relaxed its entry restrictions on US citizens, we rolled the dice: a place in the Czech Republic was booked and airline tickets were purchased; and then we waited and waited some more to see if Europe would actually let us in. The welcome mat got rolled out sometime in July and off we went in the second half of August.

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Brosinnadel.

Decin, Czech.

Given that we only had a week and wanted to spend time with the family, we prearranged a local guide who would serve as a “walking guidebook” for us: take us to the base of the climbs but let us do our own thing in the vertical realm; in other words, cut out the logistical bullshit and optimize the use of our time. The person we hired was Helmut from Dresden who is also the author of one of the local climbing guidebooks, Plasir Elbsandstein. It was fun to spend some time with a local climber and it also turned out that Helmut is a professional photographer (I’ve credited the photos that were taken by him; not that those are hard to distinguish from ours). Lastly, as we had shaky weather, his local knowledge was crucial in determining when we could actually climb. Wet sandstone is of course highly prone to crumbling and the area has very strict rules (rightfully so) as to when one can climb after a rainfall.