Sugar Loaf via Coringa

Yesterday I found myself equipped, ready to climb, at the foot of the sugar loaf, yet alone, as my climbing partner had to bail last minute. Since I was already there I decided to stick around anyways and do some bouldering. It was a nice, yet hot day, and there were a lot of climbers out and about waiting for the sun to go down a bit. On my way to the trail, I struck up a conversation with this climber who was waiting for a friend. They were going to head up an easy route that I remembered having done a long time ago, so I asked if I could join his climb.


The route is called Coringa (which means Joker). Its on the South Face of the Sugar Loaf, which tends to be a bit more "cool" during summer afternoons. It can be accessed by a 15 min trail after the end of the paved trail that cuts the Sugar Loaf. Its an 110m climb, done in 3 stretches (35m, 50m, 25m). Like most climbs in the Sugar Loaf, its a slab all the way up, positive except for some vertical stretches.

The climb is rated a 3 III Sup (in Brazilian ratings, means its like a 5.5 most of the way with a 5.6 move on the crux), but we did a little variation on it that makes the crux a 5.7.
(See chart for Brazil-US rating comparison).

Pretty easy and straightforward, except that we couldn't find the bolts at the last stop at all!!! Which lead to some adventure-full moments.

The last stop is luckily on this comfortable ledge, so after looking in vain for the bolts, Cristiano, (who was leading this stretch) ended up belaying Thiago and me up tied to these doubtful pieces of vegetation. The ledge was great but there was no tree or rock that could be slung, so he did the best he could to secure us on this flimsy piece of plant.

This route connected to another route called Costão, that is the easiest route up the sugarloaf (its exposed, but easy enough that a lot of people go without rope) and takes you all the way to the summit. It seemed that the way to Costão was going past the ledge a bit and traversing to the right, and not having found any bolts and the way looking pretty easy, we went for it. Thing is we went up too much before traversing and things started looking kind of sketchy, and well, we were unroped as we thought we would get to Costão. After seeing that wasn't the way, we downclimbed a bit and, phew, found the trail. It was all still pretty easy and falling was unlikely, but I really really didn't want to fall in that situation... weird thing I didn't feel mentally freaked out but I could definitely feel my legs getting shaky as I was downclimbing, probably my body telling me what the f... are you doing here!

So we made it to Costão and started making our way up to the summit, which took another hour or so. By then we were a bit less shaky from our cordless-traverse-downclimb but out of water and drenched in sweat.

We hiked the last bit up in the dark (yay for headlamp) and made it up in time to take the last cable car thing down the SugarLoaf at 9pm.

The two guys I climbed with were great - super fun, good climbers and well, pretty nice to let me crash their climb :)