Via Leste - Salinas, RJ

Saturday I climbed my longest route to date - a route called Leste in Três Picos National Park, in a region called Salinas, 3 hours from Rio.

The route goes up 700m in the East side of a granite mountain called Pico Maior. To get to the base - 30 minutes on a bumpy dirt road, 1 hour hiking fast through cow pastures and a steep trail up.

The climb is 18 pitches long, and not too hard - 4° V A1 E3 in brazilian ratings (something like 5.8 with 5.9 crux). A lot of slab, a lot of face climbing with good holds, two chimneys and a part done in aid. The bolts are faaaaaaar away from each other.

Most people start the climb at 6am in the morning - the guide book says to count 4-7 hours to do it. I went however with a friend who knows the route well, and, has a light and fast philosophy for climbing. We took two small packs, 1 liter of water each (which we filled in a creek in the hike up), a little food, climbed together for most of the route (except for the chimney parts) and made it up in 3.5 hours. I thought that was pretty good but there are badass climbers who do it in like, 1 hour.

Except for an altercation with a thorny tree in the beginning of the route, things went well. What happened was, the route hits a little plato with some vegetation (thorny underbush and some trees) and you are supposed to go right of it, up a more vertical wall, and then it goes back left again. We were climbing simultaneously at this point, so my climbing partner was 60 m and because I was under the little vertical stretch we couldn't see or hear each other. The rope got stuck in the tree... in a way that I couldn't move out right to do the climb. After some moments of indecision, I thought I might as well try "climbing" up the tree to free the rope... which turned out to be completely ineffective. The only way I was going to be able to free that rope would be by untying myself and pulling the rope from the other side...My friend finally climbed down to see what was up - I untied myself (I was in a big plato), and he pulled the rope from the top.

After that, the climb was pretty chill. The hardest parts of the climb were two chimneys. It had been a long time since I'd climbed a chimney and I had to remember the technique, but it is kind of like riding a bike I guess, it came back fast.

Getting to the summit was awesome. The day was perfect and the visibility as amazing, you could see the whole valley, the different mountains... its a beautiful region. We rappelled down the other side (many, many, many rappels) as you need two ropes to rappel down Leste.

In terms of cardio, it was pretty challenging - if you count 7km to get up + 7km to get down plus approx 3km hike each way, thats 20km to cover in a day. The amount of water was ok but I could probably live with carrying (and drinking) and extra half liter next time.

After the climb, a little trip to a river to soak my scraped legs...