Espolón Central

It isn’t often that a long easy rock route is quite as striking as the like of Espolón Central on Puig Campana. From the valley the climb follows the obvious ridge of rock up the centre of the rock face, which looks improbable at the grade of Hard Severe from the valley.

We set off on a beautiful misty morning which gave us a beautiful inversion at the start of the walk. We had a bit of a navigational error at the start which meant that we had an unnecessarily hard time getting up onto the plateau, however we made good time up to the crag and found other teams in front of us on the route.

By the time we had geared up the first pitch was free, and we didn’t need to queue again for the entire day. The climb started as it meant to carry on, with excellent well protected climbing which was interesting but not too difficult. The first five pitches gain the rocky spur at the base of the main ridge, then the next nine pitches headed straight up the main ridge. This section was the highlight with every pitch having interesting climbing with fantastic exposure, which is rare for easy multi pitch routes as they are often fairly broken with short sections of good climbing.

It was a very sunny day and we slightly underestimated our water requirements, it turns out that unsurprisingly 2l of water between us was not enough! It was hot enough that even the Spanish climbers were complaining about the heat.

The descent was quite exciting with a long and exposed traverse which was sometime protected by a fixed wire all the way across the top of the crag to get to the walkers path, which descended directly down an unpleasant scree slope. By the time we eventually got back to the car we were both very dehydrated and glad for the extra water that we had left in the car, although maybe it would have been better to carry it!