Angelika Rainer settles the score, sends Ironman at Eptingen

Angelika Rainer doesn’t like leaving scores unsettled. After having unsuccessfully attempted Ironman seven years ago, the other day the South Tyrolean climber finally sent this difficult dry tooling test at the Eptingen crag in Switzerland.

The mammoth overhang was first ascended in January 2012 by Robert Jasper and, at the time, with its D14+ grade it checked in as the hardest total dry climb in the world. Rainer immediately began working the route in March that year and in 2013 she even managed to reach the last easy section, but then a hold suddenly broke and she fell. Despondent, she didn’t return until only recently, when she completed the redpoint. For the record, the climb was first repeated by a woman in February 2013 at the hands of Lucie Hrozová.

Despite having repeated harder dry tooling routes such as the D15 A Line Above the Sky at Tomorrow’s World in the Dolomites, Ironman has always been a route which has played in the back of Rainer’s mind. No longer.

Link: FB Angelika Rainer, www.angelika-rainer.com, La Sportiva, Grivel

 

 

 

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Finally settling an old dept. Ironman, D14+ . There is no better way I could have finished 2019 and with it the decade I dedicated myself so much to the climbing with iceaxes! . This is quite a long story. I tried this route for the first time in March 2012, shortly after the first ascent by the strong @robertjasper_official. Then it was the hardest drytooling route in the world and quite a bit harder than the routes I had done but I was immediately interested in trying it. More than 1.5 years later, after some tries I made it all the way through the horizontal roof, I was shaking out my hands at the last quickdraw before the last quite easy moves to the ancor, when the hold I was on exploded and I was dangling in the air. It had cost me so much motivation to try a route so close to my absolute limit, that the disappointment was huge. I did not come back to the route for 6 years. This year, after having climbed harder routes than Ironman in the past years, I finally decided to come back to this old, open bill. I stil had quite some respect, or even fear. The route stil made itself desire quite a bit. It took me 3 visits in Switzerland until I finally clipped this ancor. . Sorry for this long story, but it was really an important one for me . . Thanks for the lucky belay @nikolayprimerov and thank you @marco_serva for always believing in me, even when I don’t do it. And for the . . . #drytooling #iceclimbing #climbing #climb #climbinglife #climbinggirls #climbing_lovers #climbing_is_my_passion #climbdifferent #weareclimbers

A post shared by Angelika Rainer (@angelika_rainer) on Dec 30, 2019 at 11:23am PST