What is it with my partners lately? Patrik forgot his shoes last time out. This time it was Jorge's turn. We had to go back to his place and pick up a forgotten helmet and he said that his preferred harness, shoes and belay gear were still locked up in the Schlieren gym. He had back-ups for the harness and shoes (which turned out to be, respectively, a little too big and a little too small), but he didn't have a second belay device.

Jorge hasn't climbed since injuring his knee in a pick-up football match almost three months ago. But he had tested it out at the gym a little bit a few days ago and he thinks it's ok. So we are barreling down the highway in the Weiss Panzer (Jorge drives a gigantic white Jeep) and talking at each other a mile a minute. Which is sort of funny because he speaks almost no english and my german language skills suck, however, we somehow get by. Because it is still early in the season we had to concentrate on low altitude places and also Jorge's knee, while nominally ok, might blow out if we have to do any hard hiking. That meant that we would be heading back to The Gallery, where I was climbing with Patrik last week. We weren't incredibly early, but at 10am the climbers' carpark still had a few spaces left. We racked up and marched in, within a few minutes we were underneath our first target.

On the Sunday before, my last lead was the first pitch of the 4a of a trio called Ottos Mecanique upon which Patrik had tried to hurt himself. I ran up it and reached the belay ledge with its big tree pretty quick. Jorge followed up and showed no sign that he recently had trouble even walking properly. Before screwing up his knee Jorge was getting pretty hard-core in the gym, regularly playing on 6b and 6c routes, so I expected that as long as we were conservative things would go well. When he got up beside me I tried to explain that we would be continuing upwards for another pitch. No sweat he replied, at least that was the gist of what I thought he said. The next pitch was even easier than the first and pretty soon we were both two pitches up a wall high above the Wallensee gazing at the mountainous views on offer in every direction. Jorge liked it so much that we just hung from the belay anchors up there for a while to take it all in. Because we only had one belay device I had to lower Jorge down before rapping back to the bottom of the second pitch. We stayed there for about an hour while both Jorge and I led the two 5a variations of Ottos Mecanique. At the last we decided not to lower off and topped out to a walking trail just above us.

We got back down to our packs and stopped for some lunch and discussed what we wanted to do next. A few more groups turned up and we watched as they wandered back and forth trying to match their topo maps with the cliffs in front of them. Jorge started saying he wanted to do something a bit hard, maybe a 6a or 6b. Raised eyebrows would not shake him. Instead I suggested he do something which had given me the real willies last time I had climbed it. FKK is a fairly short 5c+ which I had climbed last August with Guilia and I had a heck of a time trying to finish it then. So Jorge started up and with not much trouble and no obvious fear he got to the top having rested only once. So I reluctantly had another crack at it, managing to get up there a lot better than the previous time. But it was still too scary to be much fun. The end result was that Jorge was still keen on trying something heinious so we started casting about looking for something in the 6a range.

Jorge found what he wanted alright. If you look at the Ost Plaisir guidebook on page 235 and cast your eye to the lower frame depicting Sector B you'll find that between Anfanger and Voltige there is a thin dashed line representing an unnamed and unrated route which creeps under an angled overhang and then over it to top out to the walking trail. I had been pointing at Voltige (which is a 6a) and suggesting that Jorge do that one, but he reckoned the other line looked easier. Despite my insistance that I thought he was madder than a three dog fight he was determined to seige the route into submission. I hate having my ass handed to me while rock climbing and I could see this route doing exactly that to us. So up he goes, two clips to reach the roof line and then two more clips along a difficult few meters following under the roof as it angles up right. At the point the route goes over the roof it looks like it's been bolted by a frenchman, so things were pretty safe. However Jorge really had a hard time trying to clear that roof and in the end he had to give it up. I lowered him off and we pulled the rope, leaving behind the draws that he had placed. My turn.

As it panned out, I finished the route but it wasn't pretty. Heaving on the draws and some desperate scrabbling got me over the roof. Near the top Jorge short-roped me a little too much and I had to shout down at him. But at least it was done. Jorge had a go at following but his arms were blown by his lead attempt and he couldn't get more than a couple of clips up. I lowered him off and then rapped down. We were done. After a quick beer by the Wallensee we headed back to Zurich. Another great day in the great outdoors was complete.