BLCC's and Siurana by James Garden

After the bouldering World Cup season had finished it was time to change my focus to lead climbing for a while and to start training for the BLCC's and the 10 days in Siurana I had with my sister Charlotte. The BLCC's had not gone as well as I'd hoped but was still a really enjoyable day, I love competition pressure and climbing in a brand new centre was brilliant. Looking back I'd been kidding myself thinking I could gain the power endurance I'd need to get on that podium in such a short space of time, 4th place wasn’t too bad and at least I had some stamina to go to Siurana with.

When we arrived we went to go check out the El Pati sector which is home to routes such as La Rambla 9a+ and Golpe de Estado 9b, I felt like a kid standing underneath these routes getting excited after having seen them in the videos. 

I had been doing at lot of route setting between the BLCC's and going away so the first couple of days were really nice to climb on easy routes getting used to the rock and lounging around in the sun. This soon got boring though and it was time to find something a bit harder, the first route I tried was called Migranya 8b in the L’Olla sector, this route suited me because there were hard bouldery moves between good rests. I also did a route to the left called Cronica 8b which was an awesome route with huge dynamic moves between pockets at the bottom and a pumpy section on smaller holds at the top. 

Most of the routes in Siurana are long on vertical or slightly overhanging walls with technical moves on small holds. L’Olla is completely different though, there are two parts to this sector, one with Migranya and Cronica and the other which has small overhanging bouldery routes which were really good and packed with loads of different styles. 

On one of our rest days we drove to Barcelona to check out La Sagradia Familia (Gaudi’s Cathedral) which is amazing and totally out of this world, we also looked at the Cathedral of Barcelona, This woman’s impressive mushroom stall on La Boqueria market and this guys equally impressive knife shop.

I really enjoyed Siurana because there was so much to go at and so many different types of routes all within a short walk of each other, we had really good weather and it was almost too hot to try anything hard on some days.