A few days ago I flew down to Buenos Aires to visit my mother and her husband. It’s still the summer here, so I wasn’t expecting to do much climbing. The weather turned out to be pretty mild, high 60s to low 70s so I drove to Balcarce, a small town four hours to the south that has a fair amount of world-class bouldering. There are maybe 500 established problems, and almost infinite potential for more. The rock is extremely gentle on the skin, so you can climb until your tendons cry uncle.

On Thursday I met with a group of locals who were going to Techo Grande (Big Roof), a sector with some of the oldest established problems. That place overlooks a Nascar-style race track, so it attracts people who want to watch the races without paying for admission. Luckily there isn’t any trash around because the local climbers clean it. However, you can see graffiti going back to at least thirty years! Most of the other sectors are secluded and have not been defaced, so they look more like Switzerland.

Anyway, the locals wanted to try a problem called Asperix that was first done around 2000. I’d been there before, and never even attempted it because it seemed too hard for me. I gave the stand start (V6) a couple of tries and did it, so I decided to try the sit start that goes at V7. I sent it after a few more tries, and I was super happy:

The next day Juan (a local) and I went to a sector currently under development called La Cabezona (“the big-headed female”). It already has a handful of double-digit problems established by Nicolás Pacheco, a strong climber from Buenos Aires. However, many boulders are still completely untouched. It was raining on and off, so we spent most of our time under a roof. We scrubbed and climbed four new problems between v3 and v5, and left an open project that harder but still in the single digits. I love finding obvious lines that haven’t been climbed, regardless of the difficulty. Here’s one of them: Techo Cubista (Cubist Roof), first ascent 🙂