Mauro “Bubu” Bole repeats Fly in the wind, M10, in Val di Landro (Bz)
Photos Sara Cirilli, Andrea Gallo, Kurt Astner and Oscar Durbiano

Val di Landro, Alto Adige, winter 2002. The strong South Tyrolean ice climber Kurt Astner opens Fly in the wind, a modern extreme mixed climb, and rates it M10.
January 2004. Mauro “Bubu” Bole makes the first on-sight of the itinerary. The report of the performance is the starting point for some considerations about dry tooling and the motivations that have moved the eccentric young man from Trieste in these years of love for extreme mixed climbing.

Fly in the wind
I opened Mission Impossible three years ago and that was the last time I climbed overhangs with ice axes and crampons. A long interruption, due to my lack of enthusiasm in continuing to discover new things in this fantastic discipline of “modern mixed climbing”.
Also this year the winter came late, so the specific training went on until the end of December. One of the few alpine areas in good conditions at the beginning of January is a cave in the Val di Landro, near Toblach, where, in 2002, Kurt Astner had opened Fly in the wind, rated M10.
I warm up on a nearby pitch and then start straight away on Fly. After many months I am climbing again with Gianmario Meneghin (Ghin). We haven’t met since last summer, after having spent some nice days on the North Faces of Lavaredo, with our laughs, my dirty words, and his prayers not to be late, because his wife was waiting for him at home.
Many things have changed in these last years: more wrinkles, less flexibility of the muscles and even a little pain in the back. But that special “click” is still here, that I hear when I am at the base of a new pitch that fascinates me in a particular way. Luckily it doesn’t always happen, but when it does I start and don’t stop, until my arms let go or the darkness comes. And also this time, with a bit of luck, I reached the belay on a tree of the forest above the cave.
All this is strange, because, while climbing, I completely lose the awareness of passing time. I feel like climbing fast, while for my belayer it is always a Calvary! This time nobody looked at the watch, but I must have hung from my arms almost an hour! The style hasn’t changed from the routes in the past. The only difference is that now it’s almost a rule to climb leashless. This is one of the reasons why the climbing times are a little reduced compared with the past. I don’t despise at all the decision to abandon the leashes forever; on the contrary, I am a supporter of the so-called “freedom of wrist”, also because I was the one who proposed this innovation for the style of the modern mixed climbs. At the beginning it was just a trial that progressively has encountered the favor of the ice climbers. Today it is an established habit.
This strange experience of on-sighting extreme mixed climbs has begun in January ’99, the first one was a M7 in Slovenia. In March of the same year, I transfer to Val di Cogne, to see for myself the masterpiece of Stevie Haston, X-Files, also if the season is by now over and not much ice is left. To tell the truth, only wet rock and a thin final icicle were left. Nevertheless, blinded by my lust and without paying too much attention to the environmental conditions, I start all the same for a try. One and half hour fight, until the jump to catch the icicle, too far from the wall. Nothing to do! With the second jump I manage to reach it, but the icicle breaks and then I decide to go back home.
The next year the good conditions allow me to on-sight Welcome to the machine, M9, in Val Savaranche. A few days later I go back to X-Files. I climb it first try, but after a very long time for the friend Massimo Farina who was belaying me: almost two hours. Pushed by my performances I start the same night to France, and the next morning I on –sight Quartiere Nord, M10.
The tanked adrenalin, besides keeping me awake, had also stimulated strange ideas, like the one to try to take away the leashes from the ice axe. So I went back, to increase the difficulty of the climb. I try the new game on X-Files, that I fire first try. It was an incredible exciting feeling. I suddenly felt lighter and freer, almost if I had been climbing in my underwear! Comment of Stevie Haston, who was observing me with the binocular form the forest: “You are a fucking stupid man”!
The trip continued with a visit to Vail, Colorado, where I try Amphibian, M9+, leashless. Unfortunately at the end of the pitch I make a mistake that ruins my try. The next day I try the famous Reptile, M10, but in this case with the leashes, to increase to possibility of an on-sight. One hour and twenty minutes later I reach satisfied the coveted belay.
Winter 2001. Stevie Haston opens The Empire strikes back, the hardest route at the time. Stevie whispers that it could be M11. One day, to confirm the grade, he takes me to try it. I swear that I was nervous for that, and then it doesn’t happen every day to be belayed by Stevie Haston! Also that day I heard that famous “click”. I climbed toward the belay incredibly slowly, so that now and then Stevie asked me “Are you resting?” and I answered, “No climbing” (my English was still very poor back then). Unfortunately I lost my concentration near the end of the pitch, not far from the belay stance. A tool slips out of a hole and I find myself hanging from the rope, a few meters lower. No comment from Haston.
I repeated the route later, one time with leashes, then without them. Haston didn’t believe the latter ascent, because he didn’t think it was possible. And the now popular Mission Impossible was born also from a thing that seemed impossible, a pure coincidence. It was a special experience, and also its first rating was special, with a question mark, simply because I didn’t know what to propose for a line that seemed to me different and much more engaging that all the ones I had climbed until that moment. I don’t know if it makes sense to tell these things. May be they can be useful to stimulate the curiosity of the ones who have the opportunity to see for themselves and may be give the motivation to do something new. Stimulations and ideas that, in the meantime, were useful for the Russian Dmitri Bytchkov to repeat Mission Impossible on-sight, in my opinion the most significant sport performance of the extreme mixed world in the last years.
It was a long trip and a nice experience. In these years of climbing I haven’t invented anything new. I simply participated to the evolution of mixed climbing, I don’t know when and who started it. Probably the Similaun man, (a mummified corpse, 5300 years old, found in the glacier of Val Senales, ndr), when he had to put a foot on the ice, while the other one was still on the rock.
Bubu