Jacopo Larcher repeats Prinzip Hoffnug 8b/+ E9/10

Jacopo Larcher has made the third ascent of Beat Kammerlander's Prinzip Hoffnung 8b/+ E9/10 at Bürser Platte, Voralberg, in Austria. Beat put it up as a sport route in 1997 but later decided to chop the bolts and in 2009, beeing 50, he made the first trad ascent. Jacopo, who previously has done two 9a's, worked the route some 15 times including some four lead attempts. So what can you say about the difficulty? It's hard to relate it to a sport routes, it's something completely different, it's more mental. The climb is really technical and you can slip everywhere, which is not easy to assume as the protections are often not good and should not fall. Sure, I know grades are important for the media but I don't care about them anymore. E-grades are mainly used in UK for trad climbing and it measures (speculates) the overall difficulty, including the danger, how hard it is to onsight it. There exist some E11 that also have gotten an 8c+ grade. In other words, for some reason, the trad routes have for some reason a harder, deflated, grading scale compared to bolted routes. So stay assure that Prinzip Hoffnug should not be compared in difficulty to a modern 8b/+ sport route.