Page 36 - 2017 AMA Winter

COMMANDO RAT LINES
This is by far the most established of the crags we visited and probably the largest too. We parked for free in the nearest car park in Ghar Lapsi and made the short walk to where we wanted to climb. Obvious features include the skull shaped feature in the rock which you cannot miss but depends upon having the larger Malta guidebook that is no longer in print. This is one crag that should be available in the new edition being printed in the future.
In Ghar Lapsi there are two café’s. The nearest, an expensive seafood restaurant has good views of the sea front and serves hot and cold drinks in the daytime. We
GOZO
The last crag we visited was on the island of Gozo. If only we’d been able to spend more time here! Gozo’s climbing seems to be more refined and free of vegetation in crucial areas – a problem often witnessed on the mainland. As we were a group with the main aim of delivering RSF a huge sea cliff adventure was low on the list of priorities. However, if we were able to find a route which permitted all 10 RSF students an opportunity to climb a pitch or two before having to get back on the ferry to get home in time for dinner it would have been much higher. Consequently we
frequented the larger restaurant slightly further away from the car park and had some good food here but if going I’d go at the start of the lunch/dinner period as it gets particularly busy, even for late January.
As a trad venue there’s an abundance of routes with a good selection of bolted climbs too. I personally had my favourite climb of the exped here, which follows the line of a crack under an overhanging flake. I used tonnes of cams and large nuts for this so take a good sized rack with some good length extenders or your options become splitting it into two pitches or running it out. There’s a pair of good bolts at the top for
an abseil and you can just do it with a 50m rope.
There are other obvious tracks across the shoreline from the car park and some lead down to sea level. For access to the top of the cliff, particularly at the western edge of the cliff, there’s a set of steps cut into the rock adjacent to the pipeline that splits the crag. Although you could walk off the top of the crag in most places, I’d say there’s often not a huge amount of confidence- inspiring gear locations at the top so you’d most likely abseil back down off flakes and threads. Tat is a must!
went to a small cliff called Flakeout Walls at Mgarr ix-Xini that can be accessed from the western side of the gorge. Follow the guidebook instructions for the route (the map is quite accurate) and then the red/ blue spots on the ground to navigate down into the gorge. It’s quite polished rock and so care must be taken after rain as, like Weid Babu, would give Team Medics and REC First Aiders an opportunity for some quality CPD.
The area we wanted to climb on was in the shade initially but became lighter after
lunch. This was enough time to do our intro to sport leading in the shade before ‘sun’s out gun’s out’ when climbing. The rock is not as sharp as other locations experienced, however, was at the right angle, height and difficulty to end a good week for this group that were ready for their first lead climbs. On the whole there were good quality bolts on each line, excluding two at the top of a pair of adjacent climbs that we reported on the Malta Climbing Club Facebook group. In any case, we could top-out onto the approach route into the gorge to avoid if necessary.
On the whole, Malta and Gozo are in their infancy for supporting a climbing expedition. There’re very few climbing gear shops, little in the way of information available in print and the quality of the rock in some places is less than confidence inspiring although this is better seen on Gozo than the mainland. As the sport is progressing, however, with a good number of local and travelling climbers coming to the islands there is a strong chance that winter climbing in the country will become another strong favourite of British climbers.
If you’re after somewhere different to go outside of the summer months and have over-indulged in Spanish, Italian or French climbing locations, Malta might be somewhere new you might want to investigate.
34 ARMY MOUNTAINEER