Here’s a video of me climbing Kantti 6- in Olhava, Repovesi National Park. Like most of the climbing videos, it’s extremely boring. But I hope here you can get the idea of Kantti and the surrounding cool crag of Olhava. On general I think climbing is like sex, it’s nicer to actually do it than watch it on video. But anyway, here it is:
Kantti is a partially bolted technical slab route which consist of 3 horizontal cracks for protection and extra 5 bolts between them. First crack is about 4 meters from the start and then next protection – steel bolt – is so high that the first pro wont stop you falling all the way to lake Olhavanlampi. As the whole line is about 40 meters long and also rest of protections are quite widely spaced the Kantti has become famous within finnish climbing scene. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing new here that bolting is widely spaced, but there are not much over 35 meter high lines. And bolting in Kantti is quite sparse. But in a manly way.
Kantti is actually so famous that it is in cover page of the topo book of Finland. And yes, you can fit all the climbs in Finland in one book. That is little bit over 70 crags and about 1600 lines and that’s it for Finland. It’s all different forms of granite mainly formed by continental glaciers during ice age, but there are also other types.
The grade in Kantti is 6- in finnish climbing grading system. That is 6+ on UIAA scale and 6-/6 on swedish scale and about 6a+ on french system. I think. It could also be 6b. The thing is, that finnish grading system originally was the UIAA scale. But then the FIN scale started to live it’s own life and after a while the FIN scale was no longer the same as the UIAA scale. Then apparently there was a major attempt to renew the whole thing. But somehow it didn’t quite work out. And there’s not much written info available about those days, so I can’t really tell you anything else that it’s pretty confusing with the FIN scale. It helps to remember that back in the days it was all about showing of to swedes how much harder climbers we are.
I think Kantti is 6a+ and I think it’s one supercool line. It inspired the name for this blog.
