Review: Blocheart - Alpine Bouldering

By Greg Chapman

Harry Roker's superb boulder guide centers on the Swiss alpine regions but also goes as far south as the French granite Mecca of Ailfroide and as far East as the Austrian venue Sellapass, covering in total twenty one areas.

Many of these will be unfamiliar to even the most well traveled boulderer, but as well as opening new doors the guide does an excellent job of clarifying well known, yet badly documented areas, such as Chironico, Magic Wood and The Sustenpass.

This is very much a no nonsense document, so for those of you who's idea of a good guide is a glorified coffee table affair, predominantly for perusal in the bath tub, you may want to leave this one on the shelf. On the other hand if you want to get down to crushing some seriously good granite blocs, this should be a must-buy guide.

Each area is given a brief overview, approach and access description, the rock type (usually granite/gneiss) and a climate summary, which can be pretty useful for those of you wanting to plan summer excursion when many of the lowland valleys venues can get pretty hot. As for the actual climbing information; this is generally conveyed with overview diagrams and a table containing the name, grade and location of each problem. One feature, which I thought of particular use, was the way in which the guide explains if problems are a crouch rather than sit starts. This is something I have found can often prove confusing, as many continentals seem to have a mixed understanding of what a sit start actually is.

Although primarily a German language guide all the access, approach and aspect information has been translated into English and although the problem descriptions are in German, Harry has included a useful little "terms" dictionary at the front of the book. Grades are based on the font scale and much of the over-grading, for which Alps bouldering has become famous, has been
ironed out.


Blocheart is yet another example of the ever increasing popularity of bouldering and opens up to the masses a whole new area of superb climbing. Who would have thought ten or fifteen years ago of producing a guide exclusively to bouldering in the European heartland of mountaineering? Times are changing kids, and next time that old trad king asks if you just stopping off at Font on your way to the Alps you'll be able to say, "yes"!

Reviewed by Greg Chapman (May 2004)

Purchase Blocheart here for £17.95
[UPDATE May 2009: Blocheart is now out of print. Most areas described are covered in other, more recent, guides. However, Magic Wood is only covered via online topos or topos available from the local guest house. The free online PDF guide is available here - Magic Wood (Aug 08).]


Other Swiss Bouldering Guides
Three excellent new(er) definitive photo topo guides, all produced by the same publisher, are available to Cresciano, Chironico and San Gottardo. These are currently unavailable in the UK although they can be purchased from the tourist information centre in Biasca (a small town in between Cresciano and Chironico).

Tourist Office Location:
ENTE TURISTICO BIASCA E RIVIERA
Contrada Cavalier Pellanda 4
CH-6710 Biasca

Phone +41 91 862 33 27 / E-mail: info@biascaturismo.ch
Open from Monday to Friday: 8.30-12.00 and 14.00-18.00

There is an extensive look at bouldering in all the areas listed above in the following article:
Article: Bouldering in Switzerland