Enrico Baistrocchi repeats Oniyx at Chironico

When Enrico took me beneath that small rock face with only two bolts above the gushing river, I should have imagined the first ascentionist of that climb, so similar to certain other of his explosive and visionary ideas. I'd seen them a few months ago in the Frankenjura in the company of Baistrocchi and Gabriele Moroni, this time though we were 600km to the south, in Switzerland's Ticino, just beneath the bouldering area Chironico.

Markus Bock had invented another one of his own, calling it Oniyx and grading it 8c. A classic, furiously "fingery route with a perfect, bouldery mantle. Enrico had discovered it by chance when flicking through the Chironico guidebook, and the author of the climb was synonymous with high quality.

I believe that in all of Bock's lines there is a pure search, pure experimentation, great creativity and intuition but above all the desire to climb for himself, without great media attention.

Perhaps it's this intimate philosophy which motivated Enrico Baistrocchi to check out climbs which are particularly intense. He immediately hit it off with the route and his great performance came about after only a handful of attempts on Tuesday 26 January.