On January 15, among the cima Marzola mountains, and close to his house in Trento, the great Dolomites climber Samuele Scalet passed away. He was 70, and for some time had been battling against\u00a0an illness even tougher than an inaccessible mountain wall.
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\nHis name will forever be linked to a great mountain of the Pale di S.Martino massif, the Sass Maor, a wild temple. And it\u2019s on the south-east wall of this giant that Scalet, together with Giancarlo Biasin, in 3 intense August 1964 days, found \u201chis\u201d route. The pair opened an elegant and difficult route, with the use of relatively few pegs, considering the length (VI A0 700 m). A masterpiece. These were the years of the \u201cdirettissime\u201d climbed with aid and over-the-top use of pegs. But Samuele was far-sighted and his approach was similar to that adopted by climbers 20 years later.
\nBut, as often happens with great visionaries, he was unlucky, \u00a0and the epilogue to the pair\u2019s extraordinary achievement will always be marred by what happened during the descent on foot.
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\nHis partner, Giancarlo Biasin, slipped and died during a moment\u2019s lapse of concentration. After this tragedy, for a long period Scalet didn\u2019t climb much, dedicating himself to another of his loves, windsurfing. In the Nineties he again climbed a lot and, confirming his advanced conception of climbing, adopted modern approaches to new-routing, while always respecting the mountain and its history.
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\nIn 2001, and again on \u201chis\u201d preferred south-east face of the Sass Maor, he climbed for the first time another historic new route. With Marco Canteri and Davide Depaoli he came up with Masada (an acronym of their names), 1260 metres with your heart in your mouth, with very few bolts and difficulties of up to VIII- and A1. Those who repeated the route considered it one of the Dolomites\u2019 finest. Last October the very strong \u201clocal\u201d Riccardo Scarian managed to climb it entirely free, with climbing up to all of 8b.
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\nScalet had started exploring in 1959 on the south face of the Cima Principale di Manstorna, then on the north-west face of the Cima Immink, where he climbed this new route with long difficult free sections, and he continued climbing in this way.
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\nBorn in Primiero, in the Dolomites near Feltre, he subsequently went to live in Trento. A mathematics professor, and great lover and scholar of prime numbers, he was also an academic member of the CAI (Club Alpino Italiano) for many years. He had mountains inside of him and he knew how to climb them with delicacy, leaving behind him grand designs to be admired, appreciated and repeated.
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\nSamuele Scalet also published two well-regarded guides with Milan\u2019s Versante Sud:
\nThe \u201cGuida alpinistica alle Pale di san Martino\u201d with S. Zagonel, T. Simoni, M.
\nLott and D. Boninsegna, and, on his own, a guide to the same area\u2019s walks.
\nMasada winter\u00a0 on upclimbing
\nmario sertori
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\nAn amusing story by Samuele Scalet published on
\nwww.lavocedelnordest.it
\nI chiodi [1]
\n"I can consider \u201cchiodi\u201d family business. My great-grandfather had a small workshop near to the river, just downstream of the kilns where they produced iron, in via Forno in the village of Transacqua. He made above all hammers and pincers, and big nails and little nails. Everything was faithfully made with the press and then finished by hand.
\nWhen the mines closed, the workshop became a mill, but a certain number of boxes of nails were left for such a long time that I could explore them and make my own personal collection, which I guarded carefully.
\nThey were lovely \u201cchiodi\u201d (nails), each with its own head, body and some feature which made it unique. The slenderest always made me think of a school friend who everyone said was \u201cmagro come un chiodo\u201d, \u201cas skinny as a rake\u201d you\u2019d say in English but Italians say \u201cas skinny as a nail\u201d, but I liked him and he was intelligent. To use properly \u201cchiodi\u201d, just like anything else, you have to know them well. Taught by expert hands, I learned how to put them in without splitting the wood, without bending them, to bend over the protruding tips where necessary to make them more secure, to extract and straighten them if needed and then to put them back in the right place.
\nYes, it was dangerous to leave them lying round, perhaps with the points upwards, or drop them as you went along, so that some passing bright spark picks them up and uses them to scratch the shiny sides of parked cars. Even worst things could come into the head of real geniuses, but bad things you can\u2019t avoid by hiding the nails, only by getting people to use their consciences.
\nThen one day Granny said Grandad had \u201cun chiodo fisso\u201d, literally \u201ca nail stuck\u201d or in English you say \u201ca bee in his bonnet\u201d. I thought she meant that she was talking about a nail he couldn\u2019t get out, but I quickly realised it meant something completely different and the only thing common to ordinary nails was that it was hard to get out.
\n\u201cChiodi mentali\u201d, \u201cmental nails\u201d, even more so than the ordinary variety, you can say are hand-made, each one different from the rest, some good and some bad, and, given that they\u2019re already hidden inside people\u2019s heads, it\u2019s impossible to hide them elsewhere. The real master that keeps them under control is the conscience.
\nMy experience with \u201cchiodi\u201d started to get really interesting when I started to climb in the mountains. With the savings I\u2019d sweated for, I bought a hemp rope, krabs, a hammer and some rock pegs, perhaps five of different sizes, and I hid everything in the attic. My friend Aldo and I studied with interest the various blade forms and different sizes that\u2019d work best in the rock\u2019s cracks. Finally came the day to place them, but the first peg we came across in the mountains had been placed by someone else. In fact, there were two of them, joined by tat.
\nThis was a sure sign that we\u2019d arrived at a stance and were on the right route. What joy! Others had been here before us and had left a sign. Further up, a hold broke and I fell for a few metres until a peg stopped my fall. Probably that peg saved my life. We used them for the descent as well, for abbing off. When we arrived back at the start of the route, all the pegs were gone. You can argue for ever if it\u2019s best to climb a route using few or many pegs. They change the safety of the climb and the sense of adventure that\u2019s a very important part of climbing.
\nAnd if we want to complicate things, we can say that pegs can only be placed where there are cracks, which you don\u2019t always find, while bolts are special \u201cchiodi\u201d that can be placed wherever you want using a drill. The ethics regarding the use of bolts lead directly to a discussion on the value of life and of adventure where each person\u2019s conscience comes into play.
\nMaking several plays on words in Italian and with rapid changes of subject, we see that the ethics of climbing \u201da tutto chiodo\u201d, \u201call out\u201d, are those we\u2019ve just described, while \u201cessere inchiodati\u201d, \u201cto be nailed\u201d, means the exact opposite. Putting the two phrases together, we get \u201cchiodo scaccia chiodo\u201d, literally \u201cnail crushes nail\u201d or in English you\u2019d say, \u201cwhen one door closes, another opens\u201d or \u201chair of the dog\u201d if talking about drink. Everyone knows that carpenters are the real experts of nails, but despite this climbers, whether we\u2019re talking about \u201cchiodi normali\u201d (pegs) or \u201cchiodi fissi\u201d (bolts), are unbeatable for having their \u201cchiodo fisso\u201d about \u201cchiodi\u201d (pegs).
\nThe most extraordinary thing you can say about \u201cchiodi\u201d is that there are people who can bend them just by thinking. The nicest thing, though, is when a person gets to the end of his career, his most treasured tool gets \u201cappeso al chiodo\u201d, \u201chung up on the nail\u201d. Roba da chiodi, \u201cstuff for making nails out of\u201d!"
\nSamuele Scalet
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\n[1] \u201cChiodo\u201d, \u201cchiodi\u201d in the plural, is the Italian word for nails. It also means pegs or pitons. The word is also used in various Italian expressions, as described in the article
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