How Nina Caprez, Jérémy Bernard, and a 1991 Mercedes-Benz are Bringing Climbing to Unlikely Places
This article originally appeared on Climbing
Climbing has always been a landing pad for outsiders. So when a small blue wall popped up in an abandoned field on the margins of Vulcan, Romania, it may have been out of place, but not out of character. Nonetheless, the crowd that had gathered was witnessing something new.
Music was pumping. Freshly set boulders stood ready to spit would-be crushers onto the mats. Nerves ran high, excitement ran higher, but no competitors sat in isolation. IFSC commentator Matt Groom wasn't there to lob jokes and Janja Garnbret wouldn't be collecting another crown by day's end. This was a climbing competition, sure, but more than that it was a celebration. The spectators hadn't come to see winners; instead, they'd simply come to see past the 14 barren apartment blocks looming in the background.
Swiss climber Nina Caprez and French photographer Jeremy Bernard hardly need an introduction. When you climb 5.14c and crush hard multi-pitches on the Ratikon, El Cap, and in the Verdon Gorge, people know your name. Likewise, when you've shot (and skied) big lines across the world, including in Chile, Chamonix, the Canadian Rockies, Pakistan, and Kyrgyzstan, you gain a reputation. Caprez and Bernard have done so much in the mountains that it can be hard to get them excited. In 2019, it turned out that this was exactly what they needed.
The story of the Andrea Project starts at the end. Or, at least, at an end.
Before the pandemic hit, Caprez and Bernard had lived the dream of the climbing life so hard that the glitter had worn off. Chasing passion is a privilege, sure, but it's also a prison. The pursuit of more, bigger, better eventually flattens into "me, me, me."
"Climbing didn't make sense anymore," Caprez says. "Jeremy and I needed a project to hold us together and give us direction."
Enter Andrea.
Andrea is not a child, rather Andrea is a 1991 Mercedes-Benz Unimog U2150. If she were a dog, she would be that big canine dragon from The Neverending Story--beastly and enchanting. Andrea is 23 feet long, 12 feet tall, and, like most magical creatures, was born in a dream.
Prior to the pandemic, Caprez had worked with the Swiss organization ClimbAID in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon and drew inspiration from their Rolling Rock--a mobile climbing wall brought to refugee camps and "designed to foster resilience and a sense of community among children and youth." The experience marked her life and planted a seed.
Andrea also sports a mobile climbing wall and she likewise rolls with the aim of fostering resilience and joy in underserved communities. The difference is that Andrea can roll farther and wider, allowing Caprez and Bernard to do similar work to ClimbAID on a larger scale.
While the mobile climbing wall may be Andrea's most significant feature, the most striking is the Chris Benchetler mural painted on her broadsides. A color-saturated landscape where big walls and mountains converge on a Gandalf-meets-Old Man Winter figure is appropriately ludic and mysterious.
Vulcan is the second largest city in the Jiu Valley of Transylvania, Romania, but its population is rapidly dwindling. In 2002, 33,186 people lived here. By 2011, the number had dropped to 24,160.
Those who live in Vulcan came for the mountains. Not for their peaks, though, but for their insides. The Jiu Valley is rich in coal and for the last century and a half mining has provided a sturdy population with steady work--albeit at a high cost. The average life expectancy of Jiu Valley men is 55. .
The mines are closing, however. And with them, many residents' futures. Leaving is increasingly the best option.
Andrea rumbled into town late on a rainy Monday. Felipe Silva, a local pastor and climber who had invited Caprez and Bernard to the region, received them at his church, a small building, no nave, no spire, all white and surrounded by towering apartments. Inside there are chess lessons--a nod to Romania's period of Soviet occupation. Outside is a small parking lot where Andrea dropped anchor.
Before they could settle in, Silva introduced Caprez and Bernard to his other house of worship, Fara Limite: a youth climbing gym and launching pad for programs aimed at nurturing positive social change.
Most of the children and teens who climb at Fara Limite come from the surrounding Cartier Dallas neighborhood--14 concrete high-rises arranged in a long triangle. Statistically, this is among the most dangerous neighborhoods in Romania. A local newspaper described it as "unul dintre locurile de evitat" (the kind of place you want to avoid). It's not where you expect to find a climbing gym, but it is the sort of place climbing has always thrived: on the margins.
Nobody pays to climb at Fara Limite, but members are required to show up regularly, attend a weekly reading hour, and maintain passing grades at school. More than 100 kids are signed on.
"They were f--ing strong," Caprez says when reflecting on her first session with some of the older teens. "And they were psyched!"
Silva says the kids were thrilled to see someone show interest in their community. Every morning, a rotating cast of youngsters would filter down from the apartment block to drink tea and eat chocolate with their visitors. Caprez, Bernard, and crew set new boulders and routes at the gym and offered photography lessons. On the weekend, they took the kids camping and outdoor climbing at a nearby crag.
Andrea's visit to Romania culminated in a community-wide bouldering competition on her outdoor wall. Seventy kids attended. Families showed up on bicycles and quads, brought camping chairs, and cheered each other on. A horse grazed in the background. Music blared. Briefly, a place you want to avoid became the place everyone wanted to be.
"I want to go from top to top wherever you go in this world," wrote Andreea, age 18, in a letter to Caprez and Bernard following their time together. Gabi, age 17, wrote "Your stay determined me to be more good at what I do. ... We are moving forward... higher and higher."
After a month-long stop in Manikia to help prepare for the 2022 Petzl RocTrip, Andrea traveled to Fyli, Greece, a town north of Athens on the verge of being swallowed by the city's sprawling suburbs. The team had come to connect with ClimbAID and offer a group of unaccompanied refugee minors a chance at climbing outdoors for the first time.
A narrow road leading north from Fyli's terracotta-roofed houses meanders into the Mount Parnitha range. Follow it just a couple of miles and you end up at E.P.O.S. Fylis, a small crag named for the local mountaineering club. Here, Caprez and Bernard met with ClimbAID's volunteers who arrived with 20 young men eager to test their mettle.
"When I saw the team arrive, I couldn't believe my eyes," Caprez says. "A bunch of super excited and scrambling teenagers with overflowing energy. They were goofing off and ready for adventure."
Their chatter was a collage of languages. Afghans, Pakistanis, Ghanans, Syrians, and Malians. All had endured plenty of adventure (to put it mildly) just to get here, but climbing was quite a different thing. Adventurous, sure, but in the manufactured way that makes it more about freedom than danger.
Caprez and Bernard had set up topropes across the crag and as the crew tied in, rowdy confidence gave way to jittery focus. The conversation hushed and then quickly roared back in raucous shouts of support.
"A festival of mutual encouragement," Caprez says.
By the end of the day, the group had climbed out the entire crag. With all the anchors clipped and cleaned, Caprez, Bernard, and the group sat down to reflect on their first outdoor climbing experience.
Sami, Fadi, Intzar, and their companions' words were precise and economical.
"The best day of my life," they said.
"I felt free."
After Fyli, Andrea continued along the Greek coast from the Saronic Gulf to Corinth, a city familiar with new beginnings.
In 1858, the ancient settlement was destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt. Seventy years later it was again destroyed by another earthquake and again rebuilt. In 1933 Corinth burned to the ground and for a third time was resurrected.
This history notwithstanding, it isn't a friendly place for refugees seeking to start anew. The Corinth refugee camp to which Andrea arrived is isolated and notoriously dangerous. Caprez and Bernard had arranged to collaborate with Vasilika Moon, a nonprofit organization that operates a school and a community center there, and they showed up with friends.
Ilina Arsova, an artist, and Patricia Oudit, a journalist, had joined Andrea's journey in Athens. Marie-Julie Arnould, a volunteer, and Valentin Grollemund, a mountain guide and filmmaker, came aboard in Corinth as did Tom Buet, a carpenter, and Benoit Favre, a friend. Throughout their first days, Andrea sat parked on the camp's periphery as the crew participated in Vasilika Moon's regular programming.
School at camp includes language, IT, cooking, and science classes. Arsova and Bernard added art and photography to the curriculum while Caprez helped with German instruction. Alongside the school, Vasilika Moon runs a free shop and cafe. No cash is exchanged; instead, residents earn points that they can spend on whatever they want. The goal is to humanize their experience and provide a soft introduction to European culture.
Residents of the Corinthos refugee camp don't graduate from Vasilika Moon's cafe to sipping cafe au lait in Paris, of course. Their journey isn't over. As Andrea's crew pitched in with programming, they learned about "the game," a high-stakes gamble to get to Western Europe, and there are two ways to play. You can pay for a smuggler to stuff you into a semi-trailer and hope you aren't stopped and assaulted by police (or worse) before making it to safe ground. Or, you can cling to the underside of a ferry-bound truck and try to hang on long enough to traverse the Ionian Sea. Neither option offers good odds, but many people Caprez, Bernard, and their friends spoke to said that this was their only hope.
After a few days of settling in and connecting with residents, Caprez and Bernard pulled Andrea up to an empty lot just outside of camp. It was Friday and school was almost out. The crew busied to assemble Andrea's wall, prepare a painting workshop, set up a slackline, and rig speakers.
By noon on Saturday, traditional Kurdish music played, people danced, painted, and a few pulled onto the wall. As the sends started coming and celebratory shouts rang out, more and more curious onlookers joined, and quickly a party was underway. For an afternoon the vacant lot beside camp was a patch of nature that climbers had found and filled with joy and psych.
The party rolled on and the next day Caprez and Bernard offered more personalized coaching. Many of the same people returned, new faces appeared, and Andrea's wall was again the scene of frenzied attempts, fits of laughter, and plenty of sends.
It's easy to build fancy metaphors out of the act of carting a collapsible climbing wall through underserved communities. Overcoming is a potent social narrative, after all. Nobody in Vulcan, Athens, or Corinth learned anything about surmounting obstacles or nurturing resilience, though. Members of these communities already know so much more about the subject than climbing could ever teach. Rather, they had fun.
This story started at an end and it concludes at a beginning.
Caprez and Bernard's first child arrived in July 2022. As Andrea ambled through the Balkans, sewing seeds of overcoming and coming together, a new life was forming. What was born a truck full of joy is about to become a home.
After returning from Greece Caprez says that "climbing made sense again." Aboard Andrea it was no longer about hard grades or clickable content, it was about people and movement, connection to the body and to one another--climbing's core values.
When Jim Bridwell and John Bachar gathered in Yosemite alongside Lynn Hill and other luminaries, they were misfits who found meaning not just on the vertical plane but in one another. When Patrick Edlinger and Patrick Berhault teamed up in the Verdon Gorge, climbing offered them not just a venue for expression, but a sense of purpose.
When Caprez and Bernard bolted a collapsible climbing wall onto the side of a Unimog and christened it Andrea, they tapped back into our sport's raison d'etre. Climbing in Cartier Dallas, Athens, and Corinth was, as much for Caprez and Bernard as for the communities they touched, an escape and a meeting point.
Back in Vulcan, Andreea, Gabi, and the rest of the Fara Limite team continued "moving forward...higher and higher." In May 2022, eight athletes from the gym competed in Romania's national sport climbing and bouldering championship.
In North Athens, ClimbAID continues to bring young crushers to Fyli through their Pame Pano! program which has introduced 140 unaccompanied minors (and counting!) to the joy of outdoor climbing.
Despite struggles related to indiscriminate evictions of camp residents, Vasilika Moon continues to carve slivers of hope out of a bleak landscape.
Andrea, likewise, rumbles on. This fall she will turn south toward Morocco and, again, she will bring with her a truckload of joy.
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