One is blind, the other is paralyzed. Laila Grillo and Angela Fallegger show how climbing with disabilities works. But they also cause resentment in alpinist circles.
Laila Grillo stands at the foot of a jagged rock face. She clicks her tongue, waiting for the echo. She says: “The wall starts gently, it is not vertical.” Then she starts climbing.
Grillo, 33 years old, is blind: she lost her sight when she was five years old. Her biggest hobby is climbing.
Angela Fallegger sits on a boulder at the bottom of the wall and watches her colleague. Fallegger, 34 years old, also wears a climbing harness and helmet. Her legs are stretched out, the Ticino spring sun warms the stone beneath her. But Fallegger doesn’t feel that; Nine years ago she fell from a paraglider and has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since.
Grillo and Fallegger are part of the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) para-climbing team. You climb together with other athletes with disabilities. Like her, some are blind or paralyzed, others suffer from multiple sclerosis, one athlete is missing her left arm, another is missing her right leg.
In the Ticino village of Arcegno, Grillo and Fallegger take part in a climbing camp run by the disabled sports association Plusport. During training and competitions, the two women climb indoors and in the camp outside in the climbing garden. For most amateur climbers who come to Arcegno, the challenge begins on the wall.
Grillo and Fallegger struggled much earlier.
Blind people also have a “fear of heights”
The path to the climbing garden winds through a chestnut forest, leads over roots and rocks, and crosses a stream. It’s a short route, but it’s difficult forFallegger and Grillo. Because he is not wheelchair accessible, Fallegger had to leave her wheelchair behind in a parking lot. She is carried piggyback by a camp manager.
Grillo holds on to a companion who describes the path to her and points out obstacles such as hanging branches, steps or boulders. But most of the time Grillo has already felt them with his cane. She briefly loses her balance in a stream bed and slips, but catches herself with her hands just in time.
When they arrive at the climbing garden, Grillo beams and her smile lines deepen. She says: “It smells wonderfully of the forest.” At the age of five she was completely blind. Because she was born three months prematurely, she was given additional oxygen in the hospital. The oxygen supply was too high and Grillo’s retina never grew – it was a matter of time before it detached.
Laila Grillo is blind and climbs. For her, her impairment is part of her; she has learned to deal with it.
Grillo has adapted to life without sight: her other senses are heightened; she hears, smells, tastes and feels what many sighted people miss. In the forest she hears the wind rustling, the babbling stream, the birds chirping, the insects buzzing, and children laughing in the distance. A camp participant says: “It’s crazy what Laila hears.”
Grillo gets into the climbing harness, ties himself to the safety rope with a figure eight, and a camp manager checks the knot. Now she crawls to the rock wall; When the flat passage is over, she stands up. She makes a movement with her hands that resembles that of a windshield wiper. She feels for the handles for her hands and feet on the wall.
When she gets stuck on the rock, the camp leader who is securing her gives her the times. So Grillo knows which direction to take. If the echo of their voices sounds hollow, it is a sign that the wall is steep. Grillo feels uneasy – even blind people are afraid of heights.
Grillo’s hands dig into a crevice in the rock and she tries to pull herself up. But she loses her grip and clings to the rope; The belay partner pulls it taut and prevents her from falling onto the hard ground. Once again it went well.
Amateur mountaineers devalued their performance
Grillo grew up in the canton of St. Gallen; today she works in administration on a vegetable farm in the canton of Basel-Landschaft. This is how she earns money for her great passion, mountaineering. She climbs, skis, goes mountaineering and takes part in mountain runs. She climbs peaks whose approaches lead over glaciers and rocks. Grillo wants to go high and be an alpinist like everyone else. This offends her.
Sarah Longhi (center) is paralyzed on one side. She is accompanied back to her place by a camp manager.
The material: climbing finches, climbing helmet, carabiners – and Laila Grillo’s blind cane.
Until recently, Swiss competitive sports lacked climbing opportunities for people with physical disabilities. In 2022, the SAC founded the paraclimbing team together with Plusport – inclusion should also take place on the climbing wall. Last year the Climbing World Championships took place in Bern; For the first time, people with disabilities climbed there. Fallegger came sixth in her category, Grillo did not qualify for the World Cup.
Grillo wants to make disabled sports more visible. But for her, true inclusion means going into the mountains with non-disabled people. And she has often encountered hurdles in the past. She says that some of the organizers of high-altitude tours didn’t want to take her with them: “They said I was too slow, it was too dangerous for me.”
But Grillo is busy and she doesn’t give up that easily. She organized her own tour and climbed the Allalinhorn in Valais last fall. In the mountains, Grillo has to rely on sighted people, so she was accompanied by mountain guide Ralf Weber and a friend. Using crampons, ropes and hiking poles, they conquered snowfields, ridge passages and rock faces. Together they made it to the summit, 4027 meters high.
Swiss television documented Grillo’s ascent of the Allalinhorn. Weber, who guided Grillo at the time, says that after the documentary was broadcast, many mountain guides highlighted his work. He finds this strange: “I benefit from it too. Through tours like the one with Laila, I learn to read the terrain in a new way,” he says. Weber has been accompanying people with mental or physical disabilities into the mountains for decades. For him, the person, the experience and the joy are more important than the speed or difficulty of a tour.
The reactions of some amateur mountaineers were frightening, says Weber: “Many asked: ‘Why do blind people have to do this?’” This ignorance hurts him – he doesn’t understand it. Weber says: “Perhaps these people think that their performance on the mountain suddenly has less value.” He speaks of ableism – the discrimination in which people with disabilities are denied their mental or physical abilities.
She would rather lose her legs than her life
Grillo has now rappelled down the rock with staggering steps. Now it’s Angela Fallegger’s turn. But first she has to pull herself up to the climbing wall. Without a wheelchair, the flat passages are the most difficult for her. She sits on the rock, pushing herself forward with her arms. The first few meters of the climbing wall start flat, and Fallegger supports herself on her knees and hands. Grillo calls: “Allez Angi.”
On April 10, 2015, Fallegger crashed her paraglider in her home canton of Obwalden. It thundered 20 meters into the depths at 80 kilometers per hour. The impact was horrific. She was in terrible pain; his left foot was severed and his back was broken. Fallegger, a trained nurse, knew immediately that if she survived this, she would never be able to walk again. She was 25 years old at the time.
In the rock face, Fallegger is a purple dot, everything is color coordinated; the leggings, the knee pads, the top, the hair. Butterfly stickers and the words “Be Positive” adorn her climbing helmet. It is this fighting spirit, this positive attitude that helpsFallegger: she makes the best of her situation. Thanks to advanced training, Fallegger can control the thigh muscles from the hips.
For Angela Fallegger, climbing was a form of therapy after the accident, but today it is her passion.
Today, April 10, is like a second birthday for her, one that she celebrates with mixed emotions. Nine years ago a new life began for her. Some things have remained the same, her partner decided to stay with her and she kept her job as a nurse. But in everyday life she realizes that she is no longer “normal”. Sometimes she is looked at askance, sometimes with pity. Things that are supposed to be self-evident become a daily challenge. For example, going to the toilet: Fallegger still can’t feel her bladder today, but when she feels her lower abdomen, she knows whether her bladder is full.
Fallegger could have quarreled with her fate, but she is grateful that she is alive. She knows how those around her suffer when someone is suddenly no longer there; her mother died of cancer. She says: “I would rather lose my legs than lose my life.”
Fallegger climbs with her arms, her legs bent, her knees pointing outward, so she achieves a little more stability. She never knows whether she is standing stable on the rock because she cannot feel her feet. It could fall at any time. She compensates for the lack of strength in her legs with her strong upper body.
Camp participant Sarah Longhi, also in a wheelchair, explains to the blind Grillo howFallegger climbs. To do this, she takes Grillo’s hands and legs and puts them in the same position as with Fallegger. Grillo says: “This is incredible. It’s like Angi does pull-ups all the time!” She feels the same way, says Longhi: “For a long time it was inconceivable to me that a blind person could climb. We admire each other.”
The women understand each other’s situation, wait patiently, and ask curiously how the other is doing with her disability. In the paraclimbing team they experience helpfulness and openness – they sometimes miss these things in everyday life.
Then Laila Grillo dares to take the lead, she is the first to climb the route and has to lead the rope through the hooks on the wall. She hasn’t lead climbed in years. If it falls, it will be several meters.
A camp manager announces the hooks, Grillo feels them with his hands and hooks the rope. She climbs elegantly and thoughtfully; the body is close to the rock, the tips of the toes are stretched like a ballerina dancer. Grillo arrives at the top unscathed. She cheers.