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The fourth edition of the Valle Orco Climbing Festival, held from September 26 to 29, 2024, in Ceresole Reale, was a remarkable success. This event, which began as a small gathering in 2020, has grown into a significant international festival, attracting over 8,000 participants from around the world. Notably, 10% of attendees came from Europe and other global regions, highlighting the festival’s increasing international appeal.

The festival offered a diverse range of activities, including technical and educational workshops, outdoor activities, and inspiring talks. Participants had the chance to explore the granite walls of Valle Orco and newly prepared boulder lines, fostering a community united by a love for nature and climbing. The event also featured musical performances, including concerts and DJ sets, creating a vibrant atmosphere that encouraged the formation of new friendships.

Beside all of these great things, one of the main innovations was the ability to leverage technologyto find new climbing partners, navigate the interactive map with crags, boulders, and points of interest, view partner events and challenges, and stay updated through the dedicated event chat.

And all of this was done thanks to our app, NIVA.

Thanks to the app, two Wild Country challenges were managed: the Crack Box Challenge and the Crack Boulder Competition, which saw the participation of 206 climbers.

Last but not least, YogaForOutdoorPeople by Claudia Capovilla and Lazyghost used the app to provide information about their workshops.

• 1,101 people downloaded the app
• 865 created an account, and today the NIVA community boasts over 6,000 climbers!
• 275 climbers “participated” digitally in the VOCF event, interacting with other climbers and organizers through a dedicated chat.

From the words of the founder: Michele Guarneri

The partnership between NIVA and the Valle Orco Climbing Festival has proved to be an essential and well-established strategic collaboration, bringing with it numerous advantages for both the organisation and the event participants. Thanks to the integration of NIVA’s digital solutions, the festival has been able to take significant steps forward in the process of digitisation, eliminating the need for paper-based competition rankings and thus aligning with the guidelines of our sustainability policy. This digitisation not only reduces the environmental impact of the event, but also makes the management of results more efficient and transparent.

In addition to managing the rankings, NIVA stands out for the valuable logistical support it offers, both to participants and sponsors, facilitating communication between the organisation and users, bringing participants together and contributing to the success of the festival.

The NIVA team has always proved to be helpful and competent, capable of responding promptly to the needs of the festival and implementing features that meet the specific requirements of the event, improving the user experience through the application.

In summary, the collaboration with NIVA is a significant added value for an event that welcomes a large audience, enhancing the experience and innovation through a high quality app managed by professionals entrusted.

We want to sincerely thank the Valle Orco Climbing Festival, Michele Guarneri, and all the partners who helped spread the word about our project.

A special thanks to all the climbers who downloaded the app and are helping to create value for the community.

See you next year!

Photo Credits: ©2024 – VOCF – Roberto Mor – Camilla Pizzini

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One of the major novelties of the 2024 edition of Melloblocco is the use of the NIVA app, which will play a useful and innovative role in supporting organizers and participants.

The first advantage will be that boulderers will be able to use the interactive and geolocalised maps of the Historical Paths directly in the app. This will not only make it easy to find one’s way around the valley by discovering all the boulders but also to delve into their history directly with a click on the map: thanks to information and photos, one will discover the characters and dates that made them memorable.This information is easily accessible from the home of the NIVA app, where users have also the chance to join the event chat to get updates in real-time, or discover more about the festival and the NIVA project.

The second feature with which NIVA will support the Festival is allowing all participants to log the problems climbed and see them in a list easily from their mobile phones. This will allow climbers to know in real-time how many other boulderers have climbed each problem and will make it easier for the organizers to manage this process: thanks to NIVA, the classic manual self-certification methods will be eliminated, and participants will be more involved. As is inherent in the event’s spirit, however, it will not be a matter of defining rankings and winners (in fact, no value will be assigned to the boulders) but only of having a report on the boulderers who put themselves to the test. This also means that each participant’s user account will forever keep track of the problems completed in each edition, thus giving them the opportunity to challenge each other to improve from year to year.

The third but not least opportunity is that NIVA will enable connections between all the people involved in the festival and will do so in several ways. On the one hand, it will be possible to see the boulderers present at the festival and find new fellows to explore the valley and the historic boulders together. On the other hand, it will facilitate communication through a group chat(in addition to the one-to-ones) in which all members will be able to interact and comment in real-time, report needs of all sorts and search for others. Finally, it will also give the organizers the opportunity to communicate more easily and directly with participants, alerting them in real-time through special notifications of the start of a certain activity or providing service information for the optimal running of the Festival.

Within NIVA it will also be possible to view the three historical paths selected for the festival. Each path is composed of 10 boulders, to discover Val di Mello and Val Masino. A true exploration of the bouldering history’s symbolic boulders through the beauty of nature and the art of climbing, that will ring the valleys in a small DOC journey made for climbing but also for ‘contemplation’.

The three paths are developed on 3 levels of difficulty (5-6A, 6B-6C, 7A-7B), each of which responds to the ability of the individual climber: from the path for the less performing, to that for the almost champions, without neglecting that for the very champions (there are 10 prize blocks per category!).

Here they are summarised below:

1. I SASSISTI (5-6A): named after the historic first climbers of the Valley’s boulders, who have been active since the 1970s, and re-proposes their first achievements. How can one not marvel at the beauty of the passages, daring and revolutionary for the time, on boulders such as the Yeti Tendine, the Preda Peintada or the Masso della Luna?

2. THE MELÀT (6B-6C): the ancient inhabitant of Val di Mello who forged the megalithic steps, testimony to how much strength and tenacity he had to reach the most remote and inaccessible pastures. A good dose of strength and endurance will be needed to collect the ten passages of the path, which includes authentic gems such as the Francese or the Sass de la Polenta.

3. IL GIGIÀT (7A-7B): the most difficult path could not fail to be dedicated to the Gigiàt: a monstrous, legendary, and gigantic being, a cross between a goat and an ibex with very long hair, which legend has it inhabiting the woods and the Val Masino’s crags. Few can claim to have spotted it! Completing this path and closing some of the emblematic passages of granite climbing, such as Tarzan, Vermut Stisciut, and the Spigolo della Carrozza di Rame,is equivalent to being a ‘Master of Stone’.