Our Story

With many inclusive climbing festivals happening elsewhere in the world, it's been a long time coming for something for us in the Alps! All of us organisers have diversity and inclusion for women & LGBTQ+ close at heart, and this shared passion brought us together in different ways.

The Orga Team of Alpinehearts 2024 formed through various friends, coming from all over Europe, just chatting, at the crag, over coffees, online. We dreamed of more oppoortunity to empower ourselves, become stronger, to meet more strong women, and to be inspired. We started to dream of helping other people who share the same feelings too. The more we talked about it, the more we wanted to make it a reality, and so the idea of organising a festival was born. 

Meanwhile, Anna-Lea Wyss, who grew up on Swiss granite, had the idea to create a women's climbing meetup in Goescheneralp called Female Flow in Autumn 2023. Goescheneralp is happily centred right bang in the middle between Italy, Switzerland, France, Slovenia, Austria and Germany; at the heart of the Alps. From chatting with Anna-Lea came the inspiration for us to try this for our location, to try to develop a yearly large community-building event in Goescheneralp. The idea which had started to gain traction now had a landing point and the group decided to make it happen -  and decided to name ourselves Alpinehearts :) Cheesy... but true ;) We are just a bunch of hearts that love being in the alpine! 

Since the team has become such a collection of different people, with different genders, sexualities, cultural backgrounds, countries and climbing experience, we knew that Alpinehearts had to try be a safe space for as many people as possible, which has been our main thought behind all our organisation. We believe representation matters and that climbing can be a welcoming and fun activity for everyone. 

We represent climbing communities coming together from allover the Alps, from the German alpine club DAV, Innsbruck's Outdoorchicks and the Swiss alpine club, as well as support from other grassroots organisations for FLINTA / LGBTQ+ climbing groups. 

Alpinehearts is homemade in the Alps :) We can't wait to share our joy for rocks, nature and for climbing community with you!