I realize lately that I have been spending too much time blogging about myself and not enough time talking about all the action going down elsewhere so here goes nothing:
- During his recent work on Trice, Jamie Emerson made a slight deviation from the line of Trice and nabbed the 3rd ascent after Karn and Moon of AKR (V11). Nice work Jamie. Only a couple of weeks left before Jamie hits the road.
Jamie sending AKR
Photo: Chuffer
- Since we last heard from Dave Graham, he has made his way back out west to finish off a few more lines at Rifle. He repeated Stockboy’s Revenge (5.14c), did Benign Intervention (5.14b) second go and flashed Slice of Life (5.13d) .
- Somewhat unheralded strongman Kevin Jorgeson, who made very short work of Ode to the Modern Man (V14) earlier this summer, recently established another heady highball boulder problem in Bishop, CA. While the V8/9 crux of the newly established Footprints is down low, the problem climbs more than 40 feet up the tenuous North Face of the Grandpa Peabody boulder at the Buttermilks. Jorgeson considered it be his first “solo” which is saying something if you have seen his other highballs like The Beautiful and Damned (V13) that made Chris Sharma retreat in fear in King Lines.
Kevin Jorgeson high up on Footprints (V9)
Photo: Giovanni Traversi – Climbing.com
- Si Moore has made a very late season send of the RMNP V13 benchmark Nuthin’ But Sunshine.
- Daniel Woods and Jon Cardwell have setup shop in Europe. After some struggles with conditions they were able to get out and make the 2nd and 3rd ascents respectively of Incubator (V13) at Zillertal. Daniel also flashed Total Brutal (5.14a) at the same crag. Next up they are off to Swizzy. It should be interesting to see how they do on the problems there.
- Last week I reported that Mike Doyle repeated Fifty Words for Pump (5.14c) at the Red River Gorge. Here you can read his thoughts on the climb as well as confirmation that he apparently did adjust the bolts to make the clipping a little less cruxy. His girlfriend Audrey Sniezek has been having a good few weeks as well. She onsighted Cell Block Six (5.12c), and she was recently added as a new USA editor on 8a.nu.
- Check out this pretty cool analysis of the ascents in the 8a.nu database. Without having access to the actual database, any analysis is kind of hard to do on observation alone but it is still an interesting read. I for one would like to see “Mr 8a” find some way to allow others to tap into the really incredible wealth of information that is currently being stored in the 8a database.
- 8a.nu has also added the V and YDS scales to their scorecard system. Somewhat pointless if you ask me.
- On the mountaineering front, Tomaz Humar recently soloed the 3000-meter south face of Annapurna (8091m) in a 4 day push. First climbed in 1970 in a traditional weeks long assualt on the mountain, the south face of Annaurna is one of the great challenges in high altitude mountaineering. It famously claimed the life of Anatoli Boukreev during an attempt in the winter of 1997.
