The news from the other day aside, things happening in Patagonia are usually outside my purview.  It’s not that I don’t respect what climbers do there, it’s more that I have a hard time identifying with what it must be like to climb there since I’ve never done anything like it.  Posts like this one from Mikey Schaefer that combine a story about a new route on the south face of Poincenot with some incredible photos sure do help though.

Alex Honnold talks with PlanetMountain about his new highball in Bishop called Too Big To Flail:

This might be the biggest line that I’ve seen at the Buttermilks but it’s hard to say for sure because there is so much rock out there. It’s definitely rare though to find such a high-quality line on such good rock.

A lot of sites, including Alpinist, have picked up on the update Colin Haley posted on his Facebook wall indicating that American Hayden Kennedy and Canadian Jason Kruk pulled off the long-awaited “fair-means” ascent of the Compressor Route on Cerro Torre’s Southeast Ridge in Patagonia. The line was infamously bolted using a gas-powered compressor drill by Cesare Maestri during the line’s first ascent in 1970, and this is the first time someone has successfully climbed the line without the use of this bolt ladder. No word on how they managed to pull this off without a camera crew and a slew of extra bolts to aid said camera crew. Developing…