Ben Spannuth, who recently started a blog at LT11, grabbed a rare repeat Golden Direct at the Cathedral in Southern Utah according to his 8a scorecard.  Golden Direct was first done in 2008 by Joe Kinder at a suggested grade of 5.14d and was subsequently repeated by the likes of Chris Sharma and Jonathan Siegrist.  Having climbed five other routes in the 5.14c/d range in the past 6 months, Spannuth felt Golden Direct warranted a grade of 5.14c.

16-year-old French phenom Enzo Oddo has climbed yet another 5.15 with his repeat of La Rambla original in Siurana, Spain.  The route was first climbed before Oddo was even born by Alex Huber to a stopping point 3/4 up the wall, and it was subsequently extended by Ramón Julián Puigblanque.  The accepted grade for this route these days seems to be 5.15a, but Rock and Ice has a good recap of this history of the route including Huber’s thoughts on how the grade of this route and many others has been inflated over the years:

“It’s a fact that La Rambla increased in grade from 8c+ (5.14c) to 9a+ (5.15a). Often people believe this is due to the route extension, but in reality the difficulties do not change substantially with this extension.”

Jorg Verhoeven reports on his blog that he had a pretty successful trip to the Red River Gorge with repeats of Pure Imagination (5.14d), Fifty Words For Pump (5.14c) and Southern Smoke (5.14c) among the routes on his ticklist.  Check out a video of the Pure Imagination send here.