According to his 8a scorecard Australia’s Ben Cossey has repeated Dai Koyamada’s The Wheel Of Life in the Hollow Mountain Cave in the Grampians, Australia. Cossey registered the ascent as V14¹, and in response to posts on the Australian forum Chockstone he had this to say about the grade:

V16 represents the highest difficulty yet climbed by humans, even then these few problems are not confirmed. V15 takes the very best climbers a massive amount of effort to climb and yet there are not much more than a handful of confirmed ones in the world. The Wheel doesn’t really have any one move that you couldn’t find on, say, a V7. The hardest moves on it are in my opinion on Sleepy Hollow and yes, you have to bone down for sure because you’ve just climbed from the bottom but they aren’t crazy hard and certainly not in terms of V16 or even V15 hard.

He then goes on into more detail about the history of the problem, gives his opinion on kneebars and talks about the difficulty of the individual boulder problems that comprise Wheel Of Life.

About two years after he climbed the epic Hollow Mountain Cave link-up Sleepy Rave, James Kassay managed to send the epic Hollow Mountain Cave link-up Wheel Of Life which adds a V9 on the front end of the aforementioned Sleepy Rave.  It could be argued that Wheel Of Life is more of a route than a boulder problem (just check out the 12 minute video Ethan Pringle climbing the line), but Kassay registered his ascent as V16 on his 8a scorecard and commented that he’s now trying a “direct” version of the problem.

Update:  Kassay updated his blog with some interesting thoughts on the ascent including why it may have taken him longer than some would have thought to put together the full Wheel Of Life:

Call me stubborn, crazy or out right stupid if you must but climbing the full length of the cave wasn’t just a matter of getting from one end to the other the easiest possible way. Ethan was confused as to why I didn’t want to use the “easier beta” of putting on knee pads and milking the knee bar rests that are otherwise impossible to use…
Ultimately I set myself a personal goal and that was the way I was going to do it.

Nalle Hukkataival checks in from Australia with news of a handful of new problems done in the V11-V13 range by himself and Dave Graham.  So, are they almost out of things to do?  In a word, no:

It’s crazy how many projects and areas there are and even though we’ve been climbing pretty much every single day, there still isn’t nearly enough time for all that we’re psyched on. We may have to extend our tickets…