Rich Simpson’s Obsession With Action Directe (5.14d)

The North Face catches up with their athlete Alex Honnold to find out a bit more about his and Tommy Caldwell’s big day in Yosemite as well as Honnold’s plans to rope solo the same feat for his segment in the Reel Rock Tour:

You do one route and you have a lot of time left in the day and you think, “Oh maybe we should have done two.” And eventually you do two with time left over and you say, “maybe we could do three…” and we did three and we didn’t have any time left over so we said, “we’re over it.”

More detail and pictures from Kelly Cordes on the big day here as well.

According to his 8a scorecard, Jon Cardwell has repeated Bad Girls Club, a 5.14d in Rifle, CO first done last summer by Matty Hong.

Ethan Pringle is back at Mt. Clark, home to that one route first done by that one guy:

Projecting a route like this requires all of your attention, and having to devote all of your attention to a route like this can get really tiring really fast. At some point, you just want to get it over with. Of course, afterward you feel a mix of relief and loss. Relief that you’re done and the epic is over, and loss that this magnificent line doesn’t require your presence anymore. But for me, I think I’ll have to take a nice long break from serious route projects for a little while after this. Like Randy Levitt said, “It’s like a limestone El Cap.” Obviously, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it does sort of convey the amount of work required to complete a project of this caliber.

Pringle is no stranger to Jumbo Love, having tried it even before its FA back in 2008. You can see some footage of those attempts here.