Bishop action

Bishop was one of the last big bouldering areas I had not previously visited, so It was cool to be able to climb lots of problems each day. That's something I rarely get to do these days. Repeating the area classics was great, but did not leave much time for projects.

FA of The Swarm Direct (V13)

I did however get the first ascent of the direct finish to The Swarm after rappelling down and cleaning it. The first two moves are the same as the original line, but after the crux instead of doing the double gaston move you cross over to a good gaston with the left hand, get your right foot up on the rail. and lock off to a good crimp. After that you have a few crimpy but not so hard moves leading to a mantle on to the slab. This way you stay on the wall the whole time instead of traversing out right to the arete. For the grade I suggested 8B as for the original version. It's hard to grade this one because every time I did the crux move it felt easier and easier. A few days ago we went to film The Swarm with Chuck Fryberger and I did the whole problem again first try without warming up, so who knows.

This Side of Paradise

Trying Evilution ground up with no chalk or tick marks on the holds was a quite mission. First I tried the direct finish, but after climbing three times to the very top and taking big falls when I couldn't find the holds, I decided to do the original version. It's slightly harder, but you can actually locate most of the holds from the ground. It's definitely one of the coolest highballs I've climbed. Another amazing highball that I did was This side of paradise!!! This one I checked out with a rope first. Still, I was scared topping it out after a hold crumbled under my foot in the no-fall zone.

Maze of Death (V12)

 Xavier's roof (V11), Golden Shower (V10), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (V11), Southwest Arete, Maze of Death (V12) all deserve a mention too as they were amazing along with many more problems.

3 weeks in Bishop

It was a very good trip for me, but I'm a little disappointed I didn't really get to try Lucid Dreaming. I tried it one time for about 15 minutes and split three finger tips and didn't really get another change with all the other problems I wanted to climb. Right now I'm in Las Vegas. I'm flying back to Finland for three days and then I'm off to Sheffield for a competition and a couple days on the grit. Font and/or Switzerland is in the plans after that.

Norway video teaser

I've been editing a short bouldering film for quite a while now. All the footage is from our last trip to Norway and features three of some of the best bouldering areas in Norway: Harbak, Vingsand and Lofoten Islands. It's been hard to find time for editing, but most of the work is already done. It's out when it's out. That's all I can say at this point.

Meanwhile, here's a little clip from the movie. It's the first ascent of a famous project in the Lofoten Islands in Norway, which I later named Rough Gem, 8B. This video was shot June 10th at about 2.30 A.M. when the sun did not set at all.

Norway Update

It's been a while since my last blog post so here's a few photos from my latest trip to Norway. I'm back home now and pretty busy editing footage from the trip. We're putting together a short film again. Hopefully we can finish the edit soon.

We spent most of this trip near Trondheim, in Harbak and Vingsand, and last stop was the Lofoten Islands as soon as it stopped snowing up there. Harbak and Vingsand were definitely worth the trip, but Lofoten didn't quite match my expectations. While the weather turned out to be really good around Trondheim, in Lofoten the weather was more unstable than I could even imagine. We basically had to take advantage of every moment it didn't rain. The weather seemed to be more calm at night, so we started climbing at night, not that it really mattered when you climb since the sun did not set at all.

We spent most of the time filming so there aren't that many photos, but here are some from all of the areas we visited.

First ascent of Outlook            
      

I heard about this boulder from a friend of mine who discovered it last year. It's very high quality sandstone with a small lighthouse on top of boulder. We put up a few really good problems here.

 First Ascent of Outlook           
        

I felt like I got in a really good shape this trip. I managed to flash two 8A+ boulders: Fokus in Harbak and Talib in Vingsand. Flashing Talib was very effortless, but I was convinced by my friends that it is indeed 8A+. On top of that I got the first ascents of two well known projects in Norway: The Diamond 8B in Vingsand and Rough Gem 8B in Lofoten, both of which are very proud and beautiful lines. Another first ascent worth mentioning is Straight Outta Hellvika 8A+ which climbs the biggest and most obvious line out of the Hellvika cave. I also got really close to sending a hard roof project in Vingsand that I called the Greg Valentino project, because of the very bicep-intensive crux move.

Video frame, FA of Rough Gem 8B in Lofoten at 3 A.M.          

Harbak view            

Video frame of me flashing Fokus 8A+ in Harbak           

The highlight of the trip was without a doubt grabbing the first ascent of the Diamanten project in Vingsand. I had seen photos of this amazing diamond shaped boulder already two years ago. Just seeing the photos got me syked to go there and hearing that both Fred Nicole and Bernd Zangerl have tried it was sort of a conformation that it has to be pretty good. People who had worked on it speculated that it must be 8B+. Later an important hold broke off making it even harder.

First Ascent of The Diamond            

I managed to do the first ascent in one day and that's why I didn't think it was quite hard enough to be 8B+, so I gave it 8B. We'll see what other people think of the grade. Regardless of the grade The Diamond is an amazing problem. It must be one of the best boulders I've climbed in Europe. The photo above unfortunately doesn't do justice for the problem. I'll try to get better photo from someone and we also have video footage of the send.

      First Ascent of Where's the Paradise?           

Eventually we got tired of the Lofoten weather and left a couple days early. I might be going back again soon possibly to try to finish the Greg Valentino project and try to find a new area. On the drive back home we made a couple quick stops and I ticked Lada Miestä Kuljettaa Assis 8A+ and Paddington which I think deserves a downgrade to 8A after I climbed it 3 times in a row.

Slartibartfast in Lofoten            

Sømp 8A in Harbak            

Midnight Sun 7C+ in Lofoten            

Here's my ticklist from this trip:

The Diamond 8B   First Ascent
Rough Gem 8B     First Ascent
Trouble 8A+
Fokus 8A+     FLASH
Talib 8A+       FLASH
Origins 8A+
Straight Outta Hellvika 8A+        First Ascent
Lada Miestä Kuljettaa Assis 8A+

Cool Hand Luke 8A
Sømp 8A
Lynx 8A
Torstein problem 8A
Full Battery 8A         First Ascent
Paddington 8A
Hurtigruttan 7C+

Strong Youth 7C+

Neptune 7C+
Akkurat Der 7C+

Midnight Sun 7C+
Tare Baby 7C+
Nesten der 7C+

Midnight Madness ?      First Ascent

Puumala

My last weeks boulder hunt went well. The weather could not have been better and I spent every day running around the woods looking for new boulders and making first ascents.

Puumala area     

  

I found a lot of boulders, big ones, but not that many lines for some reason. The rock quality wasn't the best in some places. I put a few nice problems, but overall this area wasn't quite as good as I thought it might be. Oh well, that's the way it goes sometimes.

Puumala       

Here's a little clip I filmed while I was there. I didn't have much time to put into editing it, but the footage isn't that great anyway so whatever. It shows two new problems I put up: Milestone and Laiskuus Palkitaan.





On Monday I'm leaving to Norway. I haven't spent much time there climbing, but I've seen enough to know that the potential for new bouldering is huge there. The last few days it's been really hot in Finland, so hopefully we'll find better conditions in northern Norway. If not, you can always do night sessions. Soon you wont even need headlamps because the sun doesn't set that far up north in the summer!

New boulders

Not many people would drive 8 hours back and forth on a Friday to go run around the woods for nine hours while it's raining.

That's how I spent my Friday. After hours on the computer scrolling trough maps and aerial images, I was headed towards a remote area about 4 hours drive North east of Helsinki. Maps are an essential tool for finding boulders in Finland, because there are thick forest everywhere so the visibility is often really bad and the boulders are usually scattered around. You never really get a good view from the road, so you really need to go look at each boulder individually. So, after several exhausting hours of non-stop boulder hunting, I did find some really cool projects and not just individual boulders, but potentially actual areas.

 Some of the small roads were in bad shape               

The weather forecast for the this week looks a bit dubious, but whatever. I'm psyched to go out there and make some first ascents and brush some cool projects. If it's going to rain the whole time, at least I'll have a change to go look for some new boulders around.

I'm driving out there in the morning and I was just packing some of my stuff and once again realized how much gear I actually bring on a bouldering trip. Often people say that bouldering is nice because you don't need a lot of gear. I would say quite the opposite. When I was sport climbing in Spain, I often realized how nice it was that you didn't have to carry a lot of gear.

I'll be out for a few days if the weather allows and hopefully come back with some photos and video.

Bouldering grades: Everything is average nowadays

I decided to write down some of my thoughts on bouldering grades, since a lot has been happening during the last years in the bouldering world. This sort of conversation still seems to be some sort of a taboo in the climbing community, so I am prepared to receive a lot of negative reactions, but I feel like this is a really important topic to discuss.

I'm going to start from the beginning of this whole mess. In the year 2000, 8C (V15) grade first got introduced to bouldering, when Fred Nicole did the first ascent of Dreamtime and proposed a never before seen grade of 8C for it. Soon it became known as the standard for 8C in the climbing media. That was 10 years ago. Still to this date, most of the cutting-edge boulders being put up are 8C. To most, this means that a decade passed and we have not progressed at all.

Sometimes things are not how seem. There has been huge progression difficulty-wise in bouldering. What happened is deflation in the grading scale. Dreamtime being set as the 8C standard (by the media), other hard problems are being put up and since Dreamtime is the 8C standard (and the only problem of that grade in the world) they get graded based on Dreamtime. New Base Line gets it's first ascent and marks the upper end of 8C. Time goes by, more hard problems get put up and  graded based on these standards. And then, BOOOM! After Dreamtime gets enough repeats, turns out it is actually not 8C, but only 8B+. Same thing with New Base Line, which marked the upper end of 8C, it turns out to be 8B+ also. This is were it all started to go wrong.

 Dreamtime, the problem that started it all.

In 2005 Dave Graham makes the first ascent of The Story Of Two Worlds and decides to call it the new standard for 8C, even though he could have proposed 8C+ as it was harder for him than anything else at the time. Instead, Dave chose to use it as the 8C standard and make some sense to the chaotic grading scale. Today, there is a lot of variety in the upper-scale grades, simply based on these double standards, because some problems are still graded based on the old standard, while other problems are more reliant on Dave's standard.

Story of Two Worlds, in Cresciano, Switzerland

I have repeated at least five boulder problems that were originally graded 8C or even 8C+, and have now been downgraded by a grade or two. And the list goes on. Actually, most of the proposed 8C's or 8C+'s have been downgraded and many of the ones that have not, are still unconfirmed. The issue here is that a few people (like me and Dave Graham for instance) are still trying to define the 8C grade (which I personally think is still the cutting edge) while rest of the climbers do not necessarily realize the the grade deflation, that has been going on for some years now.

Here are a few examples:

- Dreamtime downgraded from 8C to 8B+
- New Base Line 8C (hard), downgraded to 8B+
- The Never-ending Story in Magic Wood was originally called 8C+, now downgraded to 8B+
- El Techo de los Tres B's, downgraded from 8C to 8B
- Banshousha, supposedly the hardest slab in the world - downgraded from 8C to 8B
- Memento, downgraded from 8C+ to 8B+ (and according to many still deserves a downgrade)
- Amandla, downgraded from 8C+ to 8B+
- Terremer in Hueco Tanks, downgraded from 8C+ to (soft?) 8C
- Ode to the modern man, downgraded from 8C to soft 8B+
- Kheops assis, downgraded from 8C to 8B+

and the list goes on...

I see this trend repeating itself year after year and there seems to be no end to it. Why do so many problems keep getting downgraded? Why are so many problems overgraded in the first place? The media is adding pressure for professional climbers to strive for new grades, since bouldering grades have been stalling or even on the decline for years. An 8C first ascent is not necessarily that newsworthy anymore, after all that grade was climbed already 10 years ago.

Last June I did the first ascent of Livin' Large in South Africa. It is by far the hardest boulder I've climbed so far, a lot harder than any 8C that I have climbed in the past. Does that mean that it is 8C+? Maybe, just maybe. Does that mean that I should grade it 8C+? I don't think so. Why do we always have to shoot high first and then wait for the downgrade. Why is it never the other way around? I graded it 8C because I feel certain that it is at least 8C. If other people feel like it's harder, they can upgrade it. Why do people always choose the egotistical approach to these things instead of "playing it safe"? Furthermore, I think Livin' Large equals in difficulty with The Story of Two Worlds, the stiff standard set by Dave Graham back in 2005, defining the standard further.

The previous standards failed us and sent the highest grades to a down-ward spiral. This time we tried to set standards that are very likely to hold their grade. A solid foundation for the grade is what we need to correct the situation and that also means lots of downgrades. This is where it gets hard, because often people can take it personal, when their biggest pride gets downrated. The few people who actually put themselves on the line and try to make a change for better, get a bad name for criticising other people's ascents or more precisely the grades. Grading climbs based on the new-school standard can mean getting "left behind" so to speak. In the world of professional climbing, that can be a big risk to take.

It is too easy to keep quiet and go with the flow, but where will this lead us in a few years?  Already, the grading scale is so chaotic in the upper end, that sometimes I'm not sure if it's even salvageable anymore, especially if we start basing an entirely new grade on the "standard" set right now.

Like I said before, there are not many people out there trying to fix the current situation, before jumping to a new grade. If others do not approve on this standard that we are trying to set and grade things based on a slightly different scale, that's totally fine with me, but in that case our problems need to be potentially re-graded. Who sets the grading scale, is the question here. I totally agree, that we need to move up on the scale soon, but I'm not sure if the necessary (big) step has been reached yet and further do we want to base a new grade on such a chaotic "foundation".

The fact is, that there is still no clear standard for 8C. We can all be throwingout big grades and flashy numbers and get on magazine covers, get better sponsorship and then a few months later watch our problem getting downgraded. The irony here is that a downgrade rarely makes the news and one would not necessarily get discredited for what he claims to have done.

I see lists of the hardest boulders in the world and in reality there is a three grades alternation between different problems, all categorized under the same grade. This almost makes me want to start a new grading scale. Another important thing is, that grades should be openly discussed, not kept quiet. Although, most grade related conversations on internet forums are usually quite pointless, I think there are people who are in certain situations qualified to state their opinion about a grade, without necessarily completing a climb.

In conclusion, grades are only estimates, personal opinions of the difficulty of a climb. People make mistakes, that is how it will always be. But how does it happen that 99 percent of the time, the mistake happens to be giving a HIGHER grade, very very rarely lower. Especially with upper-scale boulder problems, comes a fair amount of responsibility with the grading, because when the problem becomes a standard of some sort, a test-piece, it can and will affect the grading of many other climbs.

Grades are only a very small and quite unimportant part of climbing, but why do we even bother with the grades, if they really mean nothing?

 

  sreen grabs: www.8a.nu

Japan Trip Report

Once again I had to learn that climbing on plastic is not rock climbing when I didn't make to the semifinals in the World Cup in Kazo, Japan. After the World Cup we checked out a bouldering area called Horai, where Dai's new 8C called Epitaf is located. We drove more than five hours from Tokyo and paid over 10 000 yen (~ 90e) highway tolls just to discover that Epitaf is pretty much the only boulder in Horai. Soon we were told that the key hold on the problem broke - twice. The rock is quite loose and some of the still existing holds seem like they will break with some time. Since we made such and effort to get there I tried it a little bit and found myself falling off a big incut edge that had absolutely zero friction on it. I did quite a few of the moves but after falling a few times more from the big buttery crimp I called it quits. Needless to say I was not impressed with the "area".

Epitaf, Horai

Mitake was a really small area two hours north of Tokyo. There are some nice problems like Kani V11, Mushi V11, In Tokyo! V10. After all it's a pretty cool place with nice surroundings, but only a handful of boulders.

We climbed in Shiobara for a few days. There is the famous roof with many of Dai's hard roof climbs. I was really suspicious about this place because I had heard that all of the problems are chipped. After seeing it myself I can say that it is really hard to spot the chipped holds. I thought the roof was nice with a few cool hard problems - chipped or not.

Sabby in Shiobara

Ogawayama is an area with quite a lot of problems and good rock. It's only two hours from Tokyo by car and close to another bouldering area called Mizugaki. Definitely worth a visit if you go to Japan. Ogawayama also holds the famous slab Banshousha, which is 5. dan in the Japanese grading system that is the highest standard at the moment and earns you a "black belt" in climbing . It was given the grade of 8C by the first ascentionist Tokio Muroi, which would easily make it the hardest slab in the world. It was unrepeated for a long time until last Wednesday when I managed to make the first repeat. I was a little surprised it only took me one day of work, but a huge amount of tries to be honest. Was it hard? Yes. 8C? No. I never thought that a slab could be 8C knowing the standard in Font. However, Banshousha isn't a pure slab. Sure it's less than vertical hence a slab, but the whole time you are climbing a really slopey arete. Having something to actually grab onto makes a huge difference in the grading versus it being just a blank face. I felt like it is a really technical 8B and hard for sure, but not an 8C.



Mizugaki is my favorite area in Japan. It's 2.5 hours southwest from Tokyo and close (~ 40mins) to Ogawayama. Unfortunately we went to Mizugaki last and climbed only one day there. It seems that it's by far the biggest boulder area in Japan and there is a lot of potential for new problems. Rock quality varies from decent to very good. You won't find many crimpers, just pockets and slopers. Oh yeah, there are no chipped holds in Mizugaki (I think...).

Overall it was a really good trip. I must say I was pretty disappointed with some of the places. I would not recommend Japan if you just want to go on a climbing trip, there are much better places. If you are also interested in the culture and seeing the country, it's well worth the trip. Just use your consideration when choosing the climbing areas.

PURE

The official trailer for the upcoming bouldering movie Pure is out now! Check it out!

About the film...
From the producer of Dosage V - Alpine Blocs comes a 35mm bouldering flick about bouldering on planet Earth: PURE. Pure is about 19 extraordinary climbers in six countries on three continents , with no ropes. This is the first bouldering film to be shot entirely in cutting edge 35mm digital format.

PURE website

European Premiere Saturday 7.3 at Boulderkeskus, Helsinki

Make sure not to miss it!

Rain and First Ascents

The weather in Finland has been very rainy lately, but I’ve managed to put up a couple of new problems. One of them, located near Vihti, I named Optical Illusion, because it looks really easy, but in fact the difficulty is around 8A. Another FA I did, has been a project for a long time. My new problem is the full line climbing an 8A+ called Hottentotti (8A from the stand start), but instead of dropping off, you climb all the way up. I named it 1up, because it is THE line from the obvious sit start straight up to the top. 1up is 8-9 meters tall with the landing dropping away, so it adds quite a lot to the scary factor, but I'm not sure if it actually adds a full grade to the 8A+ difficulty.

First Ascent of Optical Illusion, 8A

We had night filming session, with a film crew plus two photographers, so there should be some cool footage of the ascent. The short film we made, might premiere at the Reel Rock Tour in Helsinki 13.9. We’ll see. Right now, I’m on my way to Arco Rock Masters in Italy and after that to hopefully not too hot Switzerland.

Let there be light

1 A.M. Bouldering session

Photos by Heikki Toivanen