Jesse Grupper Sends ‘Full Metal Brisket’ (5.15a)

Jesse Grupper continues his sending spree 

I’ve said this before, so forgive me, but I love that moment each autumn when the world’s fittest climbers emerge blinking and dazed from the long competitive season and scuttle out onto the cliffs and boulders to let off some steam. Jesse Grupper, who flashed Pure Imagination (5.14c) and onsighted Thanatopsis (5.14a/b) last week, and who recently qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics, is back in the news for making the third ascent of Full Metal Brisket (5.15a) at the New River Gorge—which was FA’d by Jonathan Siegrist in 2020 and got its first repeat from Tyler Thompson this past February.

But what’s fun (to me) about Grupper’s ascent is not just that he did one of the hardest routes in the east; it’s that Full Metal Brisket put up a fight. While the route felt challenging from the start (particularly the savage upper-crux), Grupper got quite close on his fourth day of effort, falling at the top four times in a row. “That night,” he wrote on Instagram, “I felt frustrated. I felt the weight of months of high performance comp climbing weighing on me. I had convinced myself that I was here to perform and send. … I was supposed to be outdoors doing the thing I loved. But that love felt fake. I wanted to leave.”

And so… he did.

He went to the Red River Gorge and just went climbing. In the process he did some things he felt quite “proud of,” including the flash and onsight mentioned above. Refreshed and recharged, he returned to the New and “surrendered to whatever the day held for me.” If he sent, great. If he didn’t, he could always come back.

Check out his artful Instagram post below for the full story.

—Steven Potter

Mari Augusta Salvesen Sends Black Mamba (5.14b) Roof Crack

In an article that published to climbing.com yesterday, about Mary Eden’s recent repeat of Black Mamba, the journalist Izzy called the 150-foot pitch perhaps “one of America’s longest, hardest, and most intimidating roof cracks.” I’ve never been to Utah’s White Rim, but I have consumed most of the Wide Boyz’ Utah-roof-crack canon—and it’s hard to disagree with Izzy’s appraisal.

Now, Norwegian Mari Augusta Salvesen has added Black Mamba to her long list of hard-trad ticks. The crack begins with 100 feet of roof-crack bouldering, then transitions to 45 feet of roped and gear-protected climbing, before a final 5.13b offwidth section. Writing on Instagram, Salvesen said, “With most of the difficulties at boulder height, and a bit of offwidth shuffling on a rope in the end, Black Mamba is the essence of Type 1 fun in my opinion. Logistically simple hard crack climbing.”

Simple? Perhaps. Aesthetic? Absolutely. But Type 1? Now that’s up for debate.

—Anthony Walsh

Sean Bailey is on a post-comp comeback 

One of the things that’s made me happy recently—albeit in the distant and rather voyeuristic way that things on social media make us happy—has been seeing Sean Bailey apply some of his hard-won comp strength to the rocks. In part, this is because I love watching Bailey climb: he’s got that graceful combination of technique and power that just makes things look so fricking easy. But it’s also because I can’t help but see his successes against the darker backdrop of his recent failure to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team for the second cycle in a row. (If you haven’t seen Sean Bailey’s recent Instagram post about this, you can find it below; it’s a raw and honest look at the pressures that the Olympics have added to an already high-pressure competitive climbing scene. It made me want to weep.) After reading Sean’s note, I was delighted to see him getting outside. I loved watching him flash Slasher, which at V13 is one of the more classic power blocs in Joes Valley.

And I was delighted to see him make quick (or quick-looking) work of Black Lung, another Joe’s Valley V13, this one FA’d by Ben Moon 23 years ago.

And I was even more psyched to see him put down the first ascent of one of Little Cottonwood Canyon’s long-standing projects, which he called Doors of Perception and graded V15. (The problem had been tried quite a bit by folks like Carlo Traversi and Zach Galla—quick video of Galla sticking the crux move here.)

And, as a nice follow on, it was really nice to see him absolutely style Jimmy Webb’s Transience (V14), which has awaited a second ascent for the last three years, only to see two in just a few days. (Nathaniel Coleman sent shortly afterward.)

His post-Pan American Games statement:

—SP

Tristan Chen does Desperanza (V15)

When I first spoke with Tristan Chen last March, he’d just successfully re-climbed Fred Nicole’s Hueco Tanks classic Esperanza, one of the first confirmed V14s in the United States. Why re-climbed? Because during his months-long battle with Leukemia (which involved multiple rounds of chemo, a stem-cell/bone marrow transplant, and a serious emotional reconsideration of his life), he’d coped with the process by “setting a concrete goal,” which, for him, was to repeat Esperanza. When he topped out, in March 2023, it was almost anti-climactic, in part because he’d sent already (and already climbed far harder), and in part because the climb went down with little difficulty. So he immediately set his sights on the low-start, Desperanza.

The line adds the V7 or V8 start of Shaken not Stirred (V12) into Esperanza. And Chen, who’s known for his willingness to downgrade things, admits that he at first thought the sit couldn’t possibly add a full grade to the stand (particularly when he sorta-kinda considers the stand a little soft). “But the bottom moves are quite extended and take away energy in such a way that the rest of the boulder becomes harder,” he told 8a.nu. “By the time I did Desp I was able to do Esp pretty much on lock as a warm up and cool down. To me it felt a bit harder than Dreamtime or Pegasus, and a step above the other V14’s I’ve done this year, so lower end V15, but still maintains the grade.”

Speaking to 8a.nu, Chen also noted that Leukemia has left him a bit ungrounded: ”After the events of last year I feel as though any hope to a sense of purpose I possessed was shown to be illusory, as if scoured clean with my marrow. I feel like this climb was one of my last moorings to hard bouldering and I’m left floating in a void ready to deemphasize bouldering for something else yet to be determined. Whether that be a different form of climbing, finding a new career, a new hobby, or simply pushing forward towards a light from within. The future remains uncertain.”

Check out my feature about Chen from earlier this year. He’s got a hell of a story.

—SP

Jonathan Siegrist returns to his stylistic roots

Speaking of Jonathan Siegrist (who FA’d Full Metal Brisket, the line Jesse Grupper just climbed), he’s just added another 5.14d to the Las Vegas area’s growing list of limestone testpieces. His new route, The Creeping Unknown, climbs a gently overhanging 120-foot panel of crimps and edges. It’s something of a stylistic throwback for Siegrist, who favored technical crimp lines early in his career but, after a concerted effort to get better at steep burly climbs, managed to make his anti-style into his favored one, climbing such cave testpieces as Jumbo Love and Stoking the Fire, both 5.15b. Siegrist had first climbed The Creeping Unknown to a midway rest last winter (about 5.14b/c to there), but he “knew the ‘real’ line would go to the top.” Returning from a multi-month trip to Europe, Siegrist began trying the line again several weeks ago and discovered that “the second half turned out to be fucking hard!”

—SP

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