Ground-Up and Gripped: Bolting a New Line in Madagascar’s Tsaranoro Valley
A few meters above my last bolt, I balanced on a granite foothold, acutely aware of the power drill clipped to my harness. Locked off on a small, lichen-covered crimp, I searched for another hold as the burning in my forearms intensified. I knew that time was ticking down. What would happen when I fell? Would the drill bit spear me in the back of the leg? Or could I push just a few meters higher through the sloping holds and find a positive edge for a hook placement?
I peeled off from my tenuous stance and hurtled back toward the belay. The rope came tight. I was unscathed—and eager to try again.
There’s nowhere in the world quite like the Tsaranoro Valley of Madagascar. It shares characteristics with North American destinations such as Tuolumne Meadows and City of Rocks, but on a much larger scale. Towering granite monoliths explode skyward from the highland savannah, rising more than 700 meters above the grasslands. The valley teems with endemic species of mammals, insects, reptiles, and amphibians, adding a wild, unfamiliar energy to the expeditions and climbing trips that I’ve grown used to. In that strange, new setting, our small team settled into a rhythm of climbing, learning, and exploration.
My team included Will Sharp, Cedar Christensen, and Luan Gaeumann, and we were eager to take in as much of this extraordinary place as we could. Most days, we encountered a conspiracy of lemurs roaming around our camp. They inched closer and closer to our kitchen to snag an errant banana or food scrap. Their playful presence became part of the rhythm of our mornings, a reminder that we were visitors in a place still very much ruled by the wild.
We arrived in Tsaranoro in early September 2025, backed by many years of experience in big wall climbing and new route development. But by no means did we know what we were doing. We came to Madagascar to learn how to bolt big wall routes on lead, but with no guidebook or online tutorial to lean on, we would have to rely on our combined experience in route finding, free climbing, and hooking. So we resolved to figure it out as we went.
The granite in Tsaranoro is relatively unmarred by cracks. Normally, this would make it an impossible place to climb. However, unlike other granite areas, Tsaronoro’s rock has solid and abundant edges, flakes, and crystal knobs. This unique character lends itself perfectly to free climbing.
Given our relatively short timeline and limited experience with this kind of development, we wanted to choose a feature we could realistically establish a route on within about a week. With those parameters in mind—and after repeating several existing routes on nearby walls and poring over the topos we’d found online during our first week, we decided that a wall called Mitsinjoarivo would be the perfect fit.
From the ground rose a lichen-covered headwall that appeared blank and featureless from the ground. When I first saw it, it gave me pause. I’ve done a number of first ascents, and I’m used to seeking out lines of weakness—a corner, a crack, or some feature that promises passage for free climbing. This time was different, as those features hardly exist in Tsaranoro. We deliberately sought out a steep face that would normally be dismissed as unsuitable for a first ascent. But on the flaky and knobby rock of Tsaranoro, it offered the perfect challenge.
On the first day, I walked the base of the wall with the team, scanning it with binoculars, and searched for a hint of where we would begin our quest. There was no obvious line of features to work with, so we decided to start up the path of least resistance.
I was lucky to lead first. I chose a vague line of edges and tic-tacked between them, searching for anywhere I could hang out long enough to pull out the drill and place the first bolt.
After a couple of meters of climbing, I found a reasonable stance between two small edges and clumsily unclipped the drill from the back of my harness. Even though I had only climbed a couple of body lengths of relatively moderate terrain, around 5.11, I was shocked by the aching and cramping in my feet as I maintained the same position for the few minutes that it took to get the hole drilled and cleaned and the bolt installed. The second I hammered the stud into the wall, I clipped myself to it and let out a sigh of relief. Then I detangled the mess of tethers from the hammer, wrenches, and daisy chain. In an effort to not drop any vital tools from my harness, I had nearly become trapped.
Each consecutive bolt placement went progressively more smoothly as I learned the system. About 40 meters higher and two and a half hours later, I was mentally exhausted, and had placed eight bolts, so it was time to relinquish the lead to Luan for another rope length.
He climbed into the second pitch with confidence, climbing far above his last bolt before searching for a small edge to sink a hook behind or a knob to tie off with a sling. Each time he shifted his weight from his feet to the hook, he cautiously turned his head away from the placement with trepidation, waiting for it to pop like a high-consequence jack-in-the-box jump scare. After only two pitches of climbing, Luan and I had spent six hours on the wall. As darkness crept in, we fixed our rope and returned to camp for the night. On the hike back to camp, despite our fatigue, Luan and I excitedly chatted about what we had begun, and what was to come. The novelty of the unknown had us hungry for more.
Since we were two teams of two on this trip and wanted to avoid knocking loose rock onto the other team as we climbed, while Luan and I rested, Will and Cedar ascended the fixed rope the following day to start up the next pitches. Like a giant skateboard ramp, Mitsinjoarivo steepens gradually the higher you go—and the climbing grows progressively harder with it. In the steeper terrain, Will and Cedar left the drill clipped to the last bolt and pushed into new ground as far as they dared—or until they found a decent hook placement. From there, they’d jump off, climb back up with the drill clipped to them, and put in the next bolt “cowboy style.” This method allowed them to explore different paths to find the best line and avoid drilling to a dead end.
Although our goal was to establish the route while free climbing, not to use bolts as a means of progression, I did have to place a single quarter-inch bolt to aid through one sequence that was too difficult to bolt from a stance. It was a tough decision to use a progression bolt, but after I’d finished the pitch, Luan and I spoke about it, and although I initially felt that it was “bad style” and wasn’t proud of it, in hindsight, he and I agreed that the more conservative approach was better in this case.
Once back at camp, as a team, we agreed that despite style being important to us, it was even more important to create a relatively safe route that visiting climbers could enjoy, not one so runout that it would fade into obscurity. In the end, these conversations about style reinforced why I came to Madagascar in the first place: to learn, to grow, to trust the team’s intuition, and to approach discomfort with curiosity.
With that understanding, we turned our focus to freeing the route itself.
After four days of slowly tracing our new line up the wall, we were all teeming with excitement to climb it for ourselves. As a team, the four of us redpointed the route in a single day. Each pitch flowed smoothly, which filled us with gratitude for the time and care we’d poured into the process. Just as the sun dipped below the horizon, I scrambled behind the team up the final meters to the summit, bathed in an otherworldly golden light. The four of us celebrated in a moment of quiet satisfaction.
At the beginning of the trip, Cedar attended a traditional Malagasy ceremony known as Famadihana, or “Turning of the Bones,” a joyous and deeply spiritual celebration in which families exhume the remains of their ancestors, rewrap them in fresh cloth, and dance with them to honor renewal, remembrance, and the enduring bond between the living and the dead. After much deliberation, we named the route Famadihana (5.13a, 300 meters). It felt fitting. For us, our climb was a kind of renewal as well, of curiosity, learning, and trust. We hadn’t come to prove anything, only to experience this valley and leave behind something that others might one day enjoy.
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