US

If bouldering is big in the UK at present, then it’s massive overseas, with places like the States emerging as bouldering venues to rival the best in the world, not that the likes of John Gill probably ever doubted it. Ben Moon, as well as Jerry Moffatt, has a long track record of bouldering in the States, and this year he kicked off in fine style in Joe’s Valley, Salt Lake City where Moon was shown a long-standing project by area activist, Steve Jeffery. Moon took just three days to convert Jeffery’s project into Black Lung (Font 8b), one of the US’s hardest problems to date. This followed Moon’s 1999 send of Bang On at Black Mountain, Southern California. Farther north in California, US climbers are having it more their own way. Chris Sharma’s mega problem from earlier in the year, The Mandala, in The Buttermilks, saw two further repeats last year, firstly by Dave Graham and later by Jared Roth. Dave Graham was capitalising on previous trips to a new venue, Chaos Canyon, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorada where he had put up numerous problems in the Font 8a to 8b range, including Nothing But Sunshine (Font 8b or harder) which he figured was harder than The Mandala. He also managed to flash The Kine Traverse (Font 8a) at Chaos Canyon. Little wonder that he ripped through the Fontainbleau forest later in the year.

Fontainbleau

November and December of last year saw a US invasion of the famous forest. Despite being somewhat inclement, the weather failed to dampen American ardour and many of the hardest problems were still ticked by the US tourists. Graham’s haul bag was getting dangerously close to full at the last check and on the very last day he topped it up with repeats of Fatman and Gourmandise, both of which are amongst the mightiest problems in the forest weighing in at Font 8b. And just for the record Graham also created history by flashing Cetait Demain (Font 8a).

Oz

Fred Nicole recently visited what is reckoned to be the hot Oz bouldering venue, Hollow Mountain Cave in the Grampians. Nicole repeated Klem Loskot’s Cave Rage (Font 8b+) and then added a harder finish to give a 30 plus move problem, Eve Reve at harder Font 8b+! Mighty Fred then repeated Loskot’s Ammagamma (Font 8b+), in significantly less time (1 day) than you’d expect given that it was previously Hollow Mountain’s hardest problem. Fred’s visit set the scene for one of the biggest bouldering problems, a stupidly long link of several problems in the Cave. The race, apparently, is on!

Rest of Europe

Back in the rest of Europe, things are buzzing as well. Ines Westenhofer has become German’s first women, and apparently the fourth women overall, to send a Font 8a problem when she repeated Willenberg’s Wombat. Over at Kochel in Germany, top boulderer, Toni Lamprecht, added Fightclub, (Font 8b+) to his other Font 8b+, Muerte. However, these (almost) pale into insignificance when you add Fred Nicole’s latest problem, Dreamtime (Font 8c) at Cresiano, Switzerland, into the equation. This is the first claimed Font 8c in the world and is a sit-down start to and existing Font 8b. Hmmm, now form an orderly queue back there please!