No pads.
It’s exciting to find a massive boulder, but cleaning it using ropes is an exhausting task. I can still tolerate the physical effort—but in some ways, there’s a joy in unearthing a hidden treasure. Still, my frustration comes from a deeper, long-standing problem that continues to follow me.
“Brave New World” is a problem that was completed after such a long development process. One day, as I followed the forest road, I happened to glance at a slope and saw something cliff-like in the distance. I ran up to it and saw a massive boulder far bigger than it looked from below – and I could clearly see a potential line. This looked promising.
I immediately took out my rope and began cleaning, filled with a mixture of hope and unease. I knocked off the big loose debris first, then carefully brushed all the holds again. By the time I was done, more than two hours had passed; it was a huge job. Sometimes you clean in hope that good holds will appear, but end up with nothing but wasted effort. Other times, there are so many holds that after an hour or more of cleaning, you cruise it and find it’s just a V1 to V5. But this rock revealed exactly the kind of holds I had hoped for, right from the bottom. My excitement stayed high throughout the cleaning.
A glorious line that lets you experience the full span of a giant boulder, with perfectly placed holds and natural angles, as if it had been designed just for climbing. With every move upward, your sense of height grows and the tension builds. It’s a perfect line.
After cleaning, I sent it in a single try. I was deeply moved: by the climb, by the experience, and by the nature surrounding this quiet forest. That such a line had been sleeping so close to the road – what a surprise, what a thrill. That thrill is the very force that drives me to seek out new climbs.
And yet, even after establishing what I could call a “perfect” problem, the issue that has haunted me for years still won’t leave my heart in peace. Using a rope to clean means, inevitably, that you see all the holds ahead of time. You come to know everything: where the holds are, what they feel like, how you’ll move. It becomes a game of imagining the moves, mapping them out from every angle, calculating what’s reachable and what’s not. The moment you cross the line where downclimbing becomes impossible, the real challenge begins. But even if you haven’t rehearsed the moves, the cleaning process itself steals away the adventure of stepping into the unknown on your own.
How luxurious would it be to try this problem ground-up, to experience it onsight? Just imagining that fills me with excitement and joy. And this problem has the right conditions to make that possible, it provokes anyone who stands before it.
That’s why I won’t write any hints here: nothing about where the crux is, what kind of holds to expect, or how it climbs. If you feel inspired to respond to this climb, I hope you don’t start by working just the lower part, or by scouting with a rope, or by watching a video. If you look up and think, “That’s impossible for me,” then train and come back.
Of course, I have no intention of carelessly encouraging others to take on dangerous challenges. But to those climbers who welcome adventure and are ready to put themselves on the line, I make this promise: if you manage to finish this problem by relying solely on your own ability, ground-up, if you onsight it – then a truly Brave New World awaits you.