Climbs

Lofoten, Norway

The first 8c in Aouth Africa.

HXS. Chalk. Fallen down.

Named after the young Italian climber Tito Claudio Traversa who sadly died in a climbing accident.

First ascentionist Carlo Traversi describes the problem:

The Dark Side has a V9 intro into a sustained V15, and those intro moves change the setup for the crux. All told, it is 17 moves from start to lip.

It starts off on a jug rail, an actual jug! The feature continues and it becomes a slopey—but good—hold for your right hand, and then you get these two really, really bad crimps: the crux holds. The left hand is the one that you spend the most time on, and there’s a crystal that goes right into your index pad, that’s the one that splits. You load the left hand, and basically put all your weight on it to reset your feet. Then you do a big lock off and enter the sloper-rail section.

The sloper rail is really bad. One of the worst slopers I’ve ever grabbed, for sure. You shuffle along this rail for eight or nine hand movements. It really feels like you’re hangboarding on the Beastmaker 2000 45-degree sloper. Then you get into this crimp rail, which is better than the crimps at the beginning but still very thin. That puts you into a high gaston, and then one last big lock off to a hold that is basically the end of The Force, which comes in from the right.

The Dark Side is weird for a hard problem. I’ve never seen a problem that is V15 or harder that looks like it. It either looks impossible without chalk on it, or it looks kind of chill when it’s chalked up. [1]

References

[1] https://www.climbing.com/news/carlo-traversi-on-establishing-yosemites-hardest-boulder