Jakob Schubert does 8C and wins Hueco Rock Rodeo
Jakob Schubert reports on Facebook, "Had lots of fun competing at the Hueco Rock Rodeo yesterday! By repeatind Desperanza in my 1st go of the day I started the day perfectly and was able to win the event."The picture by Ingo Filzwieser was taken last week, when the Austrian did Neon Desert 8B+.

Crag & route pages updated
Weโ€™ve updated the layout of the crag and route pages. The new page structure lays the foundation for bringing Topos to Vertical-Life Web. Alongside the new layโ€ฆ
Nearly 2,000 hectares of Font Forest destroyed by wildfire
Exceptional wildfires are currently sweeping through parts of France's Fontainebleau Forest. Located around 70 km south-east of Paris, the UNESCO Biosphere Reseโ€ฆ
Who are the sport climbers that have had most impact on the development in the history? Here is a draft and feel free to give your comments. 1. Adam Ondra 2. Wolfgang Gรผllich 3. Chris Sharma 4. Dani Andrada 5. Alexander Huber 6. Fred Rouhling, Ben Moon, Bernabe Fernandez, Yuji Hirayama, Tommy Caldwell, Markus Bock, Kurt Albert

9a's by Adam Ondra again
Tendon reports that Adam Ondra has done a couple of 9a's. More info to come. Photo: Definicion de resistencia democrata 9a, Terradets, Les Bruixes, Spain (V. Vrzba).

8a moved to https!
Last night we switched 8a.nu over to https, which means that you can find 8a.nu on https://www.8a.nu from now on. All http:// links will be redirected to https://. We do our best to keep all the site's resources including images on https but sometimes you might not see a green padlock in your browser address bar. This is probably caused by some embedded images in the forum and the news loaded from http:// instead of https://. Please report any such issues in the forum. We moved 8a to https for several reasons, but the most important ones are privacy and security. A lot of our users login to 8a on open WiFi hotspots. With https other people on the same network won't be able to capture your password and session tokens. Firefox announced that they are going to phase out none secure http. Google also checks if a site is using https as a part of their search ranking algorithms. If you are interested, here is a nice article from the NY Times giving more details about the benefits of https. -------------- We're fixing the last bits of the migration process while I'm writing this. Bear with us before while we try to fix the last things :)

During the last ten years we have seen an extreme development when it comes to the number of boulderers, Boulder problems, gyms, training facilities and training theories. At the same time, the female and the youngsters have pushed several grades up and in fact getting closer to the male, who show limited progress. Why do we not see more progress in male Bouldering with all these improved preconditions including videos, chalk, shoes and crash pads? Bouldering did become a sport about 20 years ago with great development during the first ten years but then it more or less stopped. Could one of the possible explanations be that some 8C's actually deserve the 8C+ grade?