Maël Musson and Ørjan Vaage send Ride of the Valkyries (9a)

Maël Musson, who did his first 9a+ this spring, and Ørjan Vaage have repeated Ride of the Valkyries (9a) in Flatanger. It is actually a mixed route where you need two ropes, put up by Leo Böe last year, since you need three cams in the 10 meter link up. Since several years it is forbidden to put up more bolts in the enormous cave. Vaage comments.

”This went down surprisingly fast. It felt like the Valkyrie boulder would be impossible with that much climbing into it, but today it felt as good as in iso! Super fun to climb the Valkyrie from the ground! Hard for me to say anything about the grade, never having done anything harder than low end 8c+, but it feels like a good step up from those routes. I used too big blue cams, one purple cam, and some nuts for the trad section. Pre placed.

Later Musson also did the second ascent of Adam Ondra’s Art of Flight (8c+) and here is his story behind the ascents.
”The goal of this trip to Flatanger was to climb the first part of Change,[Change P1 (9a+)], with the idea of eventually starting to try the second part in the coming years. Last year I was already very close to doing P1, but during my final attempt I had an accident in Change. Since the route is basically at ground level, I fell on my back while clipping the fourth quickdraw.

This year I felt really good on all the hard climbing, but whenever I had to put in real attempts, I would tense up as soon as I had to clip a draw. I was going into the route with fear, and it quickly became unpleasant and not very motivating. I soon felt like trying something else. Ride of the Valkyrie was perfect for a quick project.

It consists of climbing The Valkyrie, a classic 8c in the cave — with the particularity of starting directly in the middle of a roof, so you have to ascend a static rope to reach the beginning — starting from Nordic Flower 8b+ then linking the two parts through a crack that you have to protect with cams. This crack section isn’t really hard, but the last move is a small dyno that’s pretty scary because it’s quite runout.

The real difficulty of the route is that The Valkyrie is an intense 8c, with a first crux around 7C/+ bloc, followed by several 7A+/B bloc sections. When I was climbing just the 8c, I didn’t need to be particularly precise or clean: if I was fresh, I could simply pull a bit harder and everything worked out. But adding 45 meters of 8b+/c to get there meant I couldn’t afford to climb those sections “however”. I had to be exact, efficient, and not waste anything.

Even though I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on the route, the process felt quite long because it was frustrating. I kept falling on the same move, feeling completely fresh, with the impression that I was just waiting for the attempt where my fingers and feet would land perfectly on the holds. Usually I like long routes because you feel real progress throughout the process. In Ride, I felt like I could have done it on my first try… or not done it at all before the end of the trip.

During the last days of the trip, I managed to climb Art of Flight, proposed at 8c+/9a by Adam Ondra in 2013 but never repeated. It took me two tries; with kneepads, 8c+ feels right. This variation is really cool and deserve to be climb. I think it could become a classic👍🏻”