In order to promote onsight climbing, the webmaster has created an onsight ranking. Enjoy!

Adam Ondra has made fast progress on The Dawn Wall and this is his latest Instagram report. "@kjorgeson giving me the jugging up master class the other day and as well as beta for the pitches. The third day up on the Dawn Wall I fixed the lines almost to the top of pitch 16 (dyno pitch). I checked the moves on the crux pitches and it looked definitely hard. Beautiful, HARD, intimidating and motivating project. @tommycaldwell was a huge visionary to see this line in the middle of the blank wall." On the Black Diamond FB Adam gives some more insight to his strategy. "I would like to emphasize that I am not free climbing everything yet. The goal right now is only to go ground-up to the top, free-climbing and using a little bit of aid climbing, to fix the whole line with ropes and start working on the pitches properly to have them ready for the final free push later. So if the crux is around the protection, I just touch the holds to see how the sequence would be and continue. The first crux-pitch looked definitely super hard to free climb. Almost impossible. I will have to take a look at all these razorblades more closely."

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Kalymnos is well-known for its soft grades but in reality in 2017 the new gym climbing generation will probably say the grades are hard. The reason for this is that almost half of the first steep routes have been downgraded, some lines are a bit polished and there has been a change in the climber profile and average strength. Some ten years ago, gyms were limited especially when it comes to Bouldering. Nowadays, new Boulder gyms are popping up everywhere and more and more climbers are performance oriented, following training programs. In Kalymnos, the unique and classical routes are long, 3-dimensional, with focus on resting and technique, which makes them almost the anti-style of Bouldering. After one attempt on the classical Aegialis 7c, (c) Jörg Zeidelhack, most need an hour's rest and can do a maximum of three attempts per day. This can be compared with the Bouldering lifestyle where you could do 30 attempts a day and instead of just ticking Aegialis, you could do at least five 7Bs. Amazingly, during the last month, Aegialis has been ticked only five times, which is just half of the average ascent number of the last ten years. At the same time, more lines of around the 7B grade are added to the 8a database. As the difficulty scale in climbing is supposed to reflect how hard the community has to struggle for doing different routes, it is time to stop saying that the typical routes are soft in Kalymnos and start to regard them as rather hard.

Neil Gresham, a well-known trainer for the last 20 years, has done his first 8c+, Sabotage in Malham. © Ian Parnell Photography "I guess I've reached a peak in sport climbing in my mid forties because I didn't really do any sport climbing in my thirties - I was just going adventuring and doing trad, ice DWS, and so on. I pushed my sport climbing pretty hard in my early twenties but training methods and facilities were primitive back then and I used to get injured quite a lot. There were also way less routes to choose from back in the early 90s and most of the routes in the high F8s were short and powerful and didn't really suit me. I've been pretty structured in terms of applying a very specific focus on my projects. Both Sabotage and Freakshow (my 8c at Kilnsey last year) had moves that I couldn't do, so I had to gain the specific strength for them (by doing replica blocs and working the same finger grips on a hangboard etc) and I also trained endurance at the same angle, style and intensity as the routes. As for 9a, it isn't a goal unless my next project at Kilnsey turns out to be 9a, in which case I will square up to it!"

Black Diamond comes with the latest Dawn Wall updates with some quotes from Adam Ondra. (c) Heinz Zak “We started pretty late yesterday and the fact that we are very inexperienced was obvious right from the beginning—I’ve done a lot of jugging up in my life, but only sport climbing and always using one GriGri and one ascender. Bad technique resulted in being super slow and tired after having jugged up the first 7 pitches. It was 3:30 p.m. by that time, so I managed to get to the top of pitch 10 until it got dark. It was quite intense, a lot of bold climbing again, especially on pitch 10, which is another horrendous layback with poor protection. A combination of aid climbing, French-freeing and fear got me to the top without ripping out any of my pieces of pro. I didn’t feel like going for more adventure in the dark, so we just fixed our ropes and I tried pitch 7, 8 and 10 (5.14a, .13d and .14a) on toprope with headlamp. These pitches are not only bold, but freaking hard too! Definitely no easy grades for these ones—Tommy and Kevin are tough guys! I tried the moves all over again to get some confidence and we got back to the camp by 12:30 at night. Big day for sure."

Mathieu Pauwels has done his first 9a, Punt'X in Gorges du Loup. (c) Petr Blaha - I try the myth in summer 2015. When I returned to Belgium I decided to train myself to make Punt'X. I train very well with my coach Muriel Sarkany during the 2015/2016 season and I returned to southern France early summer 2016. I stayed a certain time that summer but no success for me but got very good feelings in Punt'x! I decided to go and come back stronger in October. It worked because the beginning of my trip I makes my first 9a Punt'X !! A dream come true! Thanks to my super coach!

After three years of North Face Festivals including many celebrities, the locals continued the festival and the marathon climbing tradition together with Vertical-Life. A couple of hundred people gathered at Elena Village during three nights with Zlagboard competition, slide shows from big wall climber Roger Schaeli, amputee Urko Carmona Barandiaran and the final cermony with great prizes from local shop Wild Sport. Everyone who signed up to the Festival did get a free T-shirt and some bar coupons. During one day, the municipality did also take out everyone to the DWS area outside Vathy. Overall, the Festival was a success as always and plans for the next year have already started.

In 2016, some 150 routes have been opend and 300 new routes have been bolted on Kalymnos including Arginonta Valley, which has become possibly the most popular sector on the island. The approach is five minutes, it is very well protected, both the longer vertical easier routes and the shorter steeper routes around 7a are of high quality and it is in the shade. Even so, there have been around 20% less climbers this year and in fact, the topo author Aris, estimated that October started with the least climbers since 2005. The main reason for this is said to be climbers not being comfortable been the refugee situation from last year and the fact that Ryan Air stopped some 50% of their flights. Another possible reason might be the fact that bouldering, especially indoors, has exploded creating a different climber profil: less interested to climb long steep routes on jugs. Instead of getting super pumped needing long recovery and actually feeling the grades for this type of routes to be hard, they might have chosen to travel to Fontainebleu this autumn. As of 2017, 8a will try to present all possible flight connections now when Ryan Air will stop flying to Kos and there will be less flights directly to Kalymnos. Many other ideas, like bolting more short routes, adding bolts on some ”oldschool” routes, creating circuits, climbing festivals etc have been put forward and 8a will follow up on it.

Black Diamond reports that Adam Ondra has started his Dawn Wall challenge. "“First day on the big wall in Yosemite, and straight onto the Dawn Wall! Foolishness, lack of respect or boldness? Well, not necessarily any of it. The Dawn Wall just dries up quickly after the huge rain on Sunday. And it went all right. Definitely scary and adventurous. Tiny footholds and insecure climbing, smearing my feet onto glassy footholds of Yosemite granite and all that with poor protection by copperheads, peckers, tiny cams and occasional bolts. I ripped some copperheads, took some falls but made it to the top of pitch 7 and fixed our ropes. Leading the pitches with all the fear definitely felt super hard, but once I had the rope from above, the moves felt OK. But grades on the Dawn Wall are definitely not overrated. Grecesat success for today and 5 pitches to go tomorrow to have our ropes fixed under the crux pitches.” The picture is from Adam's Instagram showing him at the end of the 10th pitch during a night session.