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.

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!

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.

In the Speed World Championship in Paris we could see that what was decided on the winner was a little mistake, like slipping foot etc. The official video from the last Speed WC in China shows the same problem. Other then that, Anouck Jaubert took her fourth consecutive WC win and Marcin Dzienski also secured his overall title being third.

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.

Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker, aka The Wideboyz, have done the Millennium Arch Project, which is a 100 meters 8b+ crack and they did it in one pitch. "We had to break all the rules of normal trad climbing. As the pitch is so long and also near the start quite easy to hit the ground, you have a pretty massive rack. So we pre-placed the gear whilst dogging the route to make it like a sport route and also left a rope in place for the last 25m as our first rope wasn't long enough. It's not a sport route, it's not a trad route. It's a challenge The other problem is that to get to the cave you have to access via rope and each time you lower off you also have to climb a pitch of easy climbing to get back to the belay! It's quite an adventurous big cave... Big walling for single pitch climbers.!" The 8b+ was actually just a side project as their big 9a+ trad project, The Crucifix was wet. Tomorrow we will present a progressive report :)

Five years ago, Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker made the FA of Century Crack 8c after years of projecting and replica training. Last week they did the FA of the Millenium Arch Project, which is a 100 meter long roof crack. This was just a quick side project when waiting till their main goal dries up, the Crucifix 9a+ project, which they found after one months of searching. - Just pacing out the top of the crack made you shiver with the sheer size of what lay beneath. The roof was around 180 foot in length. This was the very last cave on The Rim that we were checking out and we’d hit the absolute jackpot. All the abseiling, jumaring and legging it round the desert in the blistering sun for the last two weeks was worth it for this one. Essentially we’d found a mother-ship of intertwining roof cracks running from left to right and weaving in and out of cave systems. Right in the centre was ‘The God Line’ that we’d been looking for. A full 180 foot, straight from the depths of the hollowed out cliffside piercing right through the centre of the cave and out to the lip. Strangely enough, it was also bisected by another crack which gave the appearance of a giant Crucifix in the ceiling and seemed to bring about a theological context to our subsequent days and thoughts on the line. The next question was, ‘is it climbable?’ The crux is broken down into the 5 Holy Hangs (and involves 7 very hard moves around these positions). The holds are almost exclusively mono finger locks in a roof. This wouldn't be a huge problem, except for the fact that the footholds are almost nothing. It feel like trying to campus monos in a front lever position. And that's not easy!! Section 1 = 10m 8a+ Section 2 (main crux) = 5m 8B+ Section 3 (other easier cruxes) = 35m 8b