Sasha DiGiulian and Edu Marin Second Free Ascent of Mora Mora

How are we not talking about this yet.  Another stellar achievement to add to an already stellar year for climbing!!  

https://www.redbull.com/us-en/sasha-digiulian-first-female-ascent-madagascar-2017

Very cool. That's a pretty impressive climb. 2300 ft. - 5.14b

Amazing-looking climb, and a great accomplishment, for sure!

As to why people HERE aren't talking about it?

Climbing is changing. Those who follow this kind of news are getting it directly and sharing it with their equally-interested friends on social media. And to most "climbers" on MP, or in your gym, somebody climbing some hard shit somewhere in another part of the world is not very interesting, and very far from their everyday life.

I remember when Margo Hayes sent La Rambla this winter -- I read about it, right before I was heading to the gym, so of course I brought it up in a small talk... only to be met with a blank stare. Margo WHO? And what the hell is La Rambla? Oh yeah, 5.15? that sounds pretty hard. Rad! Where is this Siurana, anyway? Oh, yeah, Spain... cool... have you done this yellow problem yet?

It felt a bit like a bucket of water upended over my head. Here I was, amazed and excited, and it was utterly uninteresting to the guy who was focused on the yellow problem.

Yury wrote:

I am confused.

“It took us a few days to unlock all the sequences [of the crux pitch] and our port-a-ledge had been lost by the airline, so each day we were hiking about 90 minutes up the mountain, jumaring 1,400 feet of static line, to then try the 8c, rappel down to the ground and hike out,” said DiGiulian, of their labor-intensive practice runs of the route.

At the same time I see a couple of portaledges on those photos.

BTW, who made all those photos from above?

Does it mean that they had a fixed line and that photographers were jumaring ahead of them?

Well, when the airlines have lost my luggage it has never been more than about 2 days before I got it back, so I'm guessing that they had to hike out for the first couple of days without their ledge, then they had it again after the airlines got it back to them.  

Many times pro climbers will repeat crux sections of routes just for the photo ops, that's probably what is being done for the photos from above.

Francois Lebeau did the photography. It looks like the didn't have a ledge during the practice runs but by the time they redpointed, they had one. 

@Yury They fixed lines from the top to work out the crux (no ledges or hauling) then went back and did a ground up and spent three days on the way to redpoint.

Lena chita wrote:

Amazing-looking climb, and a great accomplishment, for sure!

As to why people HERE aren't talking about it?

Climbing is changing. Those who follow this kind of news are getting it directly and sharing it with their equally-interested friends on social media. And to most "climbers" on MP, or in your gym, somebody climbing some hard shit somewhere in another part of the world is not very interesting, and very far from their everyday life.

I remember when Margo Hayes sent La Rambla this winter -- I read about it, right before I was heading to the gym, so of course I brought it up in a small talk... only to be met with a blank stare. Margo WHO? And what the hell is La Rambla? Oh yeah, 5.15? that sounds pretty hard. Rad! Where is this Siurana, anyway? Oh, yeah, Spain... cool... have you done this yellow problem yet?

It felt a bit like a bucket of water upended over my head. Here I was, amazed and excited, and it was utterly uninteresting to the guy who was focused on the yellow problem.

Makes sense but it's unfortunate.  That yellow route must have been a freaking classic though!!! 

But... what is there to talk about? It's not exactly a controversial issue. There isn't any ambiguity to dissect here. Some amazing climbers climbed something really hard. Cool. I don't see how one can have a discussion based on this, or any reaction beyond what yellow-problem guy had. 

Some of us just don't care about this kind of "Strong climbers climbed something hard" stories, and that's okay. To each his own.

Basically everything Marcelo said. 

Marcelo F wrote:

But... what is there to talk about? It's not exactly a controversial issue. There isn't any ambiguity to dissect here. Some amazing climbers climbed something really hard. Cool. I don't see how one can have a discussion based on this, or any reaction beyond what yellow-problem guy had. 

Some of us just don't care about this kind of "Strong climbers climbed something hard" stories, and that's okay. To each his own.

Well, we do care about those hard climbing stories, but I agree that it lacks controversial issues to generate Chinese Whispers Type of MP.com thread. Even in this thread lena's anecdote about yellow-problem-guy is guaranteed to be mentioned a few more times.

Hey, Lena, I hope it was not me who blew off Margo's achievement to spray on yellow problem/route.

"Did you see that Sasha climbed that badass big wall in Madagascar?"

"Sure did; that's pretty impressive."

"Yea..."

(That's about it, right?)

I guess I'm in the climbing nerd catagory who finds this shit fascinating and anxiously awaits any footage from any impressive send. Why have they not released the Dawn Wall footage yet?  Whatever happened to Unearthed where Daniel Woods climbs splitter cracks down the Green River with Honnold and Segal?  Holy shit I cannot wait for Jimmy Chin to finish the edit of Honnold's Freerider solo. 

amarius wrote:

Well, we do care about those hard climbing stories, but I agree that it lacks controversial issues to generate Chinese Whispers Type of MP.com thread. Even in this thread lena's anecdote about yellow-problem-guy is guaranteed to be mentioned a few more times.

Hey, Lena, I hope it was not me who blew off Margo's achievement to spray on yellow problem/route.

What you don't remember the yellow problem?!?! how could you?! ( Maybe because it wasn't you...) 

Don Ferris wrote:

I guess I'm in the climbing nerd catagory who finds this shit fascinating and anxiously awaits any footage from any impressive send. Why have they not released the Dawn Wall footage yet?  Whatever happened to Unearthed where Daniel Woods climbs splitter cracks down the Green River with Honnold and Segal?  Holy shit I cannot wait for Jimmy Chin to finish the edit of Honnold's Freerider solo. 

I guess I'm in the same category.

When I first started climbing, I didn't know anything about climbing history. If you had asked me who Lynn Hill were, I would have just shrugged. But I started hanging out with people who had been climbing for a while, and who knew a lot of people, and who followed climbing news, before instagram and facebook, not because it was news, but because it was a friend, or a friend of a friend, who was doing this amazing thing. And things came up in conversation-- the fact that so-and-so was doing it was important because this was an iconic route, and it was iconic because... etc. And over time I learned about Warren Harding, and Royal Robbins, and Alex Lowe, and Lynn Hill, and Huber brothers, and on, and on.

So for me it feels like not an isolated piece of news: oh, look, Margo Hayes is the first woman who climbs 15a! But rather, it follows organically all the other things I have learned in a fact here and a piece there over many years. La Rambla is not JUST a 15a... if you had followed the story in pieces over many years as Dani Andrada had bolted the extension (Alex Huber sending the original La Rambla was before "my time", but I learned about it when I heard about Ramon Julian sending the extension that Dani Andrada bolted, because at the time it was a big deal), and then there is another little piece of news when Adam Ondra sent it, and so on. The more you know, the more you want to know, I suppose?  

Interesting that people that care enough to tell us that they don't care.

@lena I 100% agree with everything you said, well put. 

BrokenChairs wrote:

Interesting that people that care enough to tell us that they don't care.

You asked why people didn't care, right? They are explaining their point-of-view. I'm in the don't-care camp. 

I accept at any given moment there are  multiple elite climbers pushing new-ish ground, but am more aware of my personal goals. Their achievements are so far removed from my everyday/climbing life I'll never be able to touch or even comprehend it.

The only time I was really interested is when I met Ashima and her mom at the RRG (somehow I was the first person to recognize her in the line at Miguel's pizza, and got a photo with her) in 2012, then I read about what she climbed there the day after I met her. 

sherb wrote:

The only time I was really interested is when I met Ashima and her mom at the RRG (somehow I was the first person to recognize her in the line at Miguel's pizza, and got a photo with her) in 2012, then I read about what she climbed there the day after I met her. 

I think you nailed it, the personal connection, however tenuous, is what gets us interested, when we do get interested. 

I personally love climbing news, and love reading about the achievements of both men, women, young and old climbers. Unfortunately, to no fault of his own Adam Ondra has blown away any achievements made by any climber these days. Ondra did this particular route when he was 17. He's OS'd a handful of 14d's, climbed up to 15c, getting close on a potential 15d, sent the Dawn Wall in blistering speed and was the overall World Cup champion for both Lead and Bouldering in the same year. The only real news outside of Ondra's achievements was Honnold's mind bending solo of Freerider.

So routes like this that are just nothing more than a repeat are simply not news in the average climbers eyes IMHO. About the only thing noteable about this is that a woman sent a badass bigwall 14b, which is amazing, but because of climbing media and the lack of any unbiased news source is nothing more than a minor blip on most climbers radar.

You can disagree all you want, but even 8a.nu that published this 8 days ago only received 3 comments.

sherb wrote:

You asked why people didn't care, right? They are explaining their point-of-view. I'm in the don't-care camp. 

I accept at any given moment there are  multiple elite climbers pushing new-ish ground, but am more aware of my personal goals. Their achievements are so far removed from my everyday/climbing life I'll never be able to touch or even comprehend it.

The only time I was really interested is when I met Ashima and her mom at the RRG (somehow I was the first person to recognize her in the line at Miguel's pizza, and got a photo with her) in 2012, then I read about what she climbed there the day after I met her. 

Not my intention but I can see how people took it that way; I was more saying I was surprised that people hadn't talked about it yet.  I think there have been a ton of amazing accomplishments in 2017 and for me this was one more to stoke the fire for me.  

I could see that... Though I was really interested in Tommy and Kevin's accomplishment on the Dawn Wall even before I got the opportunity to meet Tommy.  I guess I can see it both ways but for me when I see someone climb or ski something that I can't even touch it motivates me just a little bit more to push my own climbing/skiing. I will likely never reach that level but I think it's cool to see people achieve goals whether on a 5.14 big wall route or my brother leading for the first time.  

That's crazy you were the only one to recognize her!

"Second free ascent". There you go

And the winner here is ^^