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General Climbing Discussion

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Ben Cossey Sends the Wheel of Life 7-Oct-2011 At 7:28:33 PM benjo

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Hey, well nothing like getting tangled and gouged out in another Chockstone conjecture-fest but I thought considering there is so much chit chat about it I may as well offer my thoughts on this stuff and some reasoning behind the downgrade of the cave, the finer details however might not be of interest to everyone, particularly if you don’t know the cave that well. Also, it seems a shit of a thing that things like grades and…shit me, kneebars(!) should overshadow the sheer fact that such an awesome natural feature, such a rad piece of natural climbing off in the back woods of Victoria even exits, and for little bickering people to squabble over.

Here’s some background…
When Dai came to Australia both halves of the cave had been climbed separately at V14. When he climbed the whole thing he graded it V16 relative to the grades of the individual sections at the time.

I asked him when he was in Australia trying what was to become The Wheel what he thought of the grades of the problems in the cave and if he really thought those things were that hard (at the time I was maxing out on V11 everywhere else but had just climbed Eve Reve, apparently V14). He said no, but that he didn’t want to downgrade them himself. Since then, with more local and international attention those individual problems have seen a consensus downgrade, the two halves have both dropped 2 grades: Under Siege and Cave Rave/Eve Reve, previously V14 now V12. And yet The Wheel remains V16…

V16 represents the highest difficulty yet climbed by humans, even then these few problems are not confirmed. V15 takes the very best climbers a massive amount of effort to climb and yet there are not much more than a handful of confirmed ones in the world. The Wheel doesn’t really have any one move that you couldn’t find on, say, a V7. The hardest moves on it are in my opinion on Sleepy Hollow and yes, you have to bone down for sure because you’ve just climbed from the bottom but they aren’t crazy hard and certainly not in terms of V16 or even V15 hard.

See next post........