I Climbed America’s First V11 (Except Maybe I Didn’t)

Over three decades ago, I established the first V11 in the United States. I think. Maybe. Well, probably not….

I named the problem Gnar-Gnar. It added a sit start to a previously unnamed line on the Africa Boulder, on the Lower Mound of the granite, semi-urban—think spray paint and broken glass—U Mound Boulders above Albuquerque, New Mexico. Today, the problem appears as the Samet Problem (V8/9) on Mountain Project, but it was not originally described with the start I did, which traversed in from a juggy crack out right. ( I likely also did the more direct sit described on the Proj; IDK—it was 34 years ago.)

The traverse beta took time to unlock. It was the first time I ever used a reverse heel-toe hook, for example. But the redpoint crux came higher, popping out of a sloping dish to a sharp, brittle gaston.

The stand start was—on the B-Scale we used at the time (more on that later)—given B1+ and was rumored to be a first ascent by the late, great John Duran (or, at least, he was the first person I saw do it), a preternaturally gifted climber who routinely floated his way up U-Mound’s gerbil-tooth crystals and xenoliths. When I spied the low traverse, I figured I might as well try it, since no one else had bothered.

I completed the problem in spring 1991, on a gap year between graduating from Albuquerque’s Highland High and starting college at the University of Colorado Boulder. I was living at my father and stepmother’s home, moving furniture to make money. Sweating under the unsparing New Mexico sun, I’d lug couches and boxes of books up apartment stairs with a rotating cast of feckless fellow ABQ kids. We also worked alongside various hard-luck cases, including an old-timer who was perennially coughing up a lung—yet still chain-smoking—and a pathologically horny Harley biker who had fallen out of a tree drunk, and had the limp and  steel plates in his leg to prove it.

Moving heavy things makes you hungry, but I tried to stay lean for Gnar-Gnar by asking the boss to order me lunchtime pizza “without the cheese.” As I nibbled on what was basically  bread with tomato sauce while drinking Diet Coke, my coworkers guzzled Mountain Dew and scarfed pepperoni pizza, chewing like lions and staring at me like I was insane.

But my sacrifices paid off: I got Gnar-Gnar done after some days of effort, graded the low start B2 since it was harder than the B1+ stand, and didn’t think much of it. I viewed the problem as just some lowball training diversion at the local boulders.

In the mid-1990s, my friend Timy Fairfield told me that Eric Scully, a top young climber visiting from Arizona, had repeated or tried to repeat Gnar-Gnar and was calling it V11. This didn’t really make sense to me because there was no way I—far from the strongest climber—could ever climb that hard. Back then, V11 was (and for many, still is) considered a very difficult grade. V11 represented the realm of legends like Fred Nicole, Klem Loskot, and Chris Sharma, not a podunk kid from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

A Short History of Some V-Scale Firsts

According to Planet Mountain, the first V11 (8A) boulder problem in the world was C’était Demain, established by the French bouldering legend Jacky Godoffe in 1984 at Fontainebleau. This seems to be a universally agreed-upon fact.

It’s also agreed upon that the world’s—and by default, America’s—first V12 was A.H.R. (Another Holloway Route) aka Trice. Jim Holloway put up this semi-eliminate on a bulge at Cloudshadow Wall on Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder in 1975. According to John Sherman’s book on bouldering Stone Crusade, Holloway said he didn’t rate his problems; at most, he might assess them as easy, medium, or hard. A.H.R. remained unrepeated—and unrated—until Carlo Traversi ticked the second ascent in 2007, calling it V12.

As for America’s first V11, that is much harder to track down. According to Google’s AI, which in its current iteration seems about as truthful as my three-year-old when asked how many cookies she’s already eaten even as she comes up hand outstretched for another, “The first boulder problem in America to be graded V11 was ‘The Groove,’ which was first climbed by John Gill in 1978 in Pueblo, Colorado. It’s also worth noting that Gill also famously climbed the first V10, a problem also named ‘The Groove.’”

So, per AI, Gill—the godfather of American bouldering, so called because he singlemindedly pursued a subdiscipline that was considered mere training for real climbing when he was active in the 1950s through 1980s—somehow put up The Groove twice. And it’s both V10 and V11, which, I suppose, makes as much sense as the world’s first V12 going in before the world’s first V11, or asking for another cookie when you just scarfed down six and already have a tummy ache.

But I’m being facetious: According to Pat Ament’s excellent biography of Gill, Master of Rock, The Groove is in fact a real problem on the Dakota sandstone boulder of the Fatted Calf west of Pueblo, Colorado. The problem involves pulling on in a double gaston and launching to the boulder’s lip, using the standard, dynamic, V10 method; or endeavoring to do the sequence static at V11, perhaps explaining the problem’s weird double grade. So while The Groove could be said to be V11 if consciously choosing the harder variant, this would leave Gnar-Gnar as the country’s first standalone V11—on record anyway.

Watch the author send another V11: Army of Darkness in Lyons, CO

V Confusing

When Gill and Holloway did their seminal first ascents, the V-Scale had yet to be invented. That didn’t come along until 1991, with John Sherman et al.’s Hueco Tanks guidebook. So the problems’ V-Grades were applied retroactively, as happened with Gnar-Gnar. Gill created the B-Scale back in 1958, motivated in part by Yvon Chouinard, who bouldered with Gill in the Tetons. Seeing Gill send sequences up to modern-day V9, Chouinard suggested he create a separate grading system for bouldering, since Gill had clearly surpassed the Yosemite Decimal System’s high end of 5.9 at the time.

So Gill proposed a closed, three-tiered, somewhat esoteric scale. As he wrote on his website, “B1 would denote the highest level of difficulty in traditional roped-climbing, B2 would be a broad category of more difficult or ‘bouldering level’ problems, and B3 would be an objective category signifying climbs that were unrepeated, though attempted.” The grading system was also dynamic, evolving as problems saw repeats and as roped climbing pushed into more difficult grades.

To Gill, B3, as he told me in an interview, retained “an almost ethereal nature, a concept rather than a grade. A sort of holy grail one never quite reached, but was always out there to tantalize the spirits.” It was also a grade that Gill, ever humble, never applied to any of his own problems—while Holloway was himself notoriously grade averse. Thus neither climber would have graded America’s first V10 and V12 at B3.

Neither would I have given Gnar-Gnar, or any FA I’ve done, B3 because I’m just not that strong of a boulderer—anything I can climb, someone else can climb faster and better.  Thus I was surprised to hear that a butt-dragger traverse into an unfriendly crystal problem I’d put up in 1991 and graded the vague B2 had been bestowed with the lofty grade of V11. But I’m still not entirely certain that Gnar Gnar does clock in at V11—though if the easier sit start described on Mountain Project is V8/9, then adding my more challenging sit traverse could in theory tack on a grade or two.

In light of all that complicated context, this would, in some dumb way, maybe make Gnar-Gnar America’s first V11 on record, if you discounted Gill choosing to static The Groove at V11. But I’m certain that other Americans before me had also probably already climbed what today would be V11 anyway. There were probably other Gnar-Gnars out there, other B2s at other obscure local areas like U-Mound, with dumb names like Harry’s Eliminate or Psycho Lunge or One-Armed Pinkytip Mantel.

What My Possibly Historic V11 Means to Me

It’s entertaining to consider that maybe Gnar-Gnar was America’s first standalone V11, or one of them, but it would be hubristic to insist. I was just some backwater kid on a backwater boulder—it wasn’t that important of an ascent, then or now. Plus it seems weird to call a problem the first V-something, when the V-Scale didn’t exist at the bloc’s inception anyway.

Moreover, I’m sure my “proud V11” likely wasn’t even the first V11 in New Mexico, let alone the United States. Around that time, the Southwest bouldering master Bob Murray was living in Albuquerque. A silent, reclusive type, lanky Murray would head out on his own, find some crimpy, hideous thing, and send it with zero fanfare or documentation. The many “Murray Problems” only came to light years later, when they were rediscovered by climbers on the hunt for new blocks. (Murray was also a driving force at Hueco Tanks. He put up the famous El Murray problems on the north face of the Mushroom Boulder.) I remember seeing him a few times at the overhanging Wash bouldering wall in Socorro, shirtless, wearing gray sweatpants and coke-bottle glasses. He would find the smallest pockets on the volcanic stone and deadpoint impossibly far to some tweaker, trying the move over and over until he got it, then moving on to the next eliminate. I have no idea how hard these problems were, but I’m sure at least V10.

This was just what bouldering was like back then, before V-Grades and pins and YouTube videos and huge nests of crashpads. In fact, we had no crashpads, which is about as shitty as it sounds. At U Mound and other areas in the Sandia foothills, the absence of crashpads led to many back-slapper falls onto the gravelly hardpan, and sometimes even into prickly-pear and cholla cactus.

Upon all this  overanalysis, maybe it’s most accurate to say I put up one of U-Mound’s first B2s—but again, I’d have hesitated then, and even now, to give it B3. I’m no John Gill, nor will I ever be. I can’t do one-armed front levers or lock off six-millimeter crimps in hiking boots. I’m just the guy who put up Gnar-Gnar back when he was a clueless, pimply-faced 19-year-old kid with big dreams of someday climbing hard.

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