Will Bosi Proposes His “Hardest First Ascent,” A New V17
Will Bosi continues to make the world’s hardest grade look like a habit. The Scottish boulderer has sent his fifth proposed V17 problem, Realm of Tor’ment at the limestone crag Raven Tor, in England’s Peak District.
The 26-year-old is no stranger to the most difficult bouldering grade; he’s already sent more V17s than anyone else in history. But unlike his other four—Alphane, Burden of Dreams, Return of the Sleepwalker, and Spots of Time—this latest effort is not a repeat of an established problem, but a first ascent.
“It’s massively nerve-wracking,” Bosi told me over the phone on Monday afternoon, the day before he planned to share his success with the world. “I’m so worried at the moment. Have I got this wrong? I don’t want to propose such a big grade, and it be completely off.”
The eight moves of Realm of Tor’ment
Realm is a steep, eight-move limestone problem, roughly a dozen feet high. In a press release, Bosi broke down the beta: “The line starts on a perfect left-hand tufa pinch and a right-hand split crimp. From here, you have four steady, but very engaged moves that lead to two pockets. This is where the crux sequence starts: a hard bump into a sharp right-hand undercut, then a high-tension foot walk. From here, you do the hardest move, which is a big dynamic left-hand slap to a bad small flat edge. I think this move alone is around a one-move 8B+/V14. Finally, you commit to another big slap up with the right hand to a good flake to finish.”
At this large flake, the problem ends with a drop off (as opposed to a top out). Bosi told me this was “a bit of a shame,” but necessary, given the character of the wall. “The rock above the flake is really bad quality,” he explained. “You could traverse diagonally and link up with another route, Hooligan [5.14b], but you can’t top out this part of the crag, so it’d have to be done as a sport route. It would essentially be an eliminate hard start to a route, rather than an independent line. That felt like a weird choice.” Bosi admitted that because of this, Realm of Tor’ment is perhaps “less aesthetic” than other hard problems, but maintains that the individual moves are stellar. “It’s got an acquired taste, but it’s quite cool.”
Playing the long game
Realm of Tor’ment is Bosi’s longest project to date. He began working the boulder in the spring of 2023. Initially, he had been calling the project Burden of Nightmares, because it came on the heels of his Burden of Dreams send. “It was a nightmare,” he told me, “because every time I got close, or thought I had a breakthrough moment, I would either break a hand or foothold, and then it was back to square one.”
After completing it, he changed the problem’s name to Realm of Tor’ment, partly as an ode to the surrounding crag. Raven Tor is an iconic English proving ground, also home to Ben Moon’s Hubble, sometimes considered the world’s first 5.14d. The name also pays subtle homage to a location from the video game series Guild Wars, which Bosi used to play as a kid.
How Bosi graded Tor’ment V17
As far as how many sessions Bosi put into the problem, he wasn’t quite sure. “It’s definitely in the double digits,” he says, and almost certainly represents the longest boulder project of his career. This season alone, after unlocking the final beta, he logged around a dozen sessions. In character, he thinks Realm of Tor’ment is more similar to Spots of Time than any other V17. He adds that “the crux of Realm is slightly harder, simply because the key hold is flat, slippy limestone, but when you put all of the moves of each boulder together, they come out around the same [difficulty].”
For Bosi, of course, sending V17 is nothing new. Proposing V17 on a first ascent, however, is uncharted territory, and he takes that quite seriously. “I keep sitting down, going through the whole process again and again,” he told me. “I try to be as honest and logical as I can with grades.” To arrive at the grade, he compared Realm to other boulders of similar style and that required a comparable number of sessions. He gave examples of other short, powerful boulders, like Brain Rot (V16) in Magic Wood, and Ephyra (V16) in Brione. With these comparisons in mind, “There is just no world where it could be V15. It has to be at least V16 or V17,” he reasoned. “I’m not sure that it’s harder than Spots of Time, but it definitely doesn’t feel easier. It seems like a low-end V17.”
Still, Bosi has not ruled out the possibility that his grade could be flawed. “When I go through this rational approach, that’s how it lines up,” he continued. “But I’m still unsure, because when it comes to boulders that are this short, they become so specific. If it doesn’t suit my style as well as I think it does, I could be completely off with my proposal.”
The V17 landscape—and V18 on the horizon
Objective difficulty of Realm of Tor’ment aside, there has been much chatter lately about softening in bouldering’s highest tier. For half-a-decade, Burden of Dreams sat alone as the world’s sole V17. The grade was near-mythic. But in the last few years, the number of V17 proposals has ballooned, currently sitting at over a dozen (albeit with only seven confirmed by the community). Meanwhile, some climbers have ticked the grade almost absurdly quickly. The best recent example is Hamish McArthur, who last month blitzed two then-unrepeated V17s—Megatron and No One Mourns the Wicked—in just two weeks, all while having only one V15 and one V16 under his belt. (Shockingly, No One Mourns the Wicked was taken down in a single, three-hour session.)
I asked Bosi, who has mused about the significance of the grade before, if he thinks the V17 lineup has been watered down. He said, “It’s hard to say,” but added that, “in my opinion, climbs like Realm, Spots of Time, Return of the Sleepwalker, maybe even Alphane, they could all be in a bubble, where they are all just hard V16. But then when you compare them to some V16s, then no, you do see they are harder.”
If you’re scratching your head here, you’re not alone. Bosi, for the record, is the first to admit that it’s hard to decide where to draw the line. Regardless, he says some form of reckoning is overdue. “I’m not sure if it will be in a year or two years, but there will be discussion about where the bounds sit, and what problems should be at each grade,” he told me. Bosi and I have spoken about grades at length on a couple of occasions now. Although he doesn’t dispute the fact that—as the climber with the most V17s to their name—his opinion carries serious weight, my impression is that he also feels that he alone shouldn’t be the driving force for this reckoning. It must come from multiple voices.
There’s one thing he does feel certain about: The next level is waiting in the wings. “V18 will happen for sure,” he told me. “But it needs to be appreciated that it must be a level above V17. And currently we aren’t even sure that some of the V17s are hard enough to be V17. So, I think V18 is there. It’s possible. We will probably see one in the next couple of years. But to see it confirmed, and really established as a grade, that will take much more time.”
Before we got off the phone, I asked Bosi how confident he felt that Realm of Tor’ment was V17 (9A).
He pondered for a bit, then said, “Look, I’m proposing 9A, because I think it’s 9A.”
He laughed. “However, I do appreciate that I may be wrong.”
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