West Virginia Climber Overcomes Paralyzing Snake Injury to Establish Bold 5.13

For years, West Virginia climber Andrew Leich ran laps on Morning Wood Traverse, a 100-foot lateral crack beneath a roof in Coopers Rock State Forest. The crack is roughly 25 feet off the ground, but never harder than 5.9, and well within his comfort zone. For Leich, who lives near the forest and lacks a nearby gym, it was a familiar fitness lap. “That’s probably the climb I repeat most out here,” he said.

He’d lapped Morning Wood hundreds of times, and every time, he’d look out to the rim of the roof, sculpted with continuous slopers and crimps. It was “a beautiful and obvious king line,” said Leich, and one “beckoning to be climbed.”

The question was how to safely climb it.

Rewind to V0, thanks to a snake

Before this king line of West Virgina beckoned Leich, he’d suffered a serious setback—one from which he was very much still recovering. In 2023, a rattlesnake bit Leich while he was hiking with his dog. He staggered back to the parking lot, managing to call 911 as the snake’s paralyzing neurotoxins set in. “In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, all I could do was blink,” he recalled. “It was this surreal experience of being completely trapped in my body.”

Recovery was a slog. “At first, I couldn’t move at all,” he said. His feeling slowly returned, but he suffered from severe nerve damage and muscular atrophy. A few weeks before the bite, Leich had been projecting a 5.14c and had established a new V10. Now, he was too weak to walk.

A month or so later, he tried to climb again. “I pulled onto a V0 of slab in the forest here, and I couldn’t even hold myself on the wall,” he said. “My whole body was shaking because I was trying so hard, and I couldn’t even do the first move.”

Over the next two years, Leich had to re-learn how to climb. “It was crazy to go from the level I’d been at to literally not being able to climb a V0,” he said.

Silver linings did exist, though. At the time, Leich was writing his second guidebook to West Virginia’s Cheat Canyon area. His newfound weakness actually allowed him to see beginner problems with fresh eyes. “Suddenly, all these V0 and V2 boulders became amazing projects for me,” he recalled. “I got to fully enjoy them, and experience them through the eyes of a new climber.”

To this day, Leich still suffers from breathing problems, tremors, dizziness, and other nebulous neurological symptoms as a result of the bite. That’s what makes his determination to tackle a bold, seemingly un-protectable route so staggering. “To get myself back to a place where I was solid enough on 5.13a terrain to know that I was going to fall, it was a big deal for me,” he explained.

Conundrum at Coopers Rock

Still on the heels of his snakebite setback, Leich pondered the protection and risk of that roof rim above Morning Wood Traverse. No gear placements existed, and Coopers Rock forbids bolting. “I didn’t even know how to practice it,” he said. “There wasn’t a spot for a single ball nut, I even looked into Skyhooks, but there was nothing.”

Leich could have attempted to free solo the roof onsight, but the entirety of the 35-foot rim loomed 25 feet off the deck—a serious highball at best. Climbing alone, he would have needed a staggering length of crashpads. Plus, he’d fall to a sloped and rocky landing.

Leich, who is the author of two local guidebooks and a prolific route developer, knows Coopers Rock as well as anyone. He became determined to figure out a way to work the roof.

The slingshot solution

One rainy day in August 2025, Leich went up to scout. “I was trying to figure out a way to get out to clean the holds,” he explained. The most logical way was to set an anchor above the rim, and rappel down. But since the horizontal climb was 35 feet long, he couldn’t just use one anchor to lower down and clean the climbs from. “You’d have to make 10 different anchors at 10 different spots,” he explained.

To remedy this, Leich created something akin to a Tyrolean traverse. First, he free soloed up a 30-foot 5.7 crack to the top of the rock formation. “I then made two anchors with a combination of trees and cams on either side of the roof and slung a static line between them,” he said. He hung this horizontal static line about 15 feet above the roof’s edge. Then he attached himself to the line with a personal tether and a CAMP Goblin, a device that cinches down on the rope if the climber falls or hangs on the rope. This allowed him to zip up back and forth along the lip of the roof, cleaning holds and rehearsing moves mid-air.

Leich then realized this novel system might actually allow him to rope solo the entire line. On his second trip, he modified the system slightly, switching from a CAMP Goblin to a MicroTraxion. He also made the personal tether dynamic, and added a back-up line of webbing to reduce the chances of a catastrophic rope cut.

In theory, Leich’s system would act like a slackline tether. He just needed to test it.

“After bouldering up the initial V3 arete to a sit-down rest, I tied in to [this tether] and set off across the roof into unknown terrain, hoping my slingshot system would hold a fall,” he said. “I took a fall midway across, and it worked!”

On his second try, on August 13, he sent the roof traverse without falling, dubbing it The Voice of Rushing Waters (5.13a). Less than two weeks later, he’d dialed the route enough to send it unroped, with a smattering of pads below the crux.

Projecting and sending the line felt cathartic for Leich, not just because of its caliber, but because it marked a return to form after a lengthy period of disability. He’s also managed to send the 5.14c he’d been projecting at the time of the snakebite—his hardest redpoint to date.

Rushing Waters: Ready for a repeat

Rushing Waters hasn’t been repeated, but Leich said he hopes others can give it a go using his inventive system. “It’s basically consistent roof climbing in the V4 to V5 range for pretty much every move, until you get on a sloper rail.” This rail system is the only hold above the roof; the others are all underneath. “From there you campus over to a jug,” he said.

Leich has been climbing for 13 years, bouldered up to V12, climbed 5.13c on gear and 5.14c on draws, so he has a solid base for grading. He was unsure exactly how to grade his line, but reckons The Voice of Rushing Waters is somewhere in the low 5.13 range. “While the line wasn’t very physically hard by today’s standards, [to climb it unroped] does require the highest experience level of any climb I’ve established,” he said. “You have to be solid enough to solo up to it, competent enough with ropes to rig the anchor system [to practice], and then fit enough to basically free solo a 5.13 route.”

Leich, a devout Christian, said his route name references the Bible. “One of the descriptions of the pagan god Baal was ‘the voice like rushing waters,’ because he was a storm god,” he said. “So in the Old Testament, they also describe the Israelite God as having the voice of rushing waters. Essentially, the implication is, ‘I’m the real one that you need to respect and have reverence for, not this pagan god.’”

For Leich, this new route inspired a similar blend of awe and trepidation. “When I look up at that roof, I get the same kind of healthy fear and reverence,” he said. “It’s the kind of fear that draws you in, not the kind of fear that makes you want to hide.”

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