Chris Sharma ticks off Neanderthal 5.15b (9b) in Spain
Cross Posted from Climbing Narcissist
As expected, Chris Sharma has done the first ascent of a possible 5.15b sport route in Spain, but it wasn’t the infamous First Round, First Minute project at Margalef which he is still reportedly very close to doing. Instead Sharma ticked off the Neanderthal project in the cave at Santa Linya to yield his 3rd possible 5.15b after Jumbo Love and Golpe De Estado.
Seen in Dosage V, Neanderthal follows a long and sustained 40 meter line with a hard dyno near the top of the wall. After two years of work, Sharma was able to climb “really solid and very psyched” to reach the anchors of Neanderthal with a cheering crowd looking on.
Interestingly enough, Neanderthal wasn’t Sharma’s main focus lately, but poor conditions in Margalef led to a change of plans. Commenting on their blog, the guys at Big Up shed a little more light on things:
A quick heads-up: We got a last minute call from Sharma the other day, that he was about to send First Round First Minute, so Brett jumped on over to Spain to shoot it. Margalef got snowed out, so they went to Santa Linya instead, and today Chris did his other mega-proj, Neanderthal. Probably another 9b. There is footage of him trying it in Dosage 5. Now they have a few more days to go back to FRFM and try to get it done too… We will be making the footage available as a download from our site as soon as possible. More info to come… -Josh
After a quiet middle part of the year, Sharma seems poised to finish 2009 strong with this 5.15 FA under his belt and another possibly on the way. Stay tuned…
Chris’s girlfriend Daila Ojeda also chimed in on her blog…
Neanderthal 9b for Chris in Santa Linya!!
Today it was a beautiful sunny day of winter in one of our favorite crag in Catalunya, Santa Linya. It’s was really cold too and that means perfect conditions for climbing! And some days before Chris fell in the last move in his project in Santa Linya and after one rest day he arrived to the anchor to the hardest route in the cave Neanderthal 9b. He climbed really solid and very psyched with everybody cheering down below venga bicho!! nice Chris! The good thing is Brett Lowell captured everything on tape and you be able to see some nice footage very soon on bigupproductions.com (good job guys!)
And it’s was crazy because he was waiting for his other project in Margalef to dry and he went to the cave just for fun and belay me… then he has to go to Margalef and finish his work with First round first minute 9b?? before 2010… that sound really good man!
We’ll see next few days!
UPDATE from Björn Pohl:
The lowdown on Neanderthal
Neanderthal starts there, but goes more directly out the cave.
This is Neanderthal.”
Dave says he hasn’t tried it, but that he hopes to soon. The recap above was given to him by Tomas Mrazek and Chris. Chris also said it felt a lot better this year than last. Dave and Jon will stay and climb with Chris for two more months, so provided it stops snowing, ever, we can expect things happening down there!
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[...] conceptions of difficulty, he was recently voted 8a Climber of the Decade. He has sent multiple 5.15 routes, bouldered V15, onsighted 5.14b, and established deep water solo routes at the highest [...]
February 3rd, 2010 at 11:53 am