"The Creature from the black lagoon"
by Björn Pohl - UKC 29/Sep/2016
Daniel Woods has fiinally climbed through his mental barrier and made the first ascent of The Creature from the black lagoon, ~8C+, at the Upper Chaos Canyon at Chaos Canyon, Colorado.
The Monster from the black lagoon is the low start to Leviathan style, ~8A, and Daniel says "...it felt like v15 to get into the stand of leviathan, no rest, then soft 11 to the top."
He also says that he could do all the moves and link a few of them already on day one, but that it, as so often is the case, turned into a mental battle.
I finally got to the point where I was sure it was in the bag. More days passed and I continued to fail. I would link multiple times from just 3 moves in to the top, but could never add in the first 3 relatively easy moves. This tripped me out considering that the Boulder had essentially been climbed haha. I became worried that I had already mind fucked myself and would have to wait for a new season to start fresh and see the bloc through with another set of eyes. Motivation to climb something is funny in that way. I go through this same struggle with everything challenging that I try. I beat myself up because I know it's there and overcoming mental disbelief is the most satisfying feeling for me in climbing. I had false confidence in the beginning with this thing, and that is what led me into a war of attrition. Luckily, can just look back at all those failed attempts over the course of 15 days and smile.
About the difficulty, he says: I believe this line is harder than most 15s I've done so why not call it 16... and that the same level in bouldering has maintained from Fred Nicole, Bernd Zangerl, and Klem loskot a decade ago until now. We can either acknowledge what is a level up from the standard of 15 (based off of consensus over the years) or continue climbing v15 for another decade.
This was Daniel Woods' third ~8C+ after Hypnotized minds, which he put up back in 2010, and The Process at the Buttermilks., which put up in January last year. The former didn't see a repeat until this year, when Rustam Gelmanov made a relatively quick repeat, the latter lost parts of a crucial hold shortly after the first ascent. Whether it's still roughly of the same difficulty remains to be seen.
Let's hope it doesn't take too long for Daniel's new creation to get repeated.