Interview: Will Bosi Still Isn’t Sure What V17 Means

Two weeks ago, Will Bosi made the second ascent of Aidan Roberts’s Spots of Time, becoming the first person to climb four proposed V17s. While this presumably makes him the world’s leading authority on the grade, when Bosi and I chatted about Spots of Time, which he thought called “absolutely desperate,” he expressed a continued skepticism—and confusion—about the lines that have been drawn between V15, V16, and V17.

We spoke for an hour—me in Santa Fe, Bosi in Scotland—about this confusion. I asked him a lot of questions. For instance, I asked which V17s were hardest for him. I asked him how Honey Badger (a Peak District V16 he established) compares. And I asked him if, in hindsight, there’s a chance that Adam Ondra’s Terranova was the world’s first V17.

The resultant interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The interview

Climbing: Shall we talk about Spots of Time?

Bosi: Yeah, I’m super psyched on that one.

Climbing: I spent some time in the Lake District this summer, on a non-climbing trip with my wife, and we walked up Helvellyn, and I was like: “Somewhere on this mountain lies a very, very hard boulder problem.”

Bosi: Yeah, it’s a funny experience trying it, actually, because Helvellyn is super touristy, and you park at the main hiking car park and follow the tourist trail for half an hour, and the whole way up people are like, “Wow, you’re not going to the top with those, are you?” But then you walk 200 meters off the path to the boulder and it’s just dead silent. There’s no one around. You never see anyone else there. And you just feel like you’re in this really hidden, special spot.

Trying the boulder itself was amazing. I had such a fun time pretty much every session. Not all of them, though. [Laughs] There were one or two where the conditions were terrible and my skin basically went through almost straight away, and after the three-and-a-half hour drive to get there, having just a half an hour session was demoralizing.

Climbing: And it’s off by itself, right? It’s not like you can just go do other things.

Bosi: Well, that’s one of the crazy things. In Aidan’s video, he says his fingers would tire out quite fast but then he’d go down to the Bowderstone and have a second session. For me, that wasn’t possible. After an hour or two on the boulder, my skin and my fingers were just completely battered. I was basically commuting there from either Edinburgh or Sheffield, which are both like a three hour drive away, so I considered staying in the Lakes for a day or two, but the boulder was just so intense on my fingers and skin that I couldn’t have just one rest day and then get back on it. That just wouldn’t work. So it didn’t make sense to stay there.

Climbing: So maybe Aidan had a bit of hometown advantage on that one.

Bosi: I mean, it’s incredible how it aligned. He’s literally a 15-minute drive down the road, and it’s such a perfect boulder.

Climbing: He told me that he had a lot of sessions where he would go up and just try it a couple times—in part because he didn’t even want the process to end. I think the way he phrased it was: “I almost preferred having the project there than I did the idea of having done it.”

Bosi: For me, not doing the drive again, I’m OK with that. But trying the boulder itself was just so much fun. It’s such a good line. The way I did it is four moves, and there’s only really two extra holds in the wall that I didn’t use, but even with that, there’s so many different beta options, so it never felt like you’re just trying a board climb. It was technical and intense, and I was never 100 percent sure whether I had the right beta. It made for a super fun experience.

Climbing: Aidan agonized over the grade because certain aspects of it just didn’t suit his style. But I saw somewhere that you said it was actually pretty in your wheelhouse?

Bosi: Yeah, I’d say it’s pretty much perfectly my style. It’s little incut crimps with dynamic moves between them, using drop knees and heel hooks and undercuts, which is basically everything that I feel strong on. What I found so hard with Burden of Dreams is that the holds are flatter, and I don’t think I do quite as well on flat holds. On Spots of Time I felt like they had a little more bite to them, which I think plays into my strengths quite well. And I did the first move with a really techy heel hook on a tiny edge, which is one of my favorite moves. So that played to my strength, too. And then, the last move, which essentially involves getting this terrible right-hand undercut and doing this big slap off it—I actually thought I’d find that move one of the easiest for me when I watched the original footage of Aidan, but I think that was maybe the hardest move, it’s just absolutely desperate, which is one of the things that surprised me alot. So that was the thing with the grade. With grades, it’s really hard to be definite, but one of the things I thought a lot about during this process was just how hard some of the moves were individually, and how hard I had to try. Even just pulling on to do individual moves, I had to be pretty much going full try-hard. And I feel like it’s pretty perfect in my style. So even though it maybe didn’t take super long, I think—because it suits me really well, and it still felt really limit—I think it’s pretty hard.

Climbing: It took you how many days? Eight? Seven?

Bosi: Eight days. Well, technically nine, because my first day I assumed it would be wet so I didn’t carry pads, but it was fully dry, so I felt the holds. But I had eight real climbing sessions. On the first four, I didn’t make much progress to be honest. I did all of the moves except the last one, but not in the sequence I ended up using, and all were quite limit. And then the last move took me five sessions to do individually. Which, again, I tried a lot of different betas, but it was just never quite there, and I think I just had to get a bit stronger on that left hand crimp and the compression into the undercut. So maybe it took all those original sessions to actually build up enough for it to work.

Session five was sort of a break-free session where I realized I could do the boulder and it might not be too long a process. Up until then I was just like, Yeah, this is desperate. Then suddenly I felt the individual moves unlock, and for the first time I felt like I had a chance to link them together. Session six went crazy good. I ended up dropping the last move from the undercut three times. But only two of the times I was actually able to generate movement toward the lip, and even then I was just slapping at it, I didn’t have the power or the strength to get to the hold. In the video, it looks quite close, but I was actually quite far away from sticking it.

Climbing: Do you do that move the same as Aidan?

Bosi: I did every move bar one differently, actually. For that last move, we go off the same holds and the same feet, but he goes to a slightly lower part on the lip of the boulder, which is quite bad. It’s this quite slopey pinch that he then bumps off to the better part. I thought going to that pinch was really hard, but the bump wasn’t so big, so I decided to do a slightly bigger and more powerful move where you just go straight for the better part of the lip. For me, it’s easier because I prefer dynamic moves, but Aidan looks so locked in on that move, so I don’t know if it would be easier for him. With my way, though, it was a kind of a gamble: I had to have a lot of dynamic strength left in the tank for the last move, but if I was able to get my hand to the hold, I could stay on because the hold is a lot better. On session six, when I dropped that last move a couple times, I was hitting the lip way too low to stick it.

Climbing: You mentioned on 8a.nu that you thought the jump between 8C or 8C+ [V15 or 16] and 9A [V17] was a little too small. Do you mind elaborating on that?

Bosi: Yeah, for sure. To be fair, this is one of the things I’m struggling with because I can’t really remember exactly how all the jumps felt between the different grades. But I do remember that doing my first 8A was a big milestone. And I remember 8A+ felt like an obvious step above that, and 8B was a big bit above that. It always felt like the benchmark classics were very obviously different grades from each other. There’s two ways this could go, but the jumps between a lot of 8Cs, 8C+s, and 9As seem quite small, or at least a lot more subtle. It’s hard to tell if there is actually a difference. So I’ve done quite a few 8C+ boulders that I’ve taken 8C for, and quite a few 8C+ boulders that I’ve taken 8C+ for but I’ve been like, You know, I don’t know if that actually is 8C+. But I don’t know if that’s just because so many 8Cs are sandbagged that it makes everything harder feel kind of wrong, or if the step just isn’t big enough and a lot of them potentially are just hard 8C.

Climbing: I mean that checks out with what I’ve heard. The 8C grade was the highest level in the sport for 15 years, and yet people got way stronger over that time.

Bosi: Yeah, there are certainly some 8Cs I’ve done where I’m like, in comparison to some of the others, it’s just way harder. But is it that the band? Should the band be that big? Or are the hard ones actually 8C+ and 8C+ just isn’t as far away from 8C as we thought? I don’t know. I’m not 100% set in a lot of the grades that I have given. There are quite a few climbs that I’ve first ascented on the Peak lime [Peak District limestone] that I’ve been debating upgrading for a while because when I think about them compared to a lot of other climbs I’ve done recently, I feel like they’ve probably the wrong grade now and…

Climbing: Is Honey Badger one of them?

Bosi: [Laughs] I’m actually not sure about that. That comes up a lot because of what I said when I did Alphane… but I don’t know if it is harder than 8C+ to be honest. Again, it’s one of those ones where it’s a long boulder, which is an extra factor on grading. But at that crag, you’ve got two 8B+s, which I think seem pretty solid in the grade. Then you’ve got two 8Cs that I did, which are low starts into those 8B+s. One of them is a soft 8C. The other is a hard 8C. But I think they’re not far enough apart to be different. And I think Honey Badger is an honest step above those. So 8C+ plus makes sense. I don’t think it’s enough of a step above to be 9A. I’m still holding out that that’s an 8C+.

Climbing: So what’s the other?

Bosi: I did one at Raven Tor, Wild South, which I tried a crazy amount of days, but I was ignoring a kneebar for a long time because I didn’t want there to be a kneebar there. Then one day, I tried a kneepad, and it worked really well. I gave that climb 8C because when I started trying the knee, it only took two sessions, and it didn’t feel as bad, but looking back I’m thinking it didn’t feel so bad because I’d spent so much time on the rest of the boulder. So I think that’s probably an 8C+.

My thinking is if we start maybe revisiting grades like that, though, then maybe the 8C+ grade range will actually fill out a bit and make a bit more sense. So I’m not sure if I’ve been wrong a fair bit in the past, if that makes sense. It’s just trying to work out where the bands lie. Because climbs like Alphane and Return of the Sleepwalker—I don’t know if it’s because they’re longer climbs, but it kind of feels like the more sessions you put in, the closer you get, because the moves aren’t as hard as they are on the shorter ones. So it’s hard for me to say that they’re an honest level above some of the shorter, punchier 8C+s, if you know what I mean.

Climbing: But you think that the short punchy 9As you’ve done are a level above those two longer ones?

Bosi: So for Burden of Dreams, definitely. However, and this is what I was saying on the 8a.nu post, which I maybe didn’t make as clear as I could, but the way I repeated Burden, I pretty much used the exact beta that Nalle [Hukkataival] used. Whereas the way that Elias and Simon did it with the heel and the drop knees—I didn’t try that, so I don’t know how that way feels, but for me, the crux of the boulder, or the redpoint crux, was doing that second move so that I could have the tension to then do the third move. And their betas skip that. So for me, potentially, it would actually be different now with the new betas. But the way that I did it, I personally found Burden to be the hardest. And then with Spots of Time, it really is hard to know because it suits me so well. I don’t think it was as hard as Burden, but it really is still a level above the 8C+s I’ve done and tried. Comparing it to Honey badger, Ephyra, Isle of Wonder Sit, and the other ones I’ve tried in Switzerland—it definitely seems like it’s on a different level. So it kind of makes sense to me that it’s a step above, though, again, I don’t know how big that step should be.

Climbing: Curveball for you: Do you think Adam Andra was the first person to do a 9A boulder?

Bosi: What, with Terranova?

Climbing: Yeah.

Bosi: I mean, well, I’m looking to go to the Czech Republic next week to get back on it. But I haven’t sent it, so I don’t wanna say anything definitive about the grade, but—Laughs] —I am confident that that is a 9A boulder. In comparison to the 8C+s I’ve done, it is for sure a level above. I mean, Adam definitely doesn’t agree. When I first said that to Adam, he basically laughed at me and said, “No, no, no, you’re being silly. It’s not that bad once you learn it.” But I mean, I’ve had eight sessions on it, and it feels really bad.

For me, the second half is a super hard 8C boulder, and it has an 8B intro. And there is no rest in between. It took me eight sessions to make the 8C link, and it was absolutely limit. The thought of adding even one move into it, much less seven or eight moves of 8B—it just seems crazy hard.

Climbing: Do you think this is another home field advantage thing, where Adam has just climbed at that crag a ton, he knows the rock, he—

Bosi: There’s that. But also he did it when he was very young, which on those tiny crimps probably helped slightly. And he was on an unbelievable streak of form. I mean, after that he did three 9b+ [5.15c] routes in pretty quick succession. And it was back before the V16 grade was really established. It was the second proposed 8C+ in the world. So I think he didn’t have anything else to benchmark it off, and I mean, he obviously wasn’t going to propose essentially skipping a grade and going straight to 9A.

Climbing: Has he tried it again after sending?

Bosi: I don’t think so. I’d be really curious for him to get back on it and see how it feels, because the other two 8C+s he’s done there, they’re similar in that they’re both long. But on one of them, Brutal Rider, you do an 8B boulder into a double kneebar no-hands rest, into an 8C called Ghost Rider. But that 8C took me two sessions in one trip, not eight sessions in three trips like the 8C section of Terranova. And on the other 8C+ there, you also do an 8b into an 8C, but there’s no-hands kneebar about two-thirds of the way along. It’s not a good kneebar, but you can get a bit back.

So I don’t know… both of those seem far more achievable to me. Like, if you can do the 8C sections, and if you put the time in and refine the sequences, they can come together. Whereas with Terranova, it’s so hard. I’m confident it’s 9A. But I mean, until I do it, I can’t really say for sure. Ondra, he definitely doesn’t agree. But I don’t know… I think it’d be cool to have the first 9A in the world be a low limestone traverse, though I should say that the rock quality is really good. It’s better than UK limestone.

Climbing: I’m not surprised it’s taken so long for his routes and boulders to get attention, though. I mean, when he was putting them up, there just weren’t a lot of people climbing on that level. Who was gonna go try them?

Bosi: Yeah. And because he basically grew up there climbing with Martin Stráník, the grades on the boulders—bar Terranova—are all pretty spot on. But the sport routes—my god. They’re all absolutely desperate. The 9a [5.14d] that I did, Perla Východu—Adam climbed it when he was 14 and it could be at least 9a+ [5.15a]. It felt ridiculous. And it was originally given 8c+ [5.14c].

Climbing: How do long V17s like Return of the Sleepwalker or Alphane compare to 5.15c route like Stefano Ghisolfi’s Excalibur?

Bosi: Yeah. I mean, Excalibur I could see being a 9A boulder. It’s 18 moves long, and it kind of breaks down into like a nine move 8B boulder to a long 8B+ or 8C finish. The only thing is it does have that rest in the middle—although I mean, I say “rest”: Stefano chills there for like two minutes because his endurance is incredible, but for me, it’s a couple quick shakes and then I’m like, Right, let’s get moving.

Climbing: You often seek out desperate things. But your online presence is very positive. I’ve seen a lot of pro climbers shout curses and kick chalk bags, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you express fury when you fall. You always seem kind if psyched actually, like, Oh my God, I got close! Is that online impression accurate or do you get frustrated like the rest of us?

Bosi: I’d say it’s true the majority of the time, but definitely not all the time. On Spots of Time I had two sessions where conditions were terrible and I basically didn’t make any progress—or kind of went backwards—and I definitely got frustrated. But I always look for a positive I can take away from each effort or session. I can have a terrible session, but if I can just be like, Well, that foot stayed slightly longer today, even though I’m still falling on that move, it was a good session. Of course, in the moment where you fall, it can be annoying, and I might be frustrated, but pretty much straight away I try to focus on the positive, even the smallest positive. I think it’s important, especially with projecting.

Climbing: Do you go into every session or climbing day with pre-established goals, or do you make it up as you go?

Bosi: It depends on the project, but I pretty much always have set goals going into something. If I’m trying a new project for the first time, I keep the goals a bit vague—basically I just want to try and figure something out. But on Spots of Time, after session four— which was an okay session, I didn’t really do much, to be honest, but I felt one of two things come together a bit—after that, on the walk down, I made a five-session plan. My goal for the next session was to fall on the last move. The session after was to stick the last move in isolation. And so on. The final session was to go for redpoints. As it turned out, the next session I did the next three goals in one session, but I think that’s because I try to set very achievable goals—super simple things, like touching a hold one session and sticking it the next, things that I might not do, but I really hope I will. So, yeah, I think I pretty much always go in with goals and a plan.

Climbing: Well, thanks for chatting. I’m psyched to see what happens—and good luck in the Czech Republic,

Bosi: Yeah, yeah. I’m really psyched. I always get shut down on Terranova, but it’s good.

Climbing: I mean, you’re only eight days in.

Bosi: That’s true. It’s not been super long yet. We’ll see.

Related:

• Aidan Roberts on Establishing the U.K.’s First Proposed V17

• Will Bosi Claims the Third Ascent of ‘Alphane.’ He’s Reluctant to Confirm the Grade

• Will Bosi Sends Burden of Dreams

• What I Learned Watching Will Bosi’s Livestream of Burden of Dreams

• Will Bosi Gets Second Ascent of ‘Return of the Sleepwalker’—Confirms V17

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