Kodo & Lucy, T Glasby (c)

Well, my 36th birthday turned out to be a good one, I did my new problem in Veaux, France. I was pretty determined actually, there’s not much to celebrate when you turn 36- so climbing my problem was a real boost.

It’s really awesome; the whole traverse is not contrived in any way and has a natural finish on a slab. I really like the fact that you can only go the way the holds take you and there’s pretty much only one way of doing it. When I was working it, there were sections that I initially thought weren’t going to be climbable but after careful looking at the rock and fiddling around with sequences, I worked out ways to climb past these blank sections.

Trente-Six F7c+ .T. Glasby (c)

I’ve really enjoyed the process of working this new trav, but it’s difficult to know how hard it is. The closest thing I’ve done that is vaguely similar, is ‘Ben’s roof’ at Raven Tor. They seem pretty similar in grade, ‘Ben’s roof’ is shorter and a more powerful style but this has a lot of sustained hard climbing on it, I could only chalk up each hand once in 36 moves. I’m going to grade it Font 7c+. This new route is called 'Trente-Six' because it took me 36 moves to complete and I did it on my 36th birthday.