The Devil's Thumb, sometimes called Toponas, its Indian name, poses high above Boulder, Colorado, on the southeast ridge of Bear Peak. The crooked digit, usually climbed by a short, amenable route (5.7) up its east side, offers an imposing north wall of overhanging sandstone sliced by diagonalling roofs and intermittent cracks that was climbed with aid by the late Kyle Copeland and Scott Sounders in 1981.

In one of this year's best efforts on American stone, Matt Wilder cranked the steep face on October 17. Naming the route Cheating Reality, Matt tentatively assesses the route 5.14a R but says it's "bouldery and heady" and difficult to rate.

The athletic route features lots of technical face climbing and difficult moves, including the five-move V10 crux, an "improbable leftward dyno to a sloper" from a crimp handhold, and finishes with a "final powerful and crimpy boulder problem" (V7) to the summit slab. Because of the route's serious nature, Wilder climbed it in headpointing style, that is, he worked sections on top-rope as well as did it twice on top-rope before attempting the lead. He led the route on his second attempt, the first ending when a foothold broke.

Matt, writing on his blog, gave the route its name because "the crux dyno move seems impossible at first and when you finally stick it for the first time, you feel like you've cheated reality" and "the gear was a bit scary and by not falling on the route, you are cheating reality." He also calls it a "world class route" that will be a "Front Range classic for sure."

In previous years, a first ascensionist might have slammed in a few bolts and established Cheating Reality as a sport climb, a safe and sanitary line up the steep wall that any hard climber could send. Matt Wilder, however, had the vision and boldness to create a free climb in a traditional style that will definitely stand the test of time--in another 50 years when the bolts are rusting out of Shelf Road's cliffs, Cheating Reality will be the same climb that it was in 2009. Well done, Matt, and thanks for keeping an eye to the future.

Find out more about Cheating Reality and Matt Wilder on Matt's Climbing Blog.

Photograph above: Matt Wilder working up a 5.12 corner on Cheating Reality. Photograph courtesy Andy Mann.

What's the best American climbing area? I posted a poll last week on the About.com Climbing Forum. Go there and cast your ballot for your favorite.

It's hard to decide which is the best climbing area in the United States. Lots of excellent climbing areas scatter around this vast country. Back in the 1970s it wasn't hard to decide the best arenas for rock climbing. The Big Three--Yosemite Valley, Eldorado Canyon, and the Shawangunks--were simply the best, the places where cutting edge routes were done by the world's elite climbers.

Now it's more difficult to decide. There are just so many places to climb. I winnowed them down to five areas--Yosemite, Shawangunks, New River Gorge, Smith Rock, and the Boulder area. The Big Three are still in there, for historic and aesthetic reasons and because their climbing is that good, but I chose the other two for the same reasons. Smith could rightly be called the place were American sport climbing took root, while the New offers a heck of a lot of great climbing.

There are the omissions, of course. Everyone has a favorite special area that isn't on my list, places like Red River Gorge, the Moab area, Joshua Tree, Cochise Stronghold, and Red Rocks.

All these areas are worthy. All are great climbing areas. But are they the best? Are my picks jingus? What do you think? Vote in the poll and post your comments here. Let's decide what's the best American climbing area in 2009!

Vote in my About.com Climbing Poll for the best American climbing area.

Photograph above: Keith McAllister cranks "Tongulation" at the New River Gorge, West Virginia. Photograph © Stewart M. Green.

The UIAA (Union Internationale des Associations d'Alpinisme) Safety Commission recently released its first safety standards for braking devices used for belaying and rappelling after working with device manufacturers over the last ten years. The standards include parameters for device performance as well as stringent testing guidelines so that devices can receive coveted UIAA approval.

Belay and rappel devices are crucial pieces of safety gear that climbers use every day, having these new safety standards will ensure that you can buy and use the approved devices with confidence. The standard applies to four basic braking devices--manual, locking-assisted, rappel devices, and rappel devices with a panic function. It details what kind of attachment points the device has to connect to other equipment and the size of the rope opening.

The standard also provides testing criteria for static strength on both the climbing rope and the device as well as dynamic loading strength on auto-locking devices to see how much rope slippage occurs in the device during a fall, if the rope and device are damaged by the impact forces, and what minimum and maximum rope diameters can be safely used. Lastly, the standard details the device use instructions that must be included by the manufacturer.

You can download the Braking Device Standards (UIAA 129) report from the UIAA website. While it's the sort of document that only an engineer could love, it's worthwhile to have a quick look to see the new standards so you can evaluate your own belay and rappel devices. The standards took effect on September 30. Look for approved braking devices next year.

Buy a New Belay and Rappel Device:

Buy a Black Diamond ATC

Buy a Petzl GriGri

You're out climbing in Yosemite Valley and five pitches up your latest route you take your belay and rappel device off your harness to pull the rope out after belaying your buddy up the last pitch. Before you know it, it's slipped from your hand and you see the device bouncing down the wall below...ping, ping, ping and it's off into the forest at the base.

Do you know how to rappel off a climb if you accidently drop, lose, or forget your rappel device? There are a few ways to get down, including the Dulfursitz or body rappel, the Münter hitch, and the carabiner brake. Of the three, the carabiner brake method is the best and safest method.

Back when I started rock climbing in the late 1960s, the carabiner brake method was what almost everyone used to rappel. Few rappel devices, besides the figure-8 descender, were available then. The carabiner brake is fairly simple to rig and you only use carabiners, which you always carry with you when climbing.

Check out a couple new articles I posted this week on About.com about rappelling with a carabiner brake. The Carabiner Brake Method explains what a carabiner brake is and why it's the best way to rappel if you lose your rappel device. Next read How to Rig a Carabiner Brake and learn how to make a carabiner brake with six carabiners. Then get out on your local cliff and practice so next time you lose your rap device, you can safely rappel down.

Photograph above: Know how to rig a carabiner brake and you'll safely rappel off all your climbs. Photograph © Stewart M. Green.

October's been a good month so far for European climbers. This time of the year in Europe is generally dry and mild with cooler temperatures which are perfect for hard cranking.

In North Wales, 52-year-old Stevie Haston returned to Craig Dorys at the Lleyn Peninsula and climbed two more major new lines. Earlier this year, Haston established two difficult and scary routes--Bam, Bam and Harmony--up the steep and loose cliff. The new routes, put up with Leigh McGinley, are just as hard and just as scary with scant protection and lots of rotten rock.

The first was 2-pitch Dream Canyon Handshake (5.12b/c), which Groundup Climbing describes as "a wild and physically hard line," which features tottering blocks and overhanging climbing. Requiem for a Vampire (5.13a/b), the second route, is "an astounding line that eclipses all previous routes on the cliff" and "tackles absurdly loose and steep ground...." Haston's belayer Leigh McGinley called it, "The greatest lead of a rock climb that I have ever seen!"

Is there any American climber right now who is doing comparable routes to Stevie Haston? Serious and difficult ground-up routes with no bolts, minimal inspection and cleaning on rappel, and without top-rope rehearsal? These routes are extremely serious. The consequences of a fall are huge. Is anyone flying under the radar and doing these kinds of routes in the United States? Or are we too quick with the Bosch power drill, slamming in a few bolts on these kinds of routes?

In other European news, Planet Mountain reports German climber Toni Lamprecht's free ascent of Le Vieux et la mer in the famed Verdon Gorge in southern France. The Verdon, one of the world's great climbing areas, is no longer the proving ground for hard free climbs but "it still offers sparkling new gems to those who know how to look." Lamprecht did the first ascent of the seven-pitch route in 2008 with Uli Strunz and Benno Wagner, before returning this fall and free-climbing all the pitches, but not in a single day. The line features three 5.13 pitches.

At Germany's Frankenjura area, Planet Mountain reports several notable hard routes were climbed this month. Sarah Seeger redpointed Steinbock, "a steeply overhanging 22-move 8c (5.14b)" at the Orakel. This is the hardest route yet climbed at the Frankenjura by a woman. At Grüne Hölle, 30-year-old Markus Bock free-climbed The Man that Follows Hell, rated a hefty 9a+ or 5.15a. Bock described the route in the German magazine Klettern, "16 moves--exactly as many as Action Directe 9a--with comparable climbing and steepness--yet the individual moves are significantly harder." The route is, with Bock's Corona, the Frank's hardest route.

Photograph above: Sarah Seeger sending Steinbock (8c) at the Frankenjura climbing area in Germany. Photograph courtesy Ricarda Miller.

Kyle Copeland, a prolific desert climber, died in Salt Lake City on October 3 in Salt Lake City at age 50 after battling Crohn's Disease for over 20 years. While I didn't know Kyle well, mostly just in passing, he was a friend to lots of my friends including Jimmie Dunn, Mark Rolofson, and Eric Bjørnstad, and I knew and respected his reputation as a tough climber, desert pioneer, and good person.

Kyle with his buddy, the late Charlie Fowler, basically put the popular Colorado River-side climbing area Wall Street, the most popular cliff in the Utah canyon country, on the map by doing the first ascents of most of its best routes--well, over half of its routes--back in the 1980s. Kyle wrote Climbs to Nowhere, the first guide to Wall Street in 1989 with hand-drawn topos. After the cliff became popular, he stopped climbing there. Kyle also did lots of other first ascents around Moab with Charlie, Alison Sheets, and others.

Copeland also wrote a wonderful essay Climbing in the Desert in Eric Bjørnstad's original 1988 Desert Rock climbing guide, now out of print. In the essay, Kyle's desert climbing advice still rings true and resounds with the kind of climber he was: "...it has become imperative for all visiting climbers to be aware of the unique and delicate nature of this fragile environment."

Shellon Copeland, Kyle's sister, wrote a touching rememberance on Supertopo: "Kyle was my older brother. I Googled him to look at climbing pictures of him and saw your postings. He found a great family with you guys and climbing. He was always so long and skinny he could climb anything and was like a frenetic ball of energy which is such a great gift but can sometimes not fit well with mind-numbing school classes and working in an office. He was so perfectly Yin and Yang, he paid his dues in the last 10 years and has reached nirvana. He earned it. I think going through surgeries and ER visits are equal to extreme climbing with the physical and emotional stress that goes with those."

Rest in peace, Kyle. We're all poorer without your adventurous spirit.

Read Kyle Copeland's obituary at Alpinist 28.

Photographs above: Top: Kyle Copeland leading on The Bride, a sandstone tower near Moab, Utah. Bottom: Kyle on Standing Rock in Canyonlands National Park on Christmas Day, 1985. Alison Sheets wrote, "Kyle climbed the entire route wearing a Santa hat and a cigarette in his mouth." Photographs courtesy Alison Sheets and Todd Gordon.

Never Let Go of Your Brake Hand While Rappelling. That's the prime directive and main rule for personal rappelling safety. Obey the rule, and you'll live long and prosper.

Read my new article in Climbing Skills about Using Your Brake Hand and you'll learn how to use one or two brake hands, what your guide hand does, how to keep rope strands separate so it's easy to pull your ropes, and how to get extra friction to slow down on free rappels.

Read more about rappelling:

All About Rappelling

6 Essential Rappelling Skills

Essential Rappelling Equipment

What Can Go Wrong Rappelling

Photograph above: Bill Springer rappels off Tezcatlipoca above the Sunshine Wall near Arches National Park, Utah . Photograph © Stewart M. Green

I was just down at Taos, New Mexico for the Taos Mountain Film Festival, where I presented the film Luxury Liner: The First Ascent of Supercrack on Sunday afternoon.

On Saturday I went climbing with Dennis Jackson, a long-time climbing buddy, Taos local, and author of Rock Climbing New Mexico, and Sir Chris Bonington, Britain's greatest mountaineer. Sir Chris has gone on 19 Himalayan expeditions, including four to Mount Everest and one that made the first ascent of the South Face of Annapurna. In 1962 he made the first British ascent of the famed North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland. He was knighted for his contributions to British mountaineering and alpine literature by Prince Charles in 1996.

Sir Chris is, as he said in the Monte Sagrado bar later, "Just a regular climber. Just a chap who loves to go climbing." He said that "all the money you really need is just enough to go on climbing trips and have a bit extra for going to the pub afterwards." And Sir Chris does love to climb. When he visited two years ago, Dennis and I took him climbing for three straight days during the film festival. Chris's philosophy was that he could watch movies at home any time but he could only go climbing in New Mexico when he was there. Good philosophy.

On Saturday, I was a bit late driving down from Colorado so Dennis and Sir Chris were already climbing at Tres Piedras, a superb granite area 35 miles west of Taos. Dennis had led a short first pitch to a ledge belay, and Sir Chris was leading the excellent second pitch of Chickenheads (5.7), grabbing big flake edges and jamming cams in a diagonalling crack. I photographed him from across the canyon as he edged up the high route crux, finding the critical layback hold and then pasting his feet up smears on the granite wall to a lofty belay aerie. Pretty darn good lead for a 75-year-old climber.

Afterwards we collected our packs at the cliff base and walked back to the trucks parked under swaying ponderosa pines. Dennis said to Sir Chris, "Hey Chris, you wanna beer now?" Sir Chris smiled and replied, "I like how you always think of that!" He offered up his new belt buckle, bought a few days before at Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder, to pop the beer caps. "I didn't know it did that until the fellow at the checkout pointed it out to me," Sir Chris said as he settled back into a folding chair, bottle of IPA snugly in hand, as the late afternoon sunlight slowly faded.

Photographs: Top: Dennis Jackson opens a beer bottle on Sir Chris Bonington's belt buckle at Tres Piedras, New Mexico. Bottom: Sir Chris cruises the crux moves on "Chickenheads" on Mosaic Wall at Tres Piedras. Photographs © Stewart M. Green

Details of the first free ascent of Eternal Flame (VI 5.13a/7c+) on 20,508-foot (6,251-meter) Trango Tower (Nameless Tower) in Pakistan were just released a few days ago. The famed German hardcore climbers Alexander and Thomas Huber climbed the 2,200-foot, 24-pitch route from August 11 to 14 during a spell of good weather, making it one of the world's hardest rock climbs above 20,000 feet.

The route was originally established in 1989 by the crack German team of Wolfgang Güllich, Kurt Albert, Milan Sykora and Christoph Stiegler. They redpointed the route using siege tactics, fixing ropes, and then climbing the next pitches. About 80% of the route was free-climbed, leaving several sections of aid including a 50-foot bolt ladder. Over the next 20 years several strong climbers attempted an all-free ascent, including Swiss Denis Burdet and Spaniard Iker Pou, who found a 5.13b variation to the 10th pitch bolt ladder but had to abandon his attempt because of weather.

The Huber brothers, accompanied by photographer Fritz Hinderbrandner and Mario Walder, climbed to Camp 2 at the Sun Terrace, and immediately headed up the face, climbing two 5.12 pitches, which they named "Come on Baby" and "Light My Fire." The weather turned bad for the next three days so they holed up at Base Camp before getting a great weather report for the next week. They climbed to the high point and began working up the wall above. Walder aided the pitches first, fixing ropes for Hinderbrandner to film the ascent. On their website, the Hubers wrote: "...we wanted to free climb as a team, swapping leads, without any falls, both on lead and as second, from belay to belay, pitch after pitch."

On day two they reached the unclimbed bolt ladder section. The Pou Variation was out of the question since ice coated it. But 12 feet to the right was "a trace of a crack" which led to the dry upper Pou crack. They did it in two 5.12d pitches and then finished the day with "a perfect hand-jamming crack." The next day the Hubers swung leads up more perfect cracks to a "slightly overhanging finger crack." After a "very intensive boulder session," they cranked the 5.13a crack.

On the fourth day they blitzed for the summit, reaching it at noon. Alexander Huber told Planet Mountain: "There's no doubt we were extremely lucky. To be successful, so many different things have to fall into place. The weather was great which meant we could climb perfectly, up the cracks which were free of ice. I take my hat off to the achievement and free climbing instinct of the first ascenders. This route is a true enrichment for mountaineering. With Eternal Flame, Kurt Albert, Wolfgang Güllich, Christof Stiegler and Milan Sykora have passed on the best and most beautiful free climb on the globe. We are thrilled that we could play a little part in developing this route!"

Photographs: Top: Trango Tower in Pakistan's Karakoram is one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. Bottom: Thomas Huber, Alexander Huber, and Mario Walder on the summit of Trango Tower after the first free ascent of Eternal Flame. Photographs courtesy Fritz Hinderbrandner/Huberbuam

Last Thursday I climbed the East Face route (5.6) up the First Flatiron, a 1,200-foot-high sandstone slab pasted to the mountainside above Boulder, Colorado, with my friends Bill Springer, a cardiac surgeon from Lubbock, Texas, and Brian Shelton with Front Range Climbing Company in a mere two-and-a-half hours. We did nine pitches of climbing, with 1,500 feet of actual climbing. That's pretty fast for a party of three.

To climb fast, we did a few things to save valuable time. We placed little gear on most pitches. On the hike back to our packs we counted how much gear we actually placed and it came out the same as the number of pitches--nine. That's not much but then again the Flatirons are notoriously runout plus the climbing was mostly easy. We also simul-climbed the upper half of the route. Brian led each of those pitches and Bill and I climbed together, ten feet apart, at the rope's end. I figured we saved almost an hour of belaying time by doing that.

It's fine to take your time on climbs, enjoying the views and company, but sometimes you want to move fast. That was one of those days. Even though it was early October, the air was chilled. A brisk wind swept over the Northeast Ridge, pushing frigid air from the cloud-obscured Continental Divide to the northwest. It didn't help that after a steep hike to the base of the Flatiron, Brian and I both shed our fleece sweaters, electing to climb in short-sleeved shirts. Big mistake. The whole climb I watched Bill stay toasty in his jacket. So speed equalled warmth.,

You want to climb fast too? Check out my section on Speed Climbing and learn reasons why climbing fast is good as well as get lots of time-saving tips to speed up your ascents. Sometimes it's good to climb fast--because you're cold, it's windy, and you have a lot of pitches to do to the summit and afternoon is fading to night. The reason I like to climb fast though is because I like it and because I can get more climbing in during the day. Try speed climbing. If you like it, adopt my mantra: Climb Fast, Climb More.

Learn more about speed climbing:
Climb Fast, Climb More
Speed Climbing the Nose
Speed Climbing Tip #1

Buy the book Speed Climbing by Hans Florine and Bill Wright, FalconGuides, 2004. Get speed climbing tips from Hans, one of the fastest men on the planet.

Photograph top: Bill Springer and Brian Shelton simul-climbing up pitch 5 on the First Flatiron. Photograph © Stewart M. Green