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“My first thought was, ‘Ahhh! Motherfucker!’” Charles Albert told me, laughing, on Sunday.
The famed French barefoot climber was describing the moment when he found out that his monstrous roof crack boulder problem, L’Ombre du Voyageur (V17), had been triple-downgraded, to V14. The culprit? A 23-year-old Italian named Pietro Vidi. Vidi’s was just the second ascent of the problem, but, unlike the barefoot Albert, Vidi wore rock shoes. He also wore crack climbing gloves and four beefy kneepads.
L’Ombre du Voyageur, which translates to “The Traveler’s Shadow,” is a horizontal limestone crack nearly 50 feet long inside of a cave in Salève, France. When Albert made the first ascent of the problem in the fall of 2023, he told me that his friends tried to convince him to propose V18. He didn’t, but at the time, he told me that even with shoes he didn’t ever imagine his route would be downgraded. “L’Ombre could be easier with shoes, but I still think it’s probably V17,” he had said. Now, it had been sent, in a style completely antithetical to the one Albert established it in, and it’s been slashed not just one number grade, but three.
Albert is unbothered. “I am just happy somebody went there and projected it, because I was fearing no one would take the time,” Albert told me on Sunday. “It’s good that the problem has not been forgotten.” Vidi, who also spoke to me over the phone this weekend, sent L’Ombre in just three sessions over a month in June. Unlike Albert, who jammed and crimped his bare toes and fingers into the finger crack, Vidi knee-barred his way through the entire rig. Each time he went to project the climb, he carried a backpack full of six kneepads to beef up. At first, he just used a single pad on each leg, “but then I started bleeding from the pressure, so I put another on top,” he said.
Thanks to the kneebars (and the pads) he was even able to get a 30-second no-hands rest midway through L’Ombre. In total, Vidi spent over four minutes on the problem during his send. He gave full credit to Albert for establishing it, both in his Instagram post and to me, personally, though the two have never spoken about L’Ombre, neither before nor after Vidi’s send. “The way Charles did it is for sure incredible,” Vidi said.
Watch uncut (and previously unpublished) send footage of Pietro Vidi on L’Ombre du Voyageur. Video courtesy of Pietro Vidi.
Still, Vidi, who has sent the 5.14d trad route Tribe, and El Capitan’s Lurking Fear, was very firm on his downgrade to V14. “A climb should be graded based on the easiest possible way to climb a problem, in the acceptable style,” he told me. “Today, that standard is kneepads and gloves. [To say L’Ombre is V17] after going without shoes, it’s the same as climbing a route without heel hooks, and grading it harder just for that. It’s the same as climbing it using one leg, and saying it’s harder because you only used one leg.”
I’ve spoken with Albert—who is famous for having spent a portion of his career living in a cave in Fontainebleu—on a couple of occasions, and this isn’t the first time one of his shoeless proposals have been downgraded by shoe-wearing climbers. I’m reminded of No Kpote Only, which he also proposed at V17, but has since been suggested at V16, and later V15, by the second and third ascensionists, both of whom wore shoes.
Albert never seems to mind, or really even to disagree with the downgrades. In his eyes, these are not so much proposals of objective truth, but reflections of the multiple styles in which a boulder problem can be climbed. His perception of grading is relative, unlike Vidi’s, which is absolute. “A grade is relative to the person who gives the grade,” Albert said. “The grade should equate to the way people climb the boulder. If it is most common to use knee pads and gloves and shoes on a problem, then the grade should be V14, like [Vidi] suggests. If most people climb it barefoot, then it should be the one I suggested, right?”
Right now, of course, only two people on Earth have climbed this problem, and they’ve done it from opposite ends of the spectrum. One of them went “full rubber mode” and the other one was barefoot like a caveman. So we’re 50/50. Where does the real grade sit? Somewhere in the middle? Can we have a V14/V17 slash grade? One could argue that kneepads have become an acceptable standard, as Vidi suggests, but I’m not sure double-stacked pads have, even if you’re bleeding. Where does it end? Five stacked kneepads to reach a distant rest? A full Vibram suit? Perhaps the climbing community all needs to go take an online poll.
One unexpected benefit of Charles Albert’s fluid perception of grading is that he seems to attach no ego to his proposals. He climbs his problems in an eccentric style because he wishes to climb in that style, and so—for better or worse—he believes he must grade them in that style. “If L’Ombre is graded V17 and a climber with gloves and kneepads and all that gear wants to do it, then yes, he will be disappointed,” Albert said. He also admits that he’s fully aware his stylistic choices give him a handicap when it comes to evaluating difficulty. “[L’Ombre] is the hardest problem I’ve done so far. But it’s hard for me to grade problems, even repeat problems, and get a good feeling of grades, because I climb barefoot.”
For what it’s worth, despite proposing a triple downgrade on L’Ombre du Voyageur, when we spoke, Vidi seemed truly in awe of Albert’s performance. “This problem, the way Charles did it, man it is crazy,” he said. “I mean, it is way too hard.”
Vidi hasn’t sent a confirmed V17 yet, but he has projected at the grade, and sent confirmed V16 (Shawn Raboutou’s Fuck The System) and proposed others, so he does have intimate knowledge of what a problem looks like at this tier. “I’ve tried Alphane and some other V17 projects and they felt hard, but possible,” Vidi explained. “But this one, without kneepads or shoes, it felt completely crazy. Next level, for sure.”
When I asked Vidi if, without shoes, he agreed that L’Ombre du Voyageur would be a V17 problem, he paused. “No, no,” he said. “Probably even harder.”
Watch crack-climbing legend Pete Whittaker project L’Ombre wearing shoes and kneepads (and while wishing he had crack gloves):
