Seb Bouin Strikes Again, Establishing His Second Hardest Route to Date

French climber Seb Bouin, 31, is well on his way to being the most accomplished sport climber of all time. He repeated Adam Ondra’s Move (5.15c/9b+) and Change (5.15b/c/9b+), both in Flatangar, Norway.  He repeated Alex Megos’s Bibliographie (5.15c/9b+) in Ceuse, France. He repeated Chris Sharma’s Jumbo Love (5.15b/9b) and added a 5.15c direct start. He’s done the first ascents of five routes, including DNA (5.15d/9c, the world’s hardest grade), Nordic Marathon (5.15b/c/9b+), and Beyond Integral (5.15b/c/9b+).  And he’s ticked a nauseating number of classic “low-end” 5.15s around the world.

Now he’s achieved the first ascent of Wolf Kingdom, in his home crag of Pic St. Loup, in southern France. He says it’s his second hardest climb after DNA, in the Verdon Gorge’s La Ramirole, which he climbed in March 2022.

Wolf Kingdom is a linkup between two of his other hard routes: It climbs the 5.14d/9a bottom half of Beyond Integral, a route Bouin established in 2020. Then it links into the 5.15a/9a+ top of Les Rois du Lithium, a 5.15b/9b he bolted 18 months ago and sent last spring after a season of effort.

“The route’s style is endurance, endurance, endurance,” Bouin told Climbing. The first part of the route, which it shares with Beyond Integral, links a 5.12d into a V11, then a good rest, then another V11, then another good rest, then a V6. At that point, you enter the long resistance crux of Les Rois du Lithium: 20 or so consecutive V6 moves, where there’s no good place to pause and chalk, much less shake, with a V10 heartbreaker guarding the chains.

“You just arrive so tired,” Bouin says. “It’s hard to execute properly.”

It was, effectively, a two season projecting process, Bouin reports. “Since I knew the 9b [from the spring],” he said, “it was a faster process [this fall] than it would have been on a separate 9b+.”

“As for the grade,” he told Climbing, “it’s for sure harder than Bibliographie, harder than Supreme Jumbo Love, harder than Change, but I feel it’s a bit easier than DNA, so I propose 9b+ [5.15c]—but hard 9b+.”

 

Still, after conversations with Adam Ondra, who’s been working on Les Rois du Lithium but has not yet sent, Bouin recently realized that 5.15d is not out of the question.  “Maybe I make a mistake [proposing 5.15c],” he says. “It’s 100 percent my climbing style. So maybe I underestimate the difficulty. We will see in the future.”

Pic Saint-Loup is Bouin’s home crag, and over the past decade, he’s almost single-handedly put it on the hard climbing map. In addition to Wolf Kingdom, Les Rois du Lithium, and Beyond Intégrale, he’s also established testpieces like Ariégeois Cœur Loyal (5.15b/9b), Kmira (5.15a/9a+), and Legend (5.15a/9a+).

But Wolf Kingdom, he says, may be the area’s king line. “It’s one of my best contributions to the climbing community,” he says. And thanks to its beauty and relatively friendly style—consistent, without any strange or savage cruxes—he predicts that one day, it may become one of the world’s more popular 5.15c’s.

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