I was intrigued. If Fred Rouhling was responsible for the hardest section of rock ever climbed, why don’t we hear of more standard-setting routes? If he was dishonest, why does he continue to climb so publicly, in the face of such harsh criticism? And most important: Akira — did he, or didn’t he? After a few months of e-mails, I arranged to visit Rouhling in France to find out.

I have just spent a week kicking around several European climbing areas with photographer Tim Kemple. The climbing has been great, but it seems like the main focus of our trip has been gossip. Everybody wants to talk about Fred Rouhling, and we are keen to listen. At least half the people we speak to are convinced that Fred is a shady character and/or he didn’t climb his routes.
I have learned that Rouhling is six-four or six-five, with a huge wingspan. “Plus-six or -seven ape index,” says one guy who professes to know Rouhling from back in the day. Another climber says that his routes are just a bunch of huge, chipped moves that he could only do because he’s so tall. I hear that Rouhling climbed Akira and then filled in holds so that it would be harder for others. I hear, from American climber Dave Graham, that Rouhling could not do the V7 moves on the bottom of Realization at Ceüse. I have heard enough to feel that the best-case scenario for Rouhling would be that he climbed his routes, but that they are freakish gymnastic feats possible only for enormous climbers with huge wingspans. As we pull into the parking lot that is our rendezvous point, things do not look good for Fred Rouhling.
I step out of our tiny rental car just as Rouhling pulls over in his VW Caravan across the road. French police wearing little chef/police hats drive by in their minuscule patrol car. They glare at the strange-looking people talking in the parking lot late at night and almost drive through a red light.
We wave to Fred and he waves back. As he jogs across the road to meet us, however, something is wrong. At first I can’t put my finger on it, so I smile as we exchange pleasantries. As he gives us directions to his parents’ house, I realize the problem: He’s too short. Later, we measure his height and reach. He is five feet, nine inches tall with a plus-one-and-a-half ape index. The myth begins to unravel.

Rouhling grew up in the tiny farming hamlet of Le Panissaud, about 100 kilometers northeast of Bordeaux. The neighboring village of Vilhonneur is home to a limestone quarry that, locals say with great pride, supplied the blocks at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Twenty minutes away is the town of Angoulême, where gray limestone bulges overhang many of the roads, forming a quiet little climbing area of several dozen crags known as Les Eaux Claires.
Literally translated to mean “The Clear Waters,” Les Eaux Claires is one hell of a climbing area to have in your back yard. The longest approach walk is a level hundred meters, leading to bullet limestone swells rising fifteen to twenty meters, often more overhanging than they are tall. And the style? Forget about stereotypical French drop-knees and the like; if you want to be successful at Eaux Claires you need two steel-strong fingers on each hand and shoulders to match. The climbing is all about big moves between small pockets — and of this, Rouhling is a master.
Rouhling tore through the grades as a teenager, establishing his first 8b (5.13d) at the age of nineteen. In the early 1990s he went to college in the South of France, which was the place to be worldwide for hard sport climbing. While there, he established two early 8c routes, UFO in the Calanques near Marseilles and Les Spécialistes Direct at the Verdon Gorge.
When Rouhling returned from college in 1993 he was sick of the technical endurance style that had made French sport climbing famous. Tired of using his feet, he sought out — or created — routes at Eaux Claires that didn’t require them. The first was Hugh, a sixty-foot double-overhanging bulge (with the graffito “HUG” painted in four-foot-tall letters at its base). After his first ascent he felt that he had made the route too easy, so he filled in some holds, made others worse, and then climbed the route again, resulting in some incredible dynamic moves — and his most heavy-handed manufacturing job. He rated Hugh 9a (5.14d), at a time when there were two or three other 9a’s in the world.
Next for Rouhling was Akira. The huge roof climb was less than a kilometer from his parents’ home and only 200 meters from the edge of the local quarry. In a slightly different world, Akira might be holding up the Statue of Liberty.
The line runs from the deepest corner of the cave directly out to the mouth. It is sixty-five feet long and rises perhaps ten vertical feet over that length. You can reach any point on the first forty-five feet of the route with a four-foot stepladder, which is exactly what Rouhling did in 1995.
For three consecutive months, he worked out the unrelenting dynamic bouldering movement. Pinches, slopers, crimps, and pockets lead to a jug rest near the lip of the roof where, on “redpoint,” Rouhling was handed a rope to lead the last fifteen feet of climbing. He gave Akira 9b (5.15b); that grade would still make it the hardest section of rock climbing ever done by anyone, anywhere. And he claims that none of the holds was manufactured.
Rouhling’s last hard first ascent follows a jutting prow next to Hugh, L’autre Côté du Ciel (The Other Side of the Sky). The crux bulges involve a series of campus moves on pockets that bend one’s perception of how the human body is supposed to move. The final sequence is something to behold: Big pocket moves lead to a five-foot crossover that positions the climber facing away from the rock — a more impressive version of Tom Cruise’s memorable move in Mission: Impossible 2. Rouhling climbed L’autre Côté du Ciel in 1996 and feels that route, at hard 9a, is his second hardest.
“Of course it is natural.” The glint in Rouhling’s eye gives away the punch line before he says it. “Naturally drilled.” He finishes with a shrug of his shoulders.
Fred Rouhling chipped holds on some of his hard routes, but his tactics were typical of that era in France. Many of the most famous hard French sport routes, including La Rose et la Vampire, Bronx, and Super Plafond, have some degree of chipping and/or gluing on them, and some are completely manufactured. Even in the United States, many hard, classic routes rely on chipped holds — The Phoenix in Yosemite, Just Do It at Smith Rock, and Hasta la Vista at Mount Charleston, for example. Rouhling was hardly the only one chipping routes in the mid-1990s, but once he stepped outside the box and claimed 9b for Akira, his methodology received an unprecedented level of scrutiny and he became the whipping boy for the shady practices of a whole community.
Rouhling now thinks chipping was a mistake. His peers were doing it, and while it seemed natural at the time, he has traveled a lot since then and broadened his vision. The last hold he chipped was on L’autre Côté and he’s not proud that he did it. When describing Hugh, he constantly refers to it as “dirty.”
While Rouhling has changed his mind about chipping, you can see the joy in his climbing when he revisits his old routes. His eyes light up and he literally bounces from hold to hold, feet swinging, remembering the era and the place.