Word has circulated around Angouleme that Fred Rouhling has come home and is climbing on his routes. While he’s climbing, cars park on the road below and people sit on a low bridge where they can get a good view. When Rouhling comes down, several people approach him. Some are old friends from his childhood, happy to see him and a little pissed off that he didn’t call to say he would be back in town. Rouhling says that when he climbed Hugh and Akira, nobody knew who he was and there were no crowds, but that for L’autre Côté there were people who came to watch every day. He says that this was his best first ascent.
He says that for him, climbing is better this way, with more transparency, and that if he could change one thing from his early hard climbs it would be for them to have been more public. He enjoyed his recent trip to Switzerland when people came to watch him boulder.
After the photo shoot we again retire to Fred’s parents’ home for dinner. It’s clear that Fred’s children, Hugo (age three) and Chloe (age five), and his wife, Celine, are the most important things in his life. He is equally close with his parents and over dinner we find out one good reason why.
In 1995 Celine sustained a serious spinal-cord injury from a soloing fall, and the couple stayed at Fred’s parents’ house for three months while Celine was recovering from emergency surgery. While caring for Celine, Rouhling slipped away for a few hours each day to work on Akira. When he talks about working the route, you can see him relax, remembering the momentary escapes from worrying about Celine. When she was well enough, Celine came out to belay Fred on the first ascent of Akira.
In 1996 Rouhling climbed L’autre Côté du Ciel, but over the next few years it was difficult to find time for climbing. First came the children, and then Celine was forced to undergo brain surgery for an illness unrelated to her fall. She has been fine for many years now, but the experience has put Rouhling’s priorities in order: family first.

Tim and I are growing comfortable hanging out with Fred’s parents. We drink cognac and wine late into the night, babbling in our broken French. When we are alone, we shake our heads in disbelief. It seems that almost nothing that we have heard or read about Rouhling is turning out to be accurate. He is scrupulous in pointing out his mistakes, and in four consecutive days of climbing, Rouhling makes exactly zero excuses for any failure. It is a refreshing, pressure-free way to climb. Success and failure feel less important, and the process of trying becomes a lot more fun.
Tim and I speculate about how there could possibly be such a large information gap between the Rouhling gossip and our experience of the Rouhling reality. We decide that it’s because Rouhling is not a guy who plays the game. He does not try to change public opinion about himself. He harbors the distinctly un-American view that the routes themselves are more important than the individual who climbs them, and seems to like that his chosen sport permits people to achieve at a high standard without becoming public figures.
“Climbing is good because it is not like tennis,” says Rouhling. “If I practice tennis for the next year it does not matter how good I become, because there is almost no chance that I can go and play against the best tennis players like Pete Sampras. But climbing is different. Tomorrow I can go and get on Realization if I like. The hardest routes are always there and anyone can go and try them as they like. ... So when people say things about me, it is OK. Because no matter what they say about me, the routes are still there, and if they like they can go and try them.”

The last day of our visit, we go back to Akira. Fortunately, the drunk Frenchman is nowhere in sight. There are tick marks and chalk all over the route. Somebody has been here, so maybe the rumors that the Spanish ace Dani Andrada has been climbing here are true.
The bulk of the route is about ten feet off the ground and totally horizontal. After ten feet of moderate climbing, the next twenty feet zigzag through the most difficult moves on the route. Fred tells me he feels this section could be V14, judging by the boulder problems he’s done recently. After the initial boulder problem, the route fires straight out the center of the cave. Rouhling says that although he originally thought this part was 5.14a, he has heard that Andrada found better Beta and it’s really 5.13d. At the mouth of the cave there is a long horizontal break where Fred was handed a rope for the last bit of 5.13b. (Rouhling switches between bouldering grades and route grades to distinguish between the difficulty of a shorter sequence and the difficulty of a whole section of the route. Therefore he says that one could call Akira V14, to a bit of 5.14a, to a bit of 5.13b — or simply 5.15b.)
As we stretch out, I start an argument about whether Akira is a boulder problem or a route. Rouhling concedes that if he were to do it now he’d drop from the jug after the first fifty feet and not bother with the roped finish.
As become his custom during our visit, Fred warms up by climbing a solid section of the route on his first go.
I want to feel every hold on this route myself, so I begin at the back of the cave and work my way out, trying moves that look possible but mostly looking for evidence of chipping. The climbing is every bit as impressive as the grade indicates it should be. But 5.15b? Who knows? It’s continuous, dynamic, and very cool. Finally, on the last move before the section where Rouhling was handed the rope, I find a hold that looks as though it might be chipped.
Rouhling inspects the hold I have pointed out. It is hard to tell if it is actually chipped or just a funky feature with lots of chalk on it. He says that he doesn’t think it was there when he climbed the route. At this point I have lost the cynical desire to catch Rouhling lying. But to be sure, I ask him to climb this section of the route.
As Rouhling puts his shoes on, Tim and I exchange a glance. We’re going to find out what he can do, one way or the other. Rouhling steps onto the rock, and without so much as a grunt or a deep breath he fires the last fifteen feet of the roof without using the chipped hold and without any of the ticked footholds. He dangles from the horizontal, we stack pads, and he jumps down.
This was the last question I had for Rouhling. I can’t think of any further ways to test him. By the time we finish our session, Tim and I are convinced that in his present state of fitness, Rouhling could climb Akira as it now stands. When I ask him why he has not been able to climb a route this hard in the eight years since his first ascent, he holds up three fingers.
“Three things,” he says. “Route, style, and time. It is very hard to find a route which is exactly at your limit, and is exactly in your style, and you have unlimited time to try it. I have never found another one.”

Two days after leaving Angouleme, Tim and I are sitting across the table from Alexander Huber discussing grading claims. When Huber speaks, there is weight in his words.
Discussing another controversial climb, Huber asserts his reasons for thinking it is very unlikely that Bernabe Fernandez climbed his proposed 9b+ route Chilam Balam in Spain. I then ask Huber what he thinks of Fred Rouhling. Huber raises his gaze and looks directly into my eyes. His glare is so intense that I instantly understand how he is able to climb the hard, scary routes for which he is famous.
“You should ask Dani Andrada about Fred Rouhling,” he replies. I ask him why I should talk to Dani Andrada. “Dani says that the route now is harder than when Fred did it. He says that there is Sika, glue, in the holds now. No? He says that Fred made it this way.”
This description matched what I had found online. I say that I had heard the same thing, but that just two days ago Tim and I have seen Rouhling climb big enough sections of Akira that we are convinced that he has climbed the route as it stands now.
Huber shrugs his shoulders and sips his beer. It looks like I have been dismissed. But Tim, who has done a bit of hard, scary climbing himself, is starting to get that look in his eye.
Huber continues, contending that if a person has climbed at the cutting edge, there must then be a track record of his other hard ascents. Huber gestures with his hand: “If Rouhling’s level is here,” he says, holding his hand at chest level, “and then with Akira it is here” — he holds his hand at his forehead — “then there should be many other routes around here.” The hand is level with his nose. “Where is this track record?” Huber asks. The hand moves to the side of his head, palm up. “Why hasn’t he done many other hard routes soon after Akira?”
Tim leans into the table and says, “Because he couldn’t climb for almost two years.”
“Why is this?” Huber asks.
“Because he had two kids, and his wife had brain surgery and almost died.”
“Still,” Huber says, “there should be other routes.”

On the drive back to Spain, Tim and I ponder the events of the last four days. The grade of Akira suggests that it should be compared to Chris Sharma’s Realization, but that’s the last thing that comes to mind when you look at the route. Rouhling himself is taken aback by the comparison. He says that at the highest level it’s impossible to compare two routes of such dramatically different styles. Rouhling says that for him Realization is the most impressive route in the world. He says that he would love to be able to climb it, but that he got shut down cold when he went there. (In fact, his account of the attempt is almost word for word the same as we had heard from Dave Graham.)
Tim suggests that rather than calling Akira the world’s first 5.15b route, it might be better to call it the world’s first V15 or V16 boulder problem. Rouhling has demonstrated his ability to do V14 power routes and V15 traverses with little difficulty, so comparing Akira with those climbs might help establish Rouhling’s missing “track record.”

Rouhling is now thirty-three years old. He and his family live in a fixer-upper house that they recently bought in the French Alps. It is well within striking distance of his new favorite bouldering spot, the granite blocks of Switzerland. Rouhling’s first goal is to avenge his near miss on Fred Nicole’s V15 boulder problem Dreamtime, which he climbed to the second-to-last move in 2003. His second goal is to climb the most famous of all hard routes, the late Wolfgang Güllich’s Action Direct in the Frankenjura of Germany. It is a power problem on pockets, very much in Rouhling’s style.
Even if Rouhling does either route, it will likely not change the minds of his critics. But Rouhling listens to his children, not his critics. Of course, the children have no idea what 5.15b means, but they think Fred Rouhling is the greatest climber in the world.