Simply Read (5.13d)
Project Wall; FA: Scott Franklin, 1994; equipped by Eric Fedor and Phillip Benningfield

Sitting center stage on the roadside Project Wall, Simply Read beelines out cavy and blocky (but quartzite-hard) white stone. And though modern Colorado Etrier technology makes Simply Read less fearsome than it once was, when only brute power saw you through the upper crux (reaching high over a lip for flat crimps), the initial V7/8 boulder problem still repels many a suitor.

The line’s history is complex: Eric Fedor bolted the initial cave and swell, and was getting linkage, but never equipped up to the 65-foot mark, where you today find the anchor. So Phillip Benningfield, sans discussing his intentions with Fedor, swung over from Apocalypse 91 and finished the job. (“Eric was f-—king pissed,” recalls Benningfield. “I thought he was going to crush my skull.”) The first ascent eventually went to the powerful Scott Franklin, who says, “All I knew about the climb was that there was a route that had been bolted and was just sitting there.” After a few days’ effort, Franklin completed Simply Read, giving the climb its name.

These days, anyone who slaps on kneepads can cop a no-hands, double-kneebar bat hang in one spot and lever/grind their way through the upper crux with a crafty left kneescum, but Franklin doesn’t recall using any such jessery. In fact, jokes Franklin, now working at a Colorado-based solar-energy company, “Just like Britney Spears and waterboarding, kneebarring is another example of what’s wrong with modern America.” Meanwhile, an undone challenge awaits: punch through blank stone above the anchors, up the headwall, and then out the finishing bulges that jostle for space 180 feet above the road like two hot-air balloons at a launching.