7/5/12 – Seventeen-year-old Dylan Barks completed all of the routes in the Red River Gorge’s famous-for-hard-routes Madness Cave in one day. The Madness Cave, in the Motherlode area, holds the largest and steepest collection of 5.13+ climbs in the Red River Gorge.Barks sent all six of the routes, Transworld Depravity (5.14a), Omaha Beach (5.14a), Last of the Bohicans (5.13d), Pushing Up Daisies (5.13d), The Madness (5.13c), and Forty Ounces of Justice (5.13a), without a single fall. Barks saw it as a good training day.

“It wasn’t really a goal of mine at all, it kind of just worked out,” says Barks. “Once I completed one route, I just moved on to the next and kept going until I had done them all.”

Barks is training for the Sport Climbing Series 2012 Youth Nationals, which starts Thursday, July 5, at Stone Summit in Atlanta. After that, Barks plans to return to the Red in the fall.

Barks, who has only been climbing for four years, has also sent two other extremely hard lines in the Gorge: Lucifer (5.14c) and Southern Smoke (5.14c).

Date of ascent: June 19, 2012

Sources: Dylan Barks, Michaela Kiersch

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