Did James Pearson Just Establish the World’s Hardest Trad Route?

James Pearson has done the first ascent of Bon Voyage, in Annot, France, and though he hasn’t proposed a grade, he says it may be his hardest gear route to date.

This is no small statement coming from Pearson, who has spent two decades building one of the most impressive trad resumes of all time. He’s climbed two of the hardest trad routes in the UK: Neil Gresham’s Lexicon, which he climbed last summer, and Dave MacLeod’s Rhapsody, which he did in 2014, both of which are grade E11 7a, which translates roughly 5.14 R. In 2020, he made the second ascent of Jacopo Larcher’s Tribe in Caderese, Italy, which is ungraded but is speculated to be in the 5.14d range. Pearson has also sent multiple 5.14d sport routes and has been bouldering at a high level for decades. He initially made headlines back in 2007 when he flashed multiple proposed V13s in the same season—something no one else had then done. (All three have been subject to downgrades). Just last year he climbed his first V15.

Bon Voyage is an unusual climb for Annot, where the walls are often loose and sandy and most of the routes follow crack systems. The route shares the easy opening section and first boulder problem of Pearson’s 2017 route, Le Voyage (E10 or bold 5.14), but then it veers left across “a layer of bullet-hard sandstone dotted with tiny pockets” and finishes up a technical rounded arête. 

It’s “a true miracle of Mother Nature,” he says in a press release, “and a reminder why all the years of searching were worth it.”

Pearson first began trying the line in 2021 and says it took him more time—in both days of effort and specific preparation—than any previous project: some 20 days over two years. He also had to do specific fingerboard training in order to raise his level to the route’s “intense, fingery crux.” Yet he’s still hesitant to give Bon Voyage a grade, in part because he feels unable to wade through the contradictory factors that could influence the way he conceives of its difficulty. 

He notes, for instance, that first ascents generally feel harder than repeats. He notes that several of those 20 days he spent working on the line “were spent brushing holds and trying to understand if the line might be possible,” not climbing. He notes that the route’s crux sections involve balancy moves on miserable holds and that some of the moves that at first felt impossible felt much easier after he learned “the subtleties of each position.” He notes that the route climbs on pockets—one of his weaknesses—but that the pockets are so shallow that he essentially uses them like half crimps—one of his strengths. He notes that he fell multiple times on the route’s low percentage crux, and that, with some luck, he might have progressed higher on the route faster. But he also notes that even after he stuck the crux, he fell three more times on a higher boulder problem. He notes that putting it all together was quite hard: On his send burn he nearly punted on the final arête.

But he also says that he has some PTSD about proposing hard grades. In 2008, Pearson made the first ascent of the intimidating slab Walk of Life, on England’s North Devon coast, and suggested “the godsmackingly high grade” (as Dave MacLoed, the route’s second ascensionist put it) of E12 7a. But the route’s grade didn’t stand. And after MacLoed downgraded the route to E9, Pearson was denounced as a grade-inflating headline-chaser by many members of the British climbing community. After several of Pearson’s other first ascents were likewise downgraded, the trolls became so incessant that he eventually abandoned the UK for mainland Europe, where he now lives with his wife, the climber Caroline Ciavaldini. (For more about this, see the 2014 film Redemption: The James Pearson Story). 

All of this, swirled together, helps explain why he hasn’t yet proposed a grade—though he notes that he may do so in the future. 

“A grade proposal should be just that, a proposal,” he says. “In theory I should simply say what I think, leaving future repeaters to give their opinion, and eventually we settle on a consensus. Perhaps I’m more sensitive than the average person, but in practice I’ve seen and felt that it doesn’t quite work like that. I could go with my gut and remind myself that, at 37, I’m really too old to worry about things like this. I could also undergrade it, effectively downgrading it myself before anyone else gets the chance, but this has a tendency to lead to grade stagnation like we’ve got with trad routes in the UK, [which] doesn’t do anyone any favors. However, both of these options would rely on me having a fixed grade in my head, which for all the above reasons, I simply don’t—yet. Before offering a grade I’d like to try a few more hard sport routes to better gauge my level, and also climb at Annot with other high-level climbers. Hopefully this will give me a better idea.”