VIDEO: See Daniel Woods’s New Film on His V17 “Return of the Sleepwalker”
Doing the climb was a three-month journey in the desert, one that took complete and utter dedication.
Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.
Sign up for an Outside+ membership and you get unlimited access to thousands of stories and articles on climbing.com and rockandice.com, plus you’ll get a print subscription to Climbing and receive our annual coffee-table edition of Ascent. Outside+ members receive other valuable benefits including a Gaia GPS Premium membership. Join here.
Out today: “Return of the Sleepwalker,” the film about Daniel Woods’s hardest problem, the one that “possessed” him (see story here).
“Get ready to rage,” Woods wrote on Instagram in anticipation of the film’s release.
Woods completed Return of the Sleepwalker, a low sit start to James Webb’s 2018 Sleepwalker (V16) at Red Rock, Nevada, at the end of March. He had done the second ascent of Webb’s intensely hard original problem.
The lower start, he wrote on Instagram at that time: “adds in a 3 move v12 straight into the stand. The first move is the crux and is a savage low percent right hand drive by into a hard to get into slot edge. I would stick this move 1 in every 10 tries. … This is easily the hardest thing I have tried and now I feel possessed by it.”
Doing the climb, which he has proposed as V17, was a three-month journey in the desert, one that took complete and utter dedication. As reported in this interview: “By the time he sent Return of the Sleepwalker, Woods had given up smoking, alcohol, and caffeine and spent a month camping and climbing alone for his all-encompassing pursuit. The experience was transformative.”
The boulder problem was this country’s first V17 and only the second in the world, after Nalle Hukkataival’s Burden of Dreams.
The film is from the Mellow Climbing Collective.