Scotland’s Will Bosi, 25, has made the long-awaited second ascent of Red Rock testpiece Return of the Sleepwalker, confirming Daniel Woods’s V17 suggestion. Bosi started working on the problem in mid-January and climbed it on his twelfth day of effort, though he notes that he spent three of those days on the stand start and that two were cut short by rain.
This makes Bosi the second person—after Belgium’s Simon Lorenzi—to climb three boulders graded V17. He repeated Shawn Raboutou’s Alphane in October 2022, after 12 days of work, and Nalle Hukketaival’s Burden of Dreams in April 2023, after 14 days on the problem and ten more on a 3D-scanned replica in Sheffield, UK. Bosi has also climbed numerous V16s and several 5.15b’s.
“Coming out to Las Vegas, I had no idea how this trip was going to go as I do not climb on sandstone often,” Bosi said in a press release, adding, “Sleepwalker did not look my style.”
But he surprised himself by making quick work of the stand and steady progress on the sit. By his fourth session, he was falling well into the standstart. On his tenth session, he fell repeatedly on the crux move to the sloper. On his eleventh session, “everything just clicked,” and he stuck the sloper four times, only to fall repeatedly on the penultimate move, a jump to a three-finger pinch. By that point, Bosi felt confident, but poor weather prevented him from taking more than one rest day before heading out for session 12.
“I still felt quite tired,” he said, “so I was unsure about even trying it. However, after warming up, the moves were feeling great and I decided to give it a go. The first attempt went perfectly up to the sloper, but then I really messed up the next move to the slot and almost dropped it. Somehow I recovered and hit the last hard move perfectly. Pulling onto the slab was incredible and I had to take a minute to get my breath back before heading up to the top.”
Return of the Sleepwalker adds a five-to-seven move (depending on sequence) V13 or V14 into Jimmy Webb’s Sleepwalker, which was one of the world’s most repeated V16s until both Zander Waller and Will Bosi suggested that V15 felt more accurate.
Interestingly, Waller, who had never climbed V14 or V15 before climbing Sleepwalker last October, told me his downgrade resulted from a new height-dependent sequence and wouldn’t alter the grade perception for climbers shorter than him. (He’s six feet tall with a plus four-inch wingspan.) In a short video embedded at the bottom of this article, Noah Wheeler, who climbed Sleepwalker and made disturbingly quick progress on Return of the Sleepwalker during a short trip to Red Rock earlier this year, breaks down the various betas that climbers of different sizes have used on the stand and how they influence difficulty.
However, Bosi isn’t near Waller’s height, and he thought V15 felt more accurate even with the old beta.
Despite downgrading the stand, Bosi believes that the sitstart adds enough difficulty for the full line to remain V17. “In comparison to the other climbs I have done, I think Return of the Sleepwalker comes in around the bottom end of the grade,” he says. “Burden of Dreams was harder but it is such a different style. I think Return probably came in harder than Alphane. Currently, I am very unsure about the distinction between V16 and V17, and I think it will take some time and a broader consensus of climbers operating at this level to get the distinction right.”
“My next project is dependent on conditions,” Bosi said, “but I would love to head back to Arco and try to finish Excalibur [a short bouldery 5.15c established by Stefano Ghisolfi] or back to Brno to work more on Terranova [a V16 boulder first done by Adam Ondra in 2011]. I would also love to spend some time finding new lines in Scotland, but the weather seems to always be against that!”
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