Wild Country Athlete James Pearson climbs TRIBE

October 22, 2020

On Wednesday, the 21^st of October 2020, British climber James Pearson made second ascent of the trad climb ‘Tribe’ at Cadarese, Italy.

Tribe was established by Jacopo Larcher in Spring 2019 and is widely regarded to be the hardest trad route in the world.

James reported:

“I’ve known about Tribe, or at least ‘the big project at Cadarese’ for about 10 years. I’ve walked past it  many times on the way to the crag, and wondered if it was possible, to climb or protect. But, despite it  only taking about two minutes to set up a static rope, I had never bothered to actually look at the thing. I  guess deepdown I thought it probably was impossible, like so many other King trad lines I’ve looked at  over the years.

I followed Jacopo‘s journey on the route with interest, first of all interested to see if it’s possible, and later  to see whether his conviction would stand the test of time and if he would put everything together.  Climbing a first ascent is really hard, much much harder than making a repeat, it took a lot of curiosity for  Jacopo to originally check out the line, and a lot of courage for him to stick with the process and finish it  off.

I’ve been wanting to check out Tribe ever since Jacopo made the first ascent, but since Arthur was born,  we’ve not really had the ability/energy/time to get stuck into a project like that. 

We arrived in Cadarese and everything was really really wet. For the first couple of days I got maybe an  hour to an hour and a half to try the route – at the end of each day once the seepage from above and  dried enough, and before it started to seep again. The conditions were pretty bad, but I managed most of  the moves, by the skin of my teeth, and started to believe that one day I might be able to climb the route.

After working the moves for some days, I climbed the route on my seventh lead attempt. I’d fallen pretty  close to the top on numerous attempts before that, but the fickle nature of the final boulder problem  often spat me off, despite not really knowing why. With lots of rain forecast over the coming days, I’d  pretty much given up hope, which is probably exactly what I needed to take all the pressure off and just  concentrate on climbing.

Whilst I can’t say I’ve checked out every single trad route in the world, I have been on quite a few of them,  and I’ve spent a lot of time searching for my own megaproject. For me, Tribe is by far the hardest series  of moves I have ever done on a trad-route, and it’s a real miracle that the thing is actually possible on  gear. It’s rare to find a piece of rock compact enough to make a series of sustained hard movements, but  with just enough decent gear placements. Tribe would already be an awesome sport route, and one I’m

sure people would be queueing up to try to climb. What makes it really special however, is that no one  needed to place bolts to climb it safely. Mother nature gave us everything that we need, right here… an  amazing line, a cool series of holds, and gear placements, right where you need them.”

(A blog from James, on his ‘Tribe’ experience with will be released on wildcountry.com in the coming  days.)

James Pearson is sponsored by The North Face, Wild Country, La Sportiva & Altissimo. James’ Management Yodel Agency can be contacted for further comment dave@yodelagency.com