Tommy Caldwell had a very interesting post on Instagram last night:

One stormy rest day, Chris Sharma, Brett Lowell, decided to go on a hike. We stumbled this crag. Each rest day since I have returned to do a little bouldering and dream about the potential. I believe it has more hard amazing sport climbingpotential than anywhere I have seen in this country. The rock is blasted Clean by the waterfall in spring and summer, but could be climbed In all weather fall and winter. Only problem is that it is going to take a logistically talented and dedicated hand driller to make it a reality. There, the cat is out of the bag. I challenge someone to bring it to life.

A few thoughts:

It increasingly seems like the future of really hard sport climbing—5.16 and above—will be found on granite, not limestone. Adam Ondra and Norway’s Flatanger cave, of course, already seem to have indicated that granite is the future of hard sport. Limestone fantastically lends itself to pumpy 5.11 to 5.15- climbing. But looking ahead, it makes sense that our sport’s most truly futuristic climbs won’t be on limestone, but rather on granite. Bouldering is already there. Sport climbing now just needs to catch up with bouldering and find those long routes that have multiple V12 to V14 moves and sequences stacked on top of each other without rests. Whereas typically limestone’s flaw is that it often has too many holds—”BANG IT OFF!”—granite is typically too vertical and too blank to lend itself to good sport climbing. This wall could be one of those really rare exceptions.

Unfortunately, there are fascist rules against using power drills in certain areas of the country. The law of not being able to use power drills certainly hasn’t done anything to prevent bolts from popping up in National Parks; it’s only given climbers severe cases of tennis elbow from hand drilling. So, what’s the real point of the law?

In my idealistic world, climbers would be allowed to use power drills to establish new routes and maintain existing ones. Our routes would be established and maintained by an elite select few, a core group of climbers who would make informed decisions about style and ethics. It would be a completely tenuous system fraught with unspoken rules and justified with unsteady logic, and at any moment, one bad apple could ruin the whole deal for everyone. In other words, it would be EXACTLY THE WAY IT IS EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE CLIMBING WORLD.

Only we’d have our own version of Flatanger here in the U.S. by this spring. Which means we wouldn’t have to go to Norway, where one beer costs $15. Talk about Fascism!