James Pearson talks about Bon Voyage; his hardest trad route yet

• Monday 13th February 2023

As previously reported, James Pearson has just made the FA of Bon Voyage; believing it to be one of the hardest routes he’s ever climbed – is it a shoe-in for the world’s hardest trad route? In this exclusive Q&A, James gives Climber the low-down.

In our previous news flash, we outlined the basics of Bon Voyage. Starting up Le Voyage which James FA’d back in 2017, Bon Voyage follows a line of pockets out to the left arête of the wall. After the first boulder problem on Bon Voyage, there’s a margin rest and the final protection. From here, another 20 moves – mostly on shallow pockets and tiny crimps – lead to the final ledge. “The route is definitely run out, with long falls, but you’d be unlucky to hurt yourself providing the protection is well placed.” James said. Overall the route took him longer to do than any other route or boulder problem. James estimates that Bon Voyage took him 20 days effort over two years and ten redpoint attempts before he pulled through to the finish. Despite having climbed numerous world-class trad routes in the past, including both Lexicon and Tribe in the last couple of years, James is reluctant to grade Bon Voyage. Let’s dive in a get James’ thoughts in a Q&A.

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Set the scene for everyone please - what drives you to doing first ascents? Is it the discovery element, the personal experience and growth they offer and/or the desire to make your mark and leave a legacy?

I guess I love making first ascents for the same reason I love trad climbing over sport climbing – it just adds another level of complexity to an already great experience. There is definitely something cool about finding a new line and bringing it to life. There is often a lot of work that has to goes on behind the scenes that I guess a lot of people are unaware of, and it’s rarely as simple as just walking up to a new piece of rock and climbing something, but that’s what makes it so rewarding.

Another reason is there are simply not that many really hard trad routes out there, at least in the style that I like to climb (physically difficult but relatively safe, but not a pure crack climb). Sometimes, the best way to get to climb exactly what I like to climb is to establish them myself.

Turning to Bon Vogage – how psyched were you when you abbed down and discovered the pockets leading leftwards from Le Voyage and thought that that it might be the project you were looking for?

I was pretty excited when I first realised there was perhaps a line of holds spanning that entire wall. It was the end of a long day of searching and my bum was already sore from so much sitting in a harness and jumaring up and down. I was feeling quite frustrated about having completely failed to find a functioning project and almost ready to give up, but then I had a realisation regarding the way the sandstone might have formed all those millions of years ago - instead of looking for a straight up line, I wondered if I should be looking for more of a traverse.

Annot has some of the blankest rock I have ever seen! Huge 50m high walls without a single hold, and where the rock is more featured, the rock is often of poorer quality. Very occasionally, you come across an amazing series of pockets in really solid rock, but with the exception of some of the smaller freestanding boulders that have rolled into place at a later date, these pockets never seem to go all the way from the floor to the top of the wall. They do however often span entire walls, for tens of meters, and when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Sediments will always lay down closer to horizontal than vertical, and the pockets are simply certain layers of sediment, perhaps made up of slightly different materials, or simply formed under different geological conditions.

I always thought the best part of Le Voyage was the short traverse on pockets linking the two cracks, and I knew the pockets continued on least another couple of metres further left as I’d checked out these holds hoping to find a rest before the upper crux. Lo and behold, after abseil inspection I discovered hold by hold that they continue across the entire wall rising slightly diagonally to meet an amazing slopey arete at the top-most left part of the face. I could see there were enough holds for a human to physically move along the whole wall. The question then became would “I” be able to do the moves, and if I could, would I be able to link them altogether.

At what stage in the process did you start to think that Bon Voyage would be possible for you?

It took me around two visits and perhaps three days on the route to manage all the moves, and another couple of sessions to link the crux moves together into individual problems. I say individual boulders but that’s just the way I think of it in my head, as there are no actual rest points between the boulders; the last hold of one boulder is simply the starting hold of the next. At this point, however, I knew that the route was possible for me and it was just a question of improving my fitness.

Was there a specific move or sequence that was particularly hard to sort out when you were working it?

One fact that’s quite interesting for me is that the eventual crux sequence that gave me a lot of trouble when redpointing was actually one of the earliest sequences that I managed to link, whilst the boulder that initially gave me the most trouble became one of the easier sections to climb, or at least the less likely to fall off. I think this was definitely to do with the position of those respective boulders in the overall sequence, with one of them coming just after a rest so you’re pretty fresh when you take it on, but the other main reason is that one boulder was more dependent on strength in my fingers, and so it got easier with time, practice, and training, whilst the other was a very low percentage, awkward slap, with terrible hand holds and bad slopey feet .

This move gave me a lot of trouble whilst redpointing and I fell from it six or seven times. The annoying thing is every time I fell, I pull back up to try it again with a slightly different sequence, and it would usually feel fine. I’d think that I’d cracked it and try again like that from the floor, only to fall off all over again. It’s just one of those moves that require you to be strong and fit, but also a bit lucky.

You’ve said that pockets are a weakness for you and that Ollie Torr at Lattice helped you develop both finger strength and resilience for the pockets on Bon Voyage. What did that training look like?

Ollie has been supporting me with a training program during the whole process, and I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have been able to do the route without him. I’ve mentioned before that after climbing the moves on the route, success was then simply about getting more fitness, but that’s not really true. We did a lot of specific fingerboard-based work to strengthen and reinforce my fingers. The position the holds force you to take on the route is quite unusual (several two and three finger half crimps) and not only was I not strong enough in this position to climb the moves at first, once I could climb them, I was always on the limit of getting injured. Ollie‘s training plan from Lattice is as much about injury prevention as it is about progression, and over last spring and summer I’ve almost only been fingerboarding (short max hangs for power, longer low intensity hangs for finger health and repeater series for power endurance. The difference was really noticeable when I returned in the autumn!

Let’s drill into the process next. How much time were you on a top rope before you started going for actual redpoints? Do you need the psyche of being on the lead to motivate you more?

Great question, I’m really happy you asked this. Caro and I usually practice our trad projects on a static rope as it's much easier to combine this with a young family. At this early point in the process, you often progress very slowly, staying in one place on the wall to clean holds or try specific moves, so the need for a belayer is actually fairly low. I spent at least 10 days working like this, refining each individual section, but because of the traversing nature and high intensity of the line, it was really difficult to do longer links this way.

However, instead of switching to a top rope for longer links, I decided to begin trying the route on lead fairly early on in the process, never starting from the floor, but just pre-placing enough kit to make it safe, and lowering into specific positions. Like this, I could not only work on climbing the longer sections, but I could also start to prepare myself mentally for the really long runouts. Even if I think that dealing with exposure is one of my strong points, it’s still something I have to actively take control of. Climbing way above your last piece of gear always feels pretty freaky, but it’s often just a case of getting used to that and accepting it for what it is. Once I’ve taken a few falls on something like this, then I’m able to completely focus on the climbing.

I knew there was no point in me trying to redpoint from the floor until I’d managed to link the final crux section (the 20-something hard moves after the last gear), but as soon as I managed that I switched straight away to real redpoints. The first couple of attempts were slow and messy as I re-learnt the moves and gear in Le Voyage, and after perhaps three or four redpoints I went back to the crux section and practised that a little more, to make sure I still had the fitness and remembered the moves before once again going back to full redpoints.

The combination of repeatedly practising the crux section in isolation, but also doing lots of redpoints from the floor, allowed me to really know the whole route in its entirety, and climb quickly and efficiently.

You’ve described the crux as ‘very low percentage’ and that you fell there many times before getting through it. How did you stay positive during that time?

I used to really struggle whenever I hit a plateau like this, but since having kids I generally put a lot less pressure on myself and so I’m able to enjoy the process more and more. At the end of the day, it’s only climbing, and even though I really wanted to do well on this route, deep down I knew it was just a matter of time, and some part of me didn’t really want the experience to come to an end.

The thing that worried me most was that I would pass this move and then easily climb to the top. I really didn’t want the route to be a one-move wonder, but when working in the crux section individually, whenever I got through this particular move, I was usually able to climb to the top. It wasn’t a given, but the moves are just a little bit easier and mainly less awkward, allowing you to pull really hard. With the extra residual pump from climbing the first 20m of Le Voyage in my arms, when I did finally get through this crux move on redpoint, I still fell another couple of times after that. One of these definitely had more to do with excitement and instant flash pump after passing my high point, but the next was simply because I was exhausted. It definitely makes a big difference to the end of the crux section and I had to dig really deep.

Bon Voyage is far from your first rodeo so you’ll be familiar with ‘trusting the process’ which, as it usually does, came good in the end. Was there anything specific that Bon Voyage taught you that you will be taking forward to other routes on your ‘process map’?

The main thing I will take away from climbing this route is to really try to savour every moment. It’s quite normal to have a little bit of an empty feeling after finishing off a project, but this time I was genuinely a bit sad to get to the top. Don’t get me wrong, my first reaction on topping out was pure happiness, but very shortly after I had a real moment when I realised it had all come to an end. I can best describe it as a sort of nostalgia, fondly looking back on my time trying this route where the sole focus of my climbing life was to work towards making the first ascent. These kind of trad routes are rare, to say the least, and I’m not sure if I will ever get to live something like this again, but if this is it, if this is my lot, then I feel truly blessed.

You’ve declined to propose a grade for Bon Voyage for a variety of reasons you’ve outlined so rather than talking grades let’s talk about relative difficulty then. Given Bon Voyage took you longer to do than Lexicon, Tribe and your recent F9a sport climbs it seems that it’s certainly as hard or probably harder than those routes then – all things being equal.

All things being equal one could definitely assume that, but the whole point is that nothing is really equal here. It’s hard comparing apples to oranges.

Help us look into the dangerous element of Bon Voyage next. You’ve taken some very big falls off both Lexicon and Rhapsody. How does Bon Voyage compare in terms of the fall potential?

The danger or risk factor is something that I find a little easier to compare. It’s still not perfectly black or white, but once you take away the emotional aspect of being scared and look simply at how likely you are to injure yourself, then it’s possible to make a fairly objective analysis. Rhapsody definitely has a bigger fall potential than Bon Voyage, but I would say that overall the two routes have a very similar amount of danger. You would be unlucky to hurt yourself falling off any of the moves, provided your protection and belay tactics are good. Lexicon is significantly more dangerous, and although you might only be in danger for one or two moves at the very top of the route, these moves are still part of the crux sequence and need to be taken into account. On Bon Voyage I would also suggest avoiding falling off the final moves, but they are so easy compared to the rest of the climbing that they shouldn’t come into the equation. Rhapsody has a bigger fall than both routes but there is really very little chance of you hurting yourself.

You’ve done a lot of hard trad routes so of those that you’ve done which routes are the most similar in style to Bon Voyage? Is Le Voyage similar in style for example?

In terms of the overall breakdown of the route, Rhapsody would be the closest in style to Bon Voyage. Both routes have a fairly long but easier beginning to get you nicely pumped before a rest and the really hard climbing above. In my opinion, Bon Voyage is slightly harder climbing to begin with, into a worse rest, and a more intense upper sequence.

Do you think Bon Voyage has F9a/+ difficulty climbing then? Would a sport grade with an R or an X grade like they use in the USA be better for grading Bon Voyage maybe rather than a British E grade and a tech grade?

If I could settle on a sport climbing grade, then I could give you an E grade without too much problem. I’ve actually been working on a side project to do with E grades (more information on that soon) but it relies on me having a fixed idea of the physical difficulty of the climbing (a sport grade) which at the moment I just don’t have. Hopefully, things might become clearer over the next few months if I find some other climbers to try it with.

Lexicon, Tribe and Bon Voyage together took – if our maths is correct – about 31 days between them. Do you ever envisage spending 100+ days on a project in the way that say Seb Bouin did on DNA at Ramirole?

I’d love to find something even harder than Bon Voyage and really invest a serious amount of time, but I’m not sure how realistic that is going to be. The main thing standing in my way is to find another route. Trad routes like this are incredibly rare and as of right now, I have absolutely no idea where to even look for something harder than this (if anyone has an idea, please let me know). After that, I need to find the time, which with a young family is not going to be that easy. I was incredibly lucky with Bon Voyage, not only to find this line but also to find something relatively close to home. Flying halfway around the world to try a new hard trad route is something I’m not really prepared to do anymore.

You talk about the difficulty in finding suitable projects to try. Does the search continue? Is that the direction you see your climbing continuing in?

This is not necessarily the end of the search and I’ll definitely always keep my eyes and ears open, but if it did turn out to be my last really hard trad first ascent, then I think I’d be okay with that.