Seb Bouin Gets His Crimp On and Sends Bibliographie (5.15c)

It’s official: Seb Bouin has had the most impressive year and a half of sport climbing the world has ever seen, doing (among other things) the first ascents of DNA (5.15d), Nordic Marathon (5.15b/c), and Suprême Jumbo Love (5.15c), and a repeat of Change (5.15c). But what do all of those routes have in common? They’re all long, steep endurance climbs. Yet on Saturday, June 3, Bouin stepped wildly outside of his preferred style by making the fourth ascent of Alex Megos’s Bibliographie, a gently overhanging crimp line in Céüse’s epic Biographie sector.

The route is still long by some standards; the anchors are at ~115 feet; but it’s quite short when compared to DNA (160 feet), Nordic Marathon (430 feet), and Suprême Jumbo Love (230 feet), and Change (180 feet). And even more important: the holds are—as the route’s second ascensionist, Stefano Ghisolfi, demonstrated in a fun video (embedded below)—very small, which is pretty typical for Céüse. Though it’s a local crag for Bouin, he says in a press release that Céüse is “very far away from my own natural climbing style.”

Still, the style, and the fact that Bibliographie has been well-established at the 5.15c grade, were attractive to him. As one of the most prolific first ascensionist in Southern France, Bouin is “usually alone when trying my projects in France,” cleaning, working, and sending most of his hardest lines in a bubble of solitude. He worked on DNA alone; he worked Beyond Integrale and L’Rage d’Adam, both 5.15b/c first ascents, alone. And most of his 5.14+ and 5.15 routes remain unrepeated, at least in part because, according to French wonderkid Théo Blass, Bouin is locally notorious for giving hard grades. The fact that Bibliographie was local, and had three ascents by some of the world’s strongest climbers—the style didn’t matter: “it was obvious that I had to try it.”

But style is style, and Bibliographie didn’t fall easily for Bouin. He worked the route extensively in the summer in 2021, but wasn’t able to pull it off. Returning this year, he battled with atypically wet spring weather and fell 11 times on the route’s upper boulder… after the main crux. “I underestimated this last part,” he said. “It doesn’t look or feel that hard when you do this single section in isolation. Yet when you are coming from the ground, it [is] way different.” 

He’s not alone here: Sean Bailey fell at the same upper crux more than a dozen times—and Bouin says he’s “happy that [Bailey] still holds the record.”

Does the send mean that Seb Bouin, beast of the steeps, is now a crimp-crusher, bound for the bouldery thinness of Will Bosi’s King Capella or Stefano Ghisolfi’s Excalibur? 

Don’t count on it. 

“It was a great challenge to do [5.15c] on tiny crimps,” Bouin said. “But now it’s time to go back to something a little more my style.”

The Seb Bouin interviews:

• “Interview: How Seb Bouin Sent the World’s Hardest Grade”

• “Interview: Seb Bouin on His 430-foot Cave Route and the Future of Endurance Climbing”

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