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On December 23, 2023, Carlo Traversi topped out The Dark Side (V16), completing the first ascent of his (and Yosemite’s) hardest boulder problem. The Dark Side is located on the Thriller Boulder, in the woods adjacent to Camp 4. It is a deceivingly simple-looking line that follows a long, right-trending sloper rail, joining The Force (V9) near the lip.
Traversi, 35, has pursued hard climbing in Yosemite for the last decade. He’s redpointed 5.14c gear lines like Magic Line and Meltdown (second ascent), as well as Tieranny (V14, also second ascent). Traversi is one of the few at the cutting edge of both bouldering and trad climbing (and he’s climbed 5.15 on bolts), consistently chipping away at this or that project, spanning across the mediums. The Dark Side is his latest chapter: “a culmination of all those years.”
Climbing spoke with Traversi over the phone shortly after his ascent. His words have been edited for clarity and length.
On learning about The Dark Side
Traversi: When I got the Camp 4 “Bouldering Tour” when I was really young, in maybe 2003, I remember seeing Thriller (V10), but when you look at the left side of that wall, where The Dark Side is, and there’s no chalk, it doesn’t look like there’s a boulder problem. I couldn’t see it then. I still couldn’t see it when I did Thriller on a trip in 2009 or so. It wasn’t until I came back in 2013 that I thought, oh, this is something. There’s something here. Really, we just saw this cool sloper rail in the middle of the boulder problem and it was just this funny, I wonder if we can even hang on those slopers kind of thing. In 2013 I’d already climbed V15, and I remember not being able to hold the sloper rail then. I could hold the position off a ladder, but not really. I kept checking in on The Dark Side over the course of the last 10 years. I didn’t really start actively trying it until around 2015.
On The Dark Side itself
The Dark Side has a V9 intro into a sustained V15, and those intro moves change the setup for the crux. All told, it is 17 moves from start to lip.
It starts off on a jug rail, an actual jug! The feature continues and it becomes a slopey—but good—hold for your right hand, and then you get these two really, really bad crimps: the crux holds. The left hand is the one that you spend the most time on, and there’s a crystal that goes right into your index pad, that’s the one that splits. You load the left hand, and basically put all your weight on it to reset your feet. Then you do a big lock off and enter the sloper-rail section.
The sloper rail is really bad. One of the worst slopers I’ve ever grabbed, for sure. You shuffle along this rail for eight or nine hand movements. It really feels like you’re hangboarding on the Beastmaker 2000 45-degree sloper. Then you get into this crimp rail, which is better than the crimps at the beginning but still very thin. That puts you into a high gaston, and then one last big lock off to a hold that is basically the end of The Force, which comes in from the right.
The Dark Side is weird for a hard problem. I’ve never seen a problem that is V15 or harder that looks like it. It either looks impossible without chalk on it, or it looks kind of chill when it’s chalked up.
On climbing on the problem with others
The communal aspect of the climbing in Yosemite is one of the things that I appreciate the most. Especially in the winter, it feels like this family environment: I know almost everybody who’s bouldering there in the winter. If I don’t know them, it seems like everyone has this same mindset in treating other people with respect and being encouraging. That feeling of community is a huge part of what makes it one of my favourite places to be and I hope that tradition remains.
I think Randy Puro started The Dark Side around the same time I did. Randy’s a legend, he’s a magician on the Valley granite, especially on the boulders. Then, I think in 2020, I climbed on it with Jimmy Webb and Shawn Raboutou. Jimmy got really close. I thought for sure he was going to do it; he had it in two overlapping sections. I was doing well, but I didn’t feel like a send was imminent, and the frustrations of projecting were getting to me. Shawn looked pretty good on it too, but he was on a shorter trip.
I think Jimmy got frustrated by the split fingertip situation. There’s a hold on it that often splits your tip after one try. It kind of gets into your head, you’re like, I get one try from the ground today. If I don’t send it, I’m probably going to split my tip, and I won’t be able to try it for another 10 days. I think Jimmy got into that, and I think he said he had 10 or 15 days like that and got really close but also frustrated. Of course he was physically capable of doing it, it just didn’t work out.
On the fickle nature of the boulder
That’s the thing about this boulder problem; a lot of people are physically capable of climbing it. I don’t pretend to be the strongest or think I’m the strongest. It is just a really unique boulder problem: so many things have to line up (conditions, skin) and then you have to execute, and if you don’t execute, you don’t really get extra tries. A boulder like that is rare. Plus, it is frustrating, you know, to rely so much on things that aren’t in your control. Jimmy and I joked about how if the conditions were always perfect, and you never split your tip on it, it would probably be V14. But that’s not what it is. It is super fickle. And the conditions are super fickle! The window that I climbed it in was twenty minutes. On either end of that window I couldn’t pull on to sections that I can campus in good conditions. It is such an anomaly!
Some days I would go and I would only try the sloper rail because I knew that if I grabbed on to the crimps near the start I would split my tip. So I would try the sloper rail section and if it felt bad I would sit there for thirty minutes, wait for the conditions to change, and try it again, and if it felt good, I would be like okay, it’s good right now. I’ve got to try it from the bottom.
So I’d pull on from the bottom, and if you make one mistake on this thing, you’re off: if your finger is on the wrong crystal, you’re off—it was down to that level of nuance. Only, you weren’t just off, you’ve split your tip! Well, I guess I’ll try again in ten days. Some days, the sloper rail would never feel good and I wouldn’t even try from the start. It just wasn’t worth it. It was a lot of patience. It was an experience of patience.
On transitioning from “checking in” to focusing on the boulder
I was in the Valley in February 2023 hoping to climb on another project I was close on, but it was totally soaked and covered in ice—unclimbable. I tried to shovel off the snow and clean it up but it still wasn’t climbable. I wasn’t sure what to do, I really wanted to try hard that day. So I thought, I’ll go to Camp 4, I’ll do a little warm up circuit, and check in on The Dark Side.
I chalked it all up again. It had been about a year. The session started off terrible, but got better as the day progressed. I thought, okay, I’ll try it from the two crimps. That’s kind of a logical stand start; they are the highest holds you can reach from the ground, and they are the crux holds. So I pulled on from there, and it felt like velcro. I climbed it to the end, and it was just like holy shit, what just happened? Everything clicked. That was the first time. I couldn’t believe it.
I didn’t really want to call it a problem that day, because that wasn’t my original vision of starting on the obvious jug. I’m not a fan of multiple starts on problems, and that’s just not where the line starts: the rail keeps going lower. From those two crimps I think it is probably V15, and the lower start is maybe V8 or 9. But adding it in, especially with skin, ramps it up a lot—more than I expected, to be honest!
That day, I got pretty close to doing it from the bottom. I fell in the sloper section, after feeling kind of slippery. Turns out I split my tip on the crimp, and I was bleeding and slipping on my blood. I put another four or five days into it last year, trying to put it all together. Conditions. Splitting two more tips. It just didn’t line up. Then it got too hot.
Going into this season, I did feel this pressure to seize this opportunity with all the beta and knowledge I had acquired. There was this day two weeks before I did it where things really lined up: It felt insanely sticky, I did my warm-up circuit, I felt like I was on fire! I got one try and made a small mistake on the sloper rail, fell, saw that I split my tip, and that was that [laughs].
On the day he sent
It was a day trip from Sacramento. I didn’t feel particularly good warming up. There were a ton of people at the boulder, which isn’t normal for that time of year, and can be kind of distracting, but I thought, you know, I’m just going to hangout with everyone here, have a good time, and try my thing. Whatever. Everyone was super friendly, it was fun. I got two tries and it was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. Mostly, I was just like holy shit, I’ve tried twice and haven’t split my tip. I didn’t even have a crease on my finger! I’ve never gotten three tries from the start on this thing, ever. So, I waited until the sloper rail felt pretty good, and then pulled on, and just kind of pulled through. It didn’t feel incredible. It felt like I was fighting through sections more than I should have, but things lined up.
I nearly passed out on top of the boulder. It felt like a weird dream. It is a weird moment to have. You’re so used to failing. I had to go check the video camera to make sure I actually did it!
Hard climbing is so special for that, it really taps you into this strange flow state. Everything you’ve learned in climbing, everything you’ve programmed, is just at work. You’re not telling yourself anything. Your body is doing what it knows to do.
On 20 years in Yosemite Valley, and being a part of history
Yosemite is a place where I’ve poured so much time and energy as a climber. It was the first place I really climbed outside, and I put so much time in here when I was younger, and took beat down after beat down. I’ve had so many humbling experiences here where I really felt like I was a terrible climber, and that I was never going to be good. So after twenty years it’s nice to have something that allows me to be like okay, I’ve mastered something here. Not everything, just one thing. There’s a lot more lessons to be learned for me in Yosemite, but I feel like The Dark Side is a nice culmination for all that work.
You don’t always get that satisfaction, you know? Sometimes you put all the work in, and make a lot of personal progress, but there’s nothing to show for it. That’s fine. But it is cool to have something that is a culmination of my time in Yosemite. There’s nowhere else where I’ve put so much time and energy. I felt like, for a long time, I didn’t have much to show for my time here. So this felt extra special in that regard; I proved something to myself.
I put the climbing history in Yosemite on a pedestal for so long, and now I did something that is a part of that. It is more important to me than I expected.