Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.
William Moss, 18, recently made the first free ascent of Best Things in Life Are Free (BT) at the Gunks’s Twilight Zone Buttress. Moss graded the 100-foot pitch 5.14d R, making it one of the world’s hardest trad routes.
BT is, effectively, a link up of Bro-Zone (5.14a/b) into an A4 roof called Best Things in Life Aren’t Free, first climbed in 1984. Leaving the Grand Traverse “GT” Ledge, BT tackles a physical section of 5.11+ R, then a V7 two-finger-crimp boulder, followed up immediately with a section of “5.13ish” climbing to a marginal bat-hang rest. Leaving the rest, BT fires up a powerful V10 boulder and then a V11+ roof—already 20 feet above a small nut and finger-sized cam—which Moss said is best climbed feet first “to get purchase on the slopers mid-roof.” The pitch ends via the 5.12d roof of French Connection. Moss said this route is firmly in the “R” category and wore a helmet to protect himself from the wild fall potential.
BT’s proposed grade of 5.14d makes it one of the world’s hardest trad pitches, and only the second ever to be explicitly graded as such. We should note that BT does have three bolts, all from pre-existing mixed lines, though Moss clipped only two: protecting the low V7 boulder on Bro-Zone and a 5.13 section on Ozone. Both of BT’s double-digit boulders are naturally protected.
View this post on Instagram
Moss began trad climbing just three years ago but has competed indoors for most of his life, traveling across the country and placing as high as sixth in lead at Nationals. He had bouldered V10 outdoors and redpointed 5.13b—low grades, he says, due to a lack of sport climbing nearby—but has since climbed V13 and 5.14c. Moss told Climbing he has always been interested in more adventurous forms of the sport, but that trad climbing in particular looked expensive. Thankfully, in 2020, while bouldering at the schist outcropping Rat Rock in Central Park, Manhattan, his friend Carter Ley offered to teach him how to trad climb—no investment required.
The pair headed to the Gunks, and on his third day out Moss jumped on a 5.12a—a technical grade well below his threshold of falling. But Ley recommended he practice falling on his gear. “I was always more of an endurance sport climber, but there’s just not a lot of bolted climbing near the New York area,” Moss explained. “And [in the Gunks I realized that] I could really use my talent as a sport climber on gear climbs, and that falling there was safe. That stigma of ‘you can’t fall on trad’ is totally not true. And that really opened my eyes.”
Moss sent Ozone (5.13d) on his third go in November 2020, and Bro-Zone not long after. In September 2021 he made the first free ascent of Friend Zone—ushering in a new level of trad climbing to the Gunks’s storied cliffs—before traveling west in autumn 2022 and making the first all-gear ascent of Index, Washington’s, first 5.14: En Passant (5.14a R). Moss’s trad-climbing learning curve appeared to be anything but steep.
View this post on Instagram
After Moss FA’d Friend Zone, he said it took him a season “to even think about doing the moves” on BT, thanks to the line’s sheer steepness and its scarcity of gear or bolts. It’s pretty dang hard to work a steep line like BT whether rapping in from above or climbing in from below, but because of the difficulty and danger, Moss said he nonetheless wanted to “get it wired” before embarking on a real redpoint attempt. “I took some falls on purpose just to see what it was like. But I never wanted to fall during the upside-down [crux],” he said. Moss prepared for BT by training his biceps for the stout, mid-crux undercling match, and by strengthening his tibialis anterior (shins) to hold a marginal bat-hang rest before the crux of Friend Zone. Initially, he could barely stay in there for eight seconds before falling out. He began training bat hangs by hanging off of four-pad edges in the climbing gym, and soon was hanging from his feet for nearly 20 seconds. BT went down not long after.
Anthony Walsh is a digital editor at Climbing.