100 feet of Kneebars: Slayer 5.13c

A short, unfussy record of a strange piece of Wasatch granite, and the reticence is part of the appeal. Slayer is Brent Barghahn's own first ascent in Little Cottonwood Canyon: a leaning 5.11 hand crack, then underclings split by kneebars, then roughly a hundred feet of kneebar shuffling under an arch with a crack in the back that pinches down to less than tips through an upside-down flare crux. He sent it in November 2018, a few weeks after this footage was shot.

This is for climbers who want to see what a hundred feet of kneebars looks like rather than hear anyone explain it. Andy Earl's camera moves through most of the route's sequences and the film runs thirteen minutes, which is right. Skip it if you want the crux. It is deliberately left out, and if that will frustrate you, it will.

What works is the route. Nothing else on the site climbs like this, and the transition into chimneying inside the arch to a hidden no-hands anchor is a genuine surprise. What it gets wrong is that leaving out the crux leaves out the send. The film is a preview of an ascent that happened after the cameras left.

Arc'teryx Presents: Ground Up is Barghahn a few years later on El Niño with Amity Warme, thirty-six minutes on El Capitan. That film is about scale. This one is about one weird line, made by the person who found it, and I like it more than its runtime suggests.