Born From the Climbing Life: Episode 4 — Drifter's Escape, The World's Hardest Trad Climb

The closing episode of Black Diamond's series, and the one the other three were building toward. Drifter's Escape sits five pitches up a Squamish wall: V11 moves above an offset Z4 Camalot, 5.13 crack climbing above that, then another V11 boulder problem. In the summer of 2025, after two seasons and roughly twenty attempts, Connor Herson made the first ascent and proposed 5.15a, which would make it the hardest trad route in the world. Highpoint Productions filmed, directed, and cut it, and the arithmetic of the route does most of the dramatic work: hard bouldering, small gear, hundreds of feet of air. If you only watch one chapter of this series, watch this one, but the earlier episodes are what give the send its weight.