Backtracking...

Almost 3 months ago now i made the tough decision to quit my top Wall St job and take a year or two out to realise a dream of travelling and spending time in some of the world's premier bouldering destinations. The financial world had gone into meltdown and with no near-term fix in sight it seemed right timing wise.

With the popularity of modern day bouldering expanding at a rapid rate coming up with a specific list of exactly where to go and when was tough, globally there is just so many top places to climb now. However after some hard deliberation i came up with the below plan of action (subject to some change of course as the year goes on...)

1. What better place to begin than the global home of bouldering - Fontainebleau

2. Continuing the stay in Europe, moving onto the mountain granite in the Swiss Alps

3. From there with the summer heat shutting Europe down we will move to the cooler winter temps in South Africa's Rocklands

4. By now it will be fall 09 and the only place to be at this time is the USA. Many places to visit here but starting in the east and heading west seems to make sense...Gunks in NY state, Colarado, Utah sandstone, Yosemite and Bishop in California, Hueco Tanks in Texas..the list is long...

So with a plan in place in early March i headed off to Dover from my parents house in Essex to begin a two month stint in the magical forest of Fontainebleau in France. So why no blog till June 1st you may ask?

In rural France wireless internet is still a bit of a mystery i am afraid to say and so that put paid to my early blogging plans. However, after this introductory post my next offering will attempt to summarise what i got up to in the forest before i moved to the Swiss Alps two weeks ago. Suffice to say going forward i will try and update this blog a little more often than every 3 months! 

So to finish off my first post aside from visiting these temples of rock what am i actually intending to do here? Climb, of course, but more specifically i would like to climb the classic boulder problems in each place, "the rites of passage" you might say, because these are the climbs that stay with you when you leave an area so it seems to make sense. 

However no climbing blog is complete without some mention of climbing grades, so lets start here. Aside from scaling the classic lines i have also set myself two (rough) targets with regards to the grades of the boulder problems...

1. To climb an 8a or harder bloc in each area i visit

2. To try and climb an 8b bloc somewhere along the way and achieve this magical grade of difficulty.

So that's its.... that's the plan and with the number 8 being so pivotal "life in the 8th lane" seemed like a clever sort of title. So far i have climbed an 8a bloc in Fontainbleau and in the last week managed two in Swiss so i'm hitting my numbers but really that's only a fraction of the story. Beyond grades I have climbed some truly great, great lines. Read on....