03 Apr [VIDEO] Dave McLeod and the crazy ascnet of Indian Face

Wales, Clogwyn Du’r Arddu or Cloggy, defined by Leo Houlding “the most beautiful crag in the world”. Here in 1986 the British master Johnny Dawes made one of his most crazy feats, the ascent of Indian Face E9 6c, a technically difficult route with extremely dangerous if not deadly falls.

A total and totalizing adventure for Johnny:“For me Indian Face was the ultimate realization of a dream that a few years ago was solid and perfect in my mind. An expressive purity so personal that it could transcend the obvious cosmic futility of life; the friendship and the activities are of some relief against a desperation with deep roots, but only the climb seemed to have a germ of depth in all its animated skirmishes of life and death … so the beauty of Indian Face was not for me the pleasure of climbing or in realization, but in the pleasure of having exorcised a self-destructive cage that I had created with my own hands, perhaps in the weak possibility that he could even build a meager memory of it. “

This route, wrapped in myth and also by terror, was very rarely considered but in 2010, Dave McLeod succeeded in climbing it and in this video he tells those truly thrilling moments.