Seattle Bouldering Competition

This weekend Laura and I traveled up to Seattle for the annual bouldering competition at Stone Gardens. It’s the biggest climbing competition in the state, climbers from all over the north-west made the trip, and we had competed the previous two years so didn’t want to miss it. A lot of the climbing team from the warehouse came up as well and did really well. Jimmy did awesome winning the men’s advanced category, and would have qualified for the open men’s finals if he had entered that category. I was pretty happy with my performance, I came in 13^th in the male advanced category which was a big improvement on my 27^th place last year. Laura did really well finishing 8^th in her category, improving again on her result from last year. So overall it was a good day for everyone.

We stuck around for the open finals at the end, where the best of the climbers compete for the big prizes. The problems were really well set and looked really hard, and most importantly separated the field well. Nobody had sent the final men’s problem, until Sean McColl who qualified first tried it finally. It was awesome to see Sean McColl who is a pro climber and former World Champion from Vancouver climb. We had met him in Ceuse France over the summer trying some really hard routes so we knew what he was capable of. He made the final problem look easy, and put on a show for the audience. Here's a video I got of him flashing it, where I think you can get a feel of the atmosphere in the gym as he sent it.