Skaha now has its very first 5.14. Nexus-6 (5.14a) was established by Kevin Wilkinson in June after a number of days of effort, significantly more effort than he had put into repeating a number of the harder lines at the Bluffs.

Nexus-6 opens with a powerful start sequence that leads across Catapult and into Firewire before launching up the hanging arete of Replicant. Having solved the challenge of the intial wall, it was the stamini required to compelte the 5.13+ finishing sequence of the Replicant that forestalled the first redpoint for a number of days.

And just to keep himself busy, Kevin also added a number of other fine 5.13+ routes to the Bluffs - More Human than Human (13c) takes a very steep wall left of Catapult, and supercedes the old, neglected route Donkey Puncher, and Surface of the Sun (13c) at Raven's Wall.

This latter route stimulated development of several other hard routes on the steep south face of Raven's Castle, aided by the untypically cool temperatures in late June - Rusty Trombone (13d) by Adam Tutte and Vanishing Point (12d) by Aaron Culver.

Route info will be published in the next new route update, slated to appear the week of Sept 6th.

A bit of important news from BC Parks that crept under the skaha.org radar....

At an initial size of 179 hectares, the new Skaha Bluffs Park (brought into force on April 21, 2010) protects a popular climbing area and important wildlife habitat. Land within the provincial park falls under the jurisdiction of BC Parks and provisions of the Park Act and its regulations apply.