Gabriele Moroni Claims 2nd Ascent of Coup de Grace (5.14d/15a)

As the winter bouldering season wound down in Switzerland, Gabriele Moroni left Ticino and headed for the higher elevation of Magic Wood and Sonlerto.  While there, he tried out Dave Graham’s unrepeated route Coup de Grace.  According to his blog, he was “very interested to try Dave's Coup de Graceto see if it could be a possible project for the near future!  Except for the first hard boulder(8b bloc) that needs some more work and better conditions, I did all the other sequences very well so I'm pretty psyched to try seriously next fall!”

Coup de Grace climbs out the steep belly of this massive boulder.  Photo: pintoboulders.blogspot.com

It turns out; he didn’t have to wait for the fall.  Moroni worked out a new sequence for the opening boulder problem that brought it down from V13 to V11.  With the new sequence found, he suggested 5.14d instead of the original 5.15a grade.  Gabriele called it, “the best extreme granite route in the world!”  It took him a total of 12 tries over 6 days.