Bailey locked into a wild Rose move on the Duality of Man headwall, with its porcelain-hard orange-and-white rock and microscopic handholds. Photo by Ben Neilson (@neilson.ben)
5.15d Comes to America
The Dry Canyon, an hour southeast of Tucson, Arizona, is a forbidding place. Tucked within the sere Whetstone Mountains in the Sonoran Desert, the Dry is comprised of a scarp of limestone running up a sunbaked hill, home to scree, cacti, rattlesnakes…and sometimes sport climbers. The one time I visited, we busted our rental car’s oil pan on the 4x4 road and I got heat exhaustion walking up the hill, albeit it in late April, when the crag is well out of season.
With 100-plus mostly attainable sport routes in the 5.10–5.14 range, this remote desert crag hardly seems like a place where you might find America’s hardest sport climb. But it is. It’s here, in the Celebrity Cave at the top of the hill, that you’ll find Duality of Man, a 5.15d freed by Sean Bailey (@seanbailey) in March 2025, a process documented in the inaugural, 2026 American Climbing Journal.
There are only five total proposed 5.15d’s (9c’s) in the world, beginning with Adam Ondra’s Silence at Flatanger, Norway, climbed in 2017. (The Céüse, France, route Bibliographie, which Alex Megos freed in 2020 and originally graded 9c, has since dropped to consensus 9b+.) The article below gets more into the breakdown and unique difficulties with Duality. But perhaps the most notable thing with this 9c and the four others is that they all took huge campaigns by top climbers and they all remain unrepeated, showing just how much dedication—and often specialization—is needed for the world’s hardest sport climbs.
—Matt Samet, Editor, American Climbing Journal
A pulled-back view of Duality of Man. The route was bolted two-odd decades ago but didn’t go free until 2025. Photo by Ben Neilson (@neilson.ben)
How Sean Bailey dug deep to put up the States’—if not the world’s—hardest sport climb
At present, there are only five routes given 9c (5.15d) on Earth, all unrepeated: Silence, put up by Adam Ondra in 2017 in the Hanshelleren Cave, Flatanger, Norway; DNA, put up by Seb Bouin at La Ramirole, Verdon Gorge, France, in 2022; B.I.G., also in the Hanshelleren Cave, its first ascent livestreamed by Jakob Schubert in 2023; Duality of Man in the Celebrity Cave, Dry Canyon, Arizona, freed by Sean Bailey in March 2025; and Café Colombia at Margalef, Spain, completed by Jorge Díaz-Rullo in March 2026.
But here’s the thing about Duality, the first (and so far only) 5.15d on American soil: If you run its discrete sections through the online grade calculator Darth Grader—5.14c to a medium rest to V11/12 to another medium rest to V15—Darth spits out a new grade altogether: “9c+ [or 5.16a] soft.” (For comparison, the only other one of the world’s 9c’s with a crux this hard is Silence, where some have said the upside-down compression and crack boulder might even be V16, though it does come after a no-hands knee-bar.) So, it’s possible that Duality is the world’s first 5.16. However, given that it is way up a hill at the end of a gnarly 4x4 road and faces almost due south in the sere, remote Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona, it may be some time before the climb sees a repeat. Well, that plus the insane difficulty of the climbing.
Duality’s first half is the existing sport route Lee Majors, a 5.14c cave tackling tufas, pockets, pinches, and tiered roofs via improbable dynos and knee-bars. The line was bolted by CP Little in the Dry’s early days and freed by Nathaniel Coleman in autumn 2018. Above Lee Majors’s anchor is an extension that Coleman bolted after his FA, rapping in off upper anchors placed by Little. As Coleman tried the moves, a key hold broke on the 25°-overhanging headwall, rendering the crux harder. The full climb is outlandish, a massive roof on drippy, Spanish-style limestone to a white- and orange-streaked headwall, its rock porcelain smooth.
Sean Bailey on the headwall of Duality of Man, Dry Canyon, Arizona, a 5.15d—America’s first—that he freed in March 2025. The route links the 5.14c cave route Lee Majors (FFA: Nathaniel Coleman) into two extremely difficult boulder problems on the headwall, the final one—the crux—being a complex V15 on terrible holds. Photo by Ben Neilson (@neilson.ben)
It is also remarkable at an area that, with the nearby Farmhouse, has remnants of “90s ethics,” that there’s only one artificial hold, an enhanced gaston on a V11/12 boulder at the start. CP Little clearly saw that the climb could be done by someone, someday, and left it in a nearly 100 percent natural state—which may just be needed to cultivate climbs this hard. (Both of the Hanshelleren Cave routes, on featured gneiss, are natural, while DNA has, as is common on limestone, glue reinforcing at least one hold that broke.)
That someone was Sean Bailey, who spent three seasons on Duality—his final one, according to Climbing.com, being a concerted two-month push with lots of “almost sending”—often committing to evening sessions to avoid the heat and finally figuring out that he had his best burns when there was the biggest delta between the ambient temperature and the dewpoint.
Bailey is an almost deliberately low-profile phenom, having made a rare repeat of the Céüse 5.15c Bibliographie in 2021 and the only repeat, in November 2025, of Aidan Roberts’s mysterious crimp line Arrival of the Birds in Chironico, Switzerland, given 9A/V17 but sometimes speculated to be harder. On Bailey’s send go of Duality, only the second time he’d made it through the middle V11/12 and well into the V15, he told himself, “[All] right, this is finally the fucking moment. I can finally take control of the situation again, and I’m just going to make it happen.”
New Cutting Edge Episode—The South Face of Kichatna Spire
The south face of Kichatna Spire in Alaska was one of the great unclimbed walls of North America. Until July. On their second attempt in two years, young American alpinists Eli Spitulnik and Michael Telstad climbed the 1,000-meter face with a blend of difficult aid and tricky mixed, placing no bolts. In a tight weather window, they blazed up and down the face in a little over three days, with only a four-hour bivy and some catnaps along the way, leading to a level of exhaustion that pushed them to the brink of delirium.
In this episode, host Jim Aikman interviews Eli and Michael about their adventure, explores the rich, colorful history of the Kichatna Mountains with legendary alpinist Conrad Anker and American Alpine Journal Editor Dougald MacDonald, and shares recorded tales from Al DeMaria and Peter Geiser, two members of the very first climbers to enter the Kichatnas, way back in 1965.
The Cutting Edge is sponsored by:
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Want more thoughtful, deeply researched writing on the cutting edge of North American and international rock climbing in your mailbox? Then join the American Alpine Club at the Partner or higher level, and opt in to receive the inaugural, 224-page 2026 American Climbing Journal! With stories like Adam Ondra flashing Lexicon (E11), Katie Lamb sending The Dark Side (V16), Connor Herson’s crazy pogo on the first 5.15a trad line—ever—plus other features from or about Sasha DiGiulian, Noah Wheeler, Jonathan Siegrist, Sungsu Lee, Hamish McArthur, Mary Eden, Seb Berthe, Chris Deuto, and so many others, the 2026 ACJ offers the world’s best climbing stories about the world’s hardest and most interesting rock climbs.
