Lor Sabourin Gets First Repeat of Infamous Moab 5.14 Crack

Lor Sabourin has had a lot on their plate. They’re writing a graduate thesis. They’re working full-time as a trauma therapist with domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. They’re flying back and forth cross-country to care for a father in the end stages of a battle with Alzheimer’s. 

Despite this, the non-binary climber never had a bad day while working their latest project, the 100-foot crack Stranger Than Fiction (5.14). In part, this was because of how sensitively they approached the project, with a careful eye for time, place, and self. “There’s this style of projecting where you give up everything, camp underneath the climb, and stay there ‘til you send,” Sabourin told Climbing. “I quickly realized that wasn’t going to be how I could approach this climb. And it also felt like the route deserved better than that. There’s a sense of entitlement when that’s the approach, right? ‘Oh, I’ll just siege it!’”

“For me, that wasn’t the way. I had to be the most balanced, stable form of myself to send this. I needed to show up with my life dialed.”

The Climber

With their send of Stranger earlier this month, Sabourin becomes only the second person to redpoint the desperate crack, after Mason Earle’s first ascent eight years ago. Stranger is Sabourin’s second 5.14 on gear; after Sedona’s East Coast Fist Bump (5.14a) in 2021. 

Stranger Than Fiction, however, has been on the radar even before then. They first had eyes on the project in early 2018, while working All Systems Go (5.13c), but began working the route in earnest in the fall of 2021. “It’s been on my mind forever,” they said. “It’s just such an iconic, wild thing.” 

With everything going on in their life though, it might’ve made sense to push a serious project like Stranger off into the horizon until things calmed down. But Sabourin said, for them, the projecting process wasn’t as much a challenge as a positive force in their life. “At a time when there was so much I wanted to give to other people, to my friends and family, to my work colleagues, being able to have a project that grounded me in doing something I love… I needed that.”

They noted that although there’s nothing simple about the route—in fact, it’s the hardest they’ve tackled in their career—there was something simple, almost meditative, about projecting it. “Going out to the same place, staying in this place I loved, getting to know all the little side canyons in Bartlett, going for little walks… just being out there was so joyful and special to me. It filled me up so much for all the other things I was doing in life. It might have been easy for me to be like, ‘I don’t have time or space for [this project],’ but it actually ended up giving me the time and space I needed for other things in life.”

The Climb

Stranger Than Fiction follows a steep, diagonal sandstone crack for around 100 feet, entailing a meticulous, almost scientific, projecting style, as hard cracks often do. Sabourin said they worked Stranger by breaking it down into a series of mini “pitches,” describing them for us.

The route begins guns blazing, with a wild, inverted offwidth boulder problem leading into a tight, punchy sequence. “Once you get it dialed, it’s not that bad,” Sabourin assured, “but even this season I was falling on it on days when I was otherwise doing really well. It’s hard. You get all amped up, then you have to try really hard right off the ground, but you don’t want to use too much energy.” 

From there, they throw into a finger lock, perform a foot-hand match, and throw up again into, “what’s almost a hand jam, but not quite. There are a lot of places on the route where you have these pseudo hand jams,” Sabourin explained. “They almost seem like jams but they’re not, either because of the angle of the rock or the way it forms. It doesn’t actually feel like you’re jamming. But you can get a micro shake there. At first, I would try to really rest there, but you’ve only done less than 10 feet of climbing [laughs], so you should only shake for a half second.”

At that point, the climber places some cams and enters the first crack sequence. “Now you’re really climbing,” Sabourin said, “and it’s quite steep. I think Pete [Whittaker] and Tom [Randall] were describing it almost as a roof, but it’s not actually roof climbing. It’s more like maybe 50 or 60 degrees, really baggy purples and tight greens.”

The following sequence, Sabourin said, is likely one of the route’s cruxes: an explosive, low-percentage move just after the roof-like section. “You do this sweet series of kneebar moves and get into some paddlehands… and finish with this hero throw—or at least what I do is I hero throw—out to a crimp. So you throw, you bump off that crimp, and into real hand jam. That’s your first real rest. You have a hand jam and a fist jam, and you’re just hanging out in space. It’s incredibly cool.” Sabourin says that section alone is solid 5.14.

The next portion of the route goes at around 5.12+, a string of underclings and power laybacks. “It’s the easiest climbing on the route,” they said, “but it’s actually quite pumpy. You’re still on your arms a lot.” As this sequence continues it becomes increasingly run out and spicy, traversing a flake with vanishing feet. “Eventually your feet are up quite close to your hands, and below the wall just drops off,” Sabourin said. “It’s cool and a bit eerie.” 

The section ends at a large foothold; a rest before another crux. At this point Sabourin removed one of their shoes—bare foot taped underneath—and one of their Hand Jammies in order to unlock precise moves higher up, where the bulk of a shoe and crack glove won’t fit. “You shake out as best you can in the underclings,” said Sabourin, “then you go, set some finger locks, and make a giant lock-off move where you jam your [bare] foot in and get an undercling. For me, it’s an undercling paddlehand. If you’re taller, you could throw a finger lock. …[Then] lock off really, really far.” 

At this point, the natural inclination is to throw to the next hold, a pinky lock. But Sabourin said if you throw, it’s extremely difficult to land the lock. The real beta, for them, is a static dead point. Once landed, they cut feet and throw to a sharp crimp, then bump a few increasingly baggy finger locks to rest on a solid jug and heel hook. 

Here the route pulls into what Sabourin thinks of as a “headwall” section. “You climb a bunch of greens and purples, using a combination—for Sabourin—of paddlehands, ring locks, and occasional finger locks. The crack becomes smaller and steeper as it climbs, and the final body length of the route is nearly 40 or 50 degrees overhung. “At the end, you grab a really high foot jam with your bare foot in the crack. Like, your foot is right up in your face,” Sabourin said. “Here I jam the tips of my right hand in up to the first knuckle. I get this terrible pinky lock with my left hand, and lock it down to my hip, then move into this amazing right finger lock.”

An awkward, tenuous mantle guards the chains. “It’s almost like topping out a boulder problem,” Sabourin said. “I’ve always laughed, like… ‘What if I fall off that mantle?’ That could totally happen. It’d be like missing the top out… but on a 30-meter rock climb.”

Sabourin made no comment on the grade when posting about their send. When they spoke to Climbing, they noted that grade wasn’t particularly important to them, and was also hard to establish given the extensive amount of time they spent on the route in the last several years.

Sabourin said when taking their thoughts along with the cadre of other experienced climbers who’ve worked the route—including Brittany Goris, Whittaker,  Randall, and Earle—the consensus seemed that Stranger was more of a straight 5.14 than the 5.14- Earle originally proposed. “Whether that’s 5.14b or 14c or whatever, I’m not sure,” Sabourin said. “I don’t mean to waffle, it’s just hard to know. I’m not transcendent of grades or anything. They’re important, but I feel disoriented because of how long I was on it.”

The Pioneer

A crucial piece of the Stranger Than Fiction story is that of its first ascensionist, Mason Earle. Once one of the world’s leading crack climbers, he was stricken with a chronic illness equal parts nebulous and debilitating in 2018. Five years later Earle remains severely handicapped, and physical activity of any kind is laborious. This reality put Sabourin in a sobering place. They were repeating a longstanding unrepeated route, established by an immensely strong climber who is still alive, but involuntarily on the sidelines. 

Working Stranger, they said, allowed them to get to know Earle quite well, and felt perhaps more meaningful than repeating a route by another strong climber. “Mason’s total hero status,” they said. “I look up to him a lot as a person; the way he lives. Obviously, as a climber, he’s so prolific, and everything he’s contributed to the climbing community is huge, but also the way he approaches all kinds of challenges, and not just even his illness, but the way he shows up in the world.”

Earle supported them throughout the climb, they said, and the project made their friendship uniquely special. “You walk in people’s footsteps—quite literally—on a climb, going through a process they went through, and he was so sweet and generous to me the whole time. I could see him being in a space where [climbing] was such a huge part of his life and now, because he doesn’t have that process with a specific rock climb or with rock climbing at all, he might not want to hear about it. I would understand. But he wanted to hear about all of it, and he was so supportive, and when I had a go where I fell off the last move and he was like, ‘I had a go like that! I remember how it felt.’”

The Process

As mentioned above, Sabourin’s projecting process was as meditative as it was athletic, a complex blend of strength, stoke, and mindfulness. “Every time I went out there, I just had to be there, to be present,” they said, “because so much else was going on in my life.” 

Quitting wasn’t an option, not because Sabourin needed to send, but precisely because they didn’t need to. “By the time I had carved that time out for me, it didn’t matter if I was making the next link. Yes, I did care. I really, really cared about the climb, and about sending. But I wasn’t in a place where not sending felt like failing.”

Sabourin wrote on their Instagram that, on their last day projecting, they almost knew they were going to send. They clarified this in our interview, noting the feeling wasn’t so much one of success as closure. In fact, it was almost bittersweet.

“When I got up there that last week, and I made some of these final links I knew I needed to make, I could just tell. It wasn’t like I knew it was going to happen the next go, because you can slip off anytime. But I knew I was ready. Sometimes you feel like you’re fighting a route, fighting to send. I didn’t feel that way. I always felt like the route was teaching me. I was collaborating with it.”

There was almost a grieving process with this experience for Sabourin. The last few days before their final push they camped out alone near the climb, walking in the desert, connecting with the space. “I just kept having these moments like, ‘Oh, this could be the last time I’m out here.’ I was so ecstatic to send, but also it was such a constant in my life for the last couple of years.”

Sabourin said working Stranger Than Fiction may have changed the way they’ll approach future projects. Questions like “What is the experience I want to have?” and  “Who are the people I want to spend time with?” will always be front of mind. Careful consideration of these questions was integral to Sabourin’s success on Stranger, and this reflection will be a piece of the puzzle for them in future endeavors. 

“What do I need out of my climbing right now, what is it fueling in my life, and how can I select a route to support that?’”

The post Lor Sabourin Gets First Repeat of Infamous Moab 5.14 Crack appeared first on Climbing.