How Sean Bailey Sent America’s First 5.15d—And Why He Kept Quiet

If Sean “Steezy” Bailey has ever thought something was a big deal, we’ve yet to see it. Last week, the 29-year-old casually announced his first ascent of Duality of Man, a 100-foot cave route near Tucson, Arizona that includes a V15 crux. He proposed the grade 5.15d, the sport’s all-time top grade—the same suggested for Adam Ondra’s Silence, Sébastien Bouin’s DNA, and Jakob Schubert’s B.I.G.

But his announcement, timed to the upcoming premiere of a film about the ascent, came more than 11 months after his actual send—and in the easy, understated way that we’ve come to expect from one of climbing’s most insouciant crushers. “It feels like a lifetime ago,” Bailey tells Climbing. He has to scroll back in his camera roll to confirm the actual send date of March 6, 2025. “It’s funny, I haven’t really thought about too much until just now.”

This level of nonchalance feels out of place against the intense work ethic that sending 5.15d demands. Yet Bailey neither downplays his efforts nor shrugs off the route’s historic difficulty. “I’ve never climbed something so close to my limit,” he admits. “It was just so much harder than anything I’ve done.” Duality of Man took three full seasons to project, and the final season included nearly two months of almost-sending. By the end, his confidence simmered down to pure discipline. “I knew I was going to do it,” he says. “I just didn’t respect how much luck I was going to need.”

The next big thing

Bailey’s journey to Duality of Man began in Celebrity Cave, a scooped-out hunk of golden limestone in Arizona’s Dry Canyon. Picture a Mediterranean grotto pulled from the ocean and planted on a desert bluff. Back in 2018, Bailey’s fellow World Cup competitor Nathaniel Coleman made the first ascent of Lee Majors (5.14c), a burly roof climb and the hardest in the cave. Later, Coleman bolted an extension to Lee Majors, called The Six Million Dollar Man, that exits the cave and moves up a 25-degree headwall via slippery pockets. In late 2021, he invited Bailey to come check it out.

At the time, Bailey was coming off a record season on both plastic and rock. He’d won three of the eight World Cups he’d competed in, then flown to Céüse, France, to check out the hardest route he’d ever done: Alex Megos’s Bibliographie (5.15c). In 24 sessions—his longest process, at the time—he walked away with the third ascent in September 2021. “Since then, I’ve invested a lot more time in projecting and refining my processes tactically,” he says.

The first winter on The Six Million Dollar Man, which Bailey would eventually rename Duality of Man, was a “recon mission.” Bailey focused exclusively on the headwall, where he discovered a V11/12 boulder, a rest, and a 12-move V15 crux. “The actual meat of it is five really hard moves,” he says. That first season, he sent the crux in isolation and committed to the project. But it took a second winter season to figure out how to arrive at the crux with enough power left over from Lee Majors—what Bailey describes as “this energy game.” On its own, the 5.14c requires multiple dynos; it’s easy to get exhausted. However, by early 2023, he was having a lot of “good tries” on the full link-up, making it all the way to the final boulder before he fell.

One last season

Bailey can’t quite remember why he skipped Duality of Man during the 2023-2024 winter—perhaps to go on a bouldering tear that included sending his first V17, Shaolin, and Devilution (V16), with a right-hand throw that elite boulderer Keenan Takahashi described as “top five hardest [moves] in the world.” He’d retired from competition climbing in late 2023, and by the time he returned to Tucson for the 2024-2025 winter season, he’d spent an entire year on rock. “I had been thinking about [Duality of Man] all the time,” he says.

After settling into his friend Ben’s house in Tucson and spending two weeks re-learning the moves on Duality, Bailey narrowed in on the details of his redpoint process. It had been a notoriously hot year for Tucson, with more than 112 days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In the winter, Celebrity Cave faced the sun all day, and the only hours that were climbable were just before dusk.

Bailey would start his days slowly, driving an hour from Tucson and hiking up for 30 minutes in the afternoon. Just as the sun was going down, he’d begin his warm up and try to send the crux boulder in one burn. “That was usually my first little test to see if I was feeling good,” he says. Then he’d come down, rest, and try for a send go, making just one full try per day. He also experimented with timing his tries for the highest gap between the temperature and the dewpoint—a measurement that he started to believe was more useful than humidity.

When he wasn’t checking the dewpoint or making attempts on the route, Bailey spent his rest days working on his laptop at home. He and his partner, Olympic silver medalist Miho Nonaka, had just rented a space in Tokyo to build a new bouldering gym, and there was a ton of work to prepare for its opening. “I was doing a bunch of wall designing and picking holds out,” he says, adding that the work was far from relaxing. “On the ‘off’ days, I’d just work all day, and on the ‘on’ days, I’d go try the route and it would fucking suck and I’d fall off it. I look back on it fondly, but it was hectic.”

The waiting game

The process of working Duality of Man was so unpredictable that it challenged even Bailey’s patience. “It’s always the same process of, you don’t know you can do it, and it’s fun, and you’re learning, and everything’s improving,” he says, “and then you hit this switch. The switch always comes from that single idea: I can do this. After you have that thought, everything changes and you’re in it.”

In January 2025, that switch arrived. Bailey finally had a nearly flawless try, where he made it through all of Lee Majors, past the first boulder, and through the crux—right up to the last move. “Ben [Neilson] had always been joking at me that I’d fall on this move,” says Bailey, laughing. “I was telling him not to put it in the ether. And then I fell, and I was like, ‘You fucking dick, dude.’” For next two months, Bailey lived with a constant and nagging certainty: he knew he could 100% do the route, but didn’t know what day, if any, he would.

March 6, he says, was just another day. Nothing special or momentous hinted at the send. Bailey got through Lee Majors with decent efficiency, then pulled the first five moves of the lower crux. There was a small reset where he collected his mind. “It was the second time I’ve been up there,” he says. “I was like, 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.” He pulled off the V15, held on through the last move, and after four years of work, finally clipped the chains.

Then he shut up about it. Instead of reveling in the glory of sending America’s hardest proposed route, Bailey decided to reserve his big public announcement until the film was ready to show. His reason was surprisingly practical. “I think in today’s age, the hype moment only happens once,” he says. “Trying to make sure that was decently close to the film coming out kind of made the most sense.” He adds that funding the film was a priority, and he really wants his photographer, Neilson, to get paid for his work. For the next 11 months, he processed the accomplishment in private, with no social media reactions to boost or dampen his satisfaction. Overall, he calls this “a good thing.”

On May 4, 2025, Bailey and Nonaka opened their new gym, Next Gen Bouldering, in the outskirts of Tokyo, and it’s been keeping them busy since then. “A lot of my energy has been going into setting and all the usual stuff that goes into a gym, but on the backend, I’ve been trying to go on some trips, too,” says Bailey. In November, he flew to Switzerland and made the second ascent of Aidan Roberts’s Arrival of the Birds, marking Bailey’s third V17. This spring, he’s planning to sport climb at the Red River Gorge in Kentucky. “I’m psyched on everything, but just trying to make sure I’m investing enough time in all the things I’m trying to do,” he says. We can’t wait to hear about his future sends—even if we have to wait a year to celebrate.

Tickets for the Mellow film tour, which premieres in Boulder, Colorado, on February 27, are available now.

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