Bronwyn Hodgins repeats Necronomicon horizontal roof crack at Canyonlands, USA
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Lindsey Hamm
Bronwyn Hodgins has made a very impressive repeat of Necronomicon, the huge horizontal roof crack located below the White Rim Trail in America's Canyonlands National Park, first ascended by Jean-Pierre Ouellet in 2011.
This summer the Canadian completed a 65-day climbing trip to NW coast of Greenland where she put up a flurry of new routes, and on her return she spent two months training on roof cracks in Squamish as well as at a friend's "crack shack" before heading to Utah. At Moab she almost flashed the classic The Crack House (13a), proving to herself that she was on fine form, and then she needed just five sessions to send Necronomicon.
The route starts with a long section of wide hands and fists, thins down significantly for several body lengths at the crux, before reaching the obvious double knee bar rest and then finishing on wide hands and fists. Glove tactics proved crucial to success: Hodgins taped her hands with thin tape and wore crack climbing gloves for the first half, ripped off the gloves to fight her way through the thin crux, and put them back on again after the no-hands rest. The devil is in the details.
Commenting on IG, Hodgins stated "My sequence on Necronomicon (13d) involved multiple 360s and a no-hands double knee bar!! I also found a hands-free bat hang on heel-toe locks but was too nervous to commit to that one on the send." What she did commit to though on the send was skipping the gear on the crux, resulting in an extremely long runout to the next piece of gear.
Necronomicon was first repeated by Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker in 2019, while Mary Eden made the first female ascent only a few weeks ago. The splitter checks in as Hodgins' hardest trad single pitch to date, and follows in the wake of the aforementioned new routes in Greenland and, importantly, her repeat of Golden Gate on El Capitan in Yosemite in 2021 and Freerider in 2018.
