The young Austrian has made the first ascent of Wunderbare Jahre at Warmbad near Villach in Carinthia. He suggests the grade sits at the lower end of 9b, and nobody has repeated the route yet.

Christian Leitner keeps raising his own bar. The 17-year-old from Austria, Chrissi to the national federation, made the first ascent of Wunderbare Jahre at Warmbad above Villach at the end of October. 8a.nu reported the ascent on 30 October. Leitner proposes 9b for the route, at the lower end of the grade. Until now his hardest lines were two 9a+ first ascents, so this is a big jump for a climber who is still a junior.

The line was not his to begin with. Andreas Matuska and Mario Schautz bolted Wunderbare Jahre as their own project, and Leitner got their go-ahead to try it. He was in Carinthia for a training camp with the Austrian national team, which the Polish site wspinanie.pl describes as a youth squad camp. How many days and tries it took him he hasn't said. Climbing History lists no repeat so far.

On Instagram he called it one of the best routes he has ever climbed. He wrote that he had put a lot of time and effort into it and that the moment everything finally came together felt incredible. He also thanked Matuska and Schautz for letting him try their project and paid them big respect for bolting such a great line. As for the grade, he sees it as clearly the hardest route he has done and a real step up from his earlier ascents. Compared with other routes of similar difficulty he has tried, he places it at the lower end of 9b, and he says he is curious to hear what repeaters think.

Until repeaters arrive, 9b remains Leitner's personal proposal—a notable step up from his two previous 9a+ first ascents.

Warmbad is a crag for strong fingers. The steep to overhanging limestone above Villach's spa quarter has around 113 routes, most of them hard, sitting in the shade of the trees at about 610 to 740 metres. Matuska is one of the local equippers, and theCrag credits him with the first ascent of Estrella, a 35-metre 11-, in 2019. The hardest route theCrag lists at the crag is Dead man fighting (8c+), the extension of Dead man walking (10+/11-), first freed by Domen Škofic on 23 June 2018. If Leitner's proposal holds, Wunderbare Jahre would sit three grade steps higher and give this corner of Carinthia a new benchmark.

The camp was busy in other ways too. Leitner also climbed Bügeleisen (8B+), Klem Loskot's classic boulder in the Maltatal. That is the same valley you see in our cover photo, although the picture shows a different crag.

Leitner started climbing at three, competed from six, and was ticking 8a to 8b by age ten.

He is just as sharp on plastic. In September he took silver in U19 lead at the European Youth Championships in Augsburg. He reached the same height as the winner in both the semi-final and the final and only lost on countback to qualification. "Gold would have been possible," his coach Celina Schoibl told Austria Climbing. "Chrissi got just as high as the winner in the final, and in the semi too." She added that there had been more to come on the final route. "That shows the potential he has." The same event brought two bronzes for the Czech youth team.

Teenagers at the top of the grade scale are no longer a surprise. Ola Vekve opened Kjernekraft (9a/+) at 18, and Austria already has Jakob Schubert, who made the first repeat of DNA (9c). It has been a strong autumn for Austrian climbing in general, with Jessica Pilz on Hades and Maggie Kompein on Speed Intégrale both ticking their first 9a. For other recent 9b first ascents, read about Alex Megos on Slice of Heaven and Seb Bouin on Le Chant des Muses.

Sources: 8a.nu, wspinanie.pl, Climbing History, 8a.nu (Napalm in the morning), Austria Climbing, climbing.plus, Climbing History (Illusion of Lactate), theCrag (Warmbad)

Cover: illustrative photo of the Kreuzwand crag in the Maltatal, Carinthia. It shows neither Christian Leitner nor Wunderbare Jahre. The photo is unedited apart from the climbing.place watermark. Photo: Naturpuur, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.