The 23-year-old American needed seven sessions over two trips to repeat Nalle Hukkataival's 9A at Lappnor in Finland. He sent it in May and has now released a film of the ascent.

Nalle Hukkataival spent nearly four years on Burden of Dreams before he topped it out in 2016. The short boulder on a 45-degree face at Lappnor was the world's first 9A, and for more than six years nobody repeated it, although Daniel Woods and Shawn Raboutou were among those who tried. Will Bosi finally broke the spell in April 2023. Simon Lorenzi, Elias Iagnemma, Lee Sungsu and Makoto Yamauchi followed, and on 14 May 2026 Noah Wheeler made the seventh ascent. We wrote about Lee's two sends here.

Wheeler's first trip, last October, was largely a washout. The boulder stayed wet for two weeks and he got just three sessions in. This spring he came back for four more. He had all the moves and links down fairly solidly in the very first session and reached the last move from the start every time, but he just couldn't stick it. "Burden demanded something different than optimization for me to unlock it, it demanded reorientation," he told Vertical-Life. The night before the send he hardly slept and spent the hours working on his head, looking for a place where he would feel comfortable doing that last move.

The final act had a twist. Two goes before the real send he topped out, but his left foot had touched the pad on the first cut-loose move. His flight home was booked for 6 a.m. the next day. "Some moments are so surreal that they feel unfinished even after they've happened," he wrote on Instagram. Wheeler used the drop-knee sequence that Lorenzi and every later ascensionist except Iagnemma have climbed, and guesses it is half a grade to a full grade easier than Nalle's original beta. On his 8a.nu logbook he marked the problem soft.

It is his third 9A, after Daniel Woods's Return of the Sleepwalker in December 2024 and Sean Bailey's Shaolin in March 2025, both at Red Rocks. He reckons Burden is objectively harder than Shaolin, but it suits him so well that it felt easier. He did it four months after fully rupturing the A2 pulley in his left ring finger, and unlike some of his predecessors he never trained on a replica. The film of the send came out this week.

Sources: Gripped, 8a.nu, PlanetMountain, Gripped (May 2026), Lacrux

Photo: Granite shore of the Hanko peninsula, Pöllö, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons