Red Bull.com

Don’t you remember Phileas Fogg, that stiff English lord who bet he could travel around the World in less than 80 days? Well, the odyssey that the Pou Brothers have proposed also looks like something straight out of Julio Verne’s head, but a great deal more complicated… A vertical world trip around the world stopping off at some of the most spectacular theatres on the planet.

This pair of brothers born in Vitoria (Basque Country, Spain) aim to free climb the wall that in their minds might be the most emblematic on each continent, always seeking out the most difficult routes. It is a highly ambitious sports project that attempts to push extreme wall climbing to summits never climbed before.

Any of the walls on its own would be a maximum difficulty goal. All of them taken together, then, make a challenge that no climber has ever attempted.

Pure Climbing

As if the complexity of each wall isn’t enough, the Pou Brothers want to even further… They will be going back to the roots of climbing, to the simplest, and therefore most complicated, form of ascent: free climbing. This means that climbers can only ascend using their own strength, with no help from artificial elements. If they fall from the wall, they have to start that same stretch again.

“Although we know for certain that climbing those walls (which on most mountains exceed 800 m in terms of difference in height) using all of the possibilities within our range would be a proper challenge in itself, we want to push ourselves to the limit. We want to complete each target using the purest climbing style that exists.”

Some of the targets on their list have never been free climbed before, and the rest have been attempted by only a handful of climbers. Many of the latter were climbing legends, true heroes who at the time were labelled crazy, such as Wolfgang Gullich, Catherine Destivelle, Kart Albert…