While offering moral support to his good friend Miles Gibson, who was trying a project up at Wimberry, a fantastic but often green and dirty crag in the Chew valley, Ben Heason thought he may as well try something tricky up there himself.

Having already climbed most of the routes up to E5 at the crag it was obvious he'd need to clean up a line.

Ben continues: "I was keen to try the hardest thing there, but couldn’t get on Sam Whittaker’s E9 “Appointment with Death” until I’d at least had a good bash at trying the super classic E7 “Appointment with Fear” as they share the same start. Miles had initially enticed me up there in the first place by offering to clean it up for me so that I could try and flash it – but unfortunately that never happened; I think he may have become a little side-tracked.

Kevin Thaw’s route, “Order of the Phoenix” seemed the obvious next choice. It looked a nice line and seemed the cleanest of the harder routes up there. (Madman, although an enticing line, was unfortunately particularly luminous green) Kevin gave the route E9 6c and I didn’t find out until after I’d first tried it that it had been downgraded to E8. Still, with fantastic moves up a beautiful sustained arête I thought I’d persevere.

Physically it’s the most sustained hard grit route I’ve done so far with no particularly easy moves on it. The climbing is highly technical, often with tenuous footholds and a crux slap up the arête from a 1-finger pebble (by which time the gear/rope is redundant), culminating with taking a small pebble in each hand to make a super high step to a

smeary top-out. Kevin lead the route with a low side runner in Coffin Crack, in an attempt to avoid the nasty boulder-strewn landing should the worst happen… Even without this it felt like E8 rather than E9 (so long as you trust the pebbles…) My ascent went smoothly but it's probably quite stern for the grade."

Fortunately Miles did his new route Dangermouse at E9 7A later that day - a fantastic effort and not a bad day!