6 years after he first began piecing together the big project on the Traumland block at the Sustenpass, Martin Keller has finally made the first ascent of Ikarus/Daedalus. It's been an epic story of ups and downs, which is most excellently described in his blog, Swizzy bouldering.

About the difficulty of the whole thing, Martin says "...it can be put it in pieces and compared to others: IKARUS is arround a 7C+ linking into a hard 8A - that's about the same numbers as the "neverendingstory" in avers [Magic wood] - just the other way round and may even more physical. The next 5 moves to gain the easy topout-part are "just" around 6C/7A and from the bottom one could think that this ads "arithmetically" nothing to the "NUMBER", but for me it was a BIG diffrence. Up to IKARUS I climbed super safe and controlled. The next 4 "easy" moves I was totally out of controll and my "flight" up DEADALUS nearly "crashed".

So can it be the SAME grade?!

Difficulty-wise it was something totally different but as grades have "depth" its maybe the same grade. But where is the line between the grades? And if a grading-scale can not tell me such an obvious difference in difficulty, then I just dont need such a "tight" grading-system! It would be enough to state that DEADALUS is a hard 8th grade boulder.