How Didier Berthod Established One of the Hardest Crack Boulders in the U.S.

I. Lost in the desert

Didier Berthod slinks into a corner booth at a crowded bakery in Moab, Utah. It’s August 18, 2025, and far too hot to comfortably walk around town. The 44-year-old former monk wears baggy shorts and a Black Diamond t-shirt. He’s beaming, and for good reason: He just made the first ascent of an abandoned Mason Earle project, The Anomaly, a few hours ago. If the proposed grade, V13, holds up, it could be among the hardest crack boulders in the United States.

“I’m so fucking happy,” he admits, shaking his head. He’s sporting a penny-sized gobie on his right wrist, but is otherwise unscathed and relaxed.

Two months ago, Berthod drove from Squamish to Moab following the release of The Cobra and the Heart, in which intimate details of his life and close relationships played out onscreen in theaters across more than 40 countries. The two-hour film is the pièce de résistance for Reel Rock’s 2025 program. It covers Berthod’s 2006 disappearance into a Swiss monastery, his abandoned relationships, and his return to Squamish 17 years later. Overlaid with themes of redemption and second chances, the film culminates with a reunion with his 17-year-old daughter and his send of Cobra Crack (5.14b), one of the hardest cracks in the world. Berthod openly sobs in his on-screen interview. I caught a screening in San Francisco; at the end, I cried, too.

In a roundabout way, the film tour led to The Anomaly. Last spring, Berthod visited the U.S. for Reel Rock’s season premiere in Boulder, and he took the opportunity to visit Moab. While attempting to climb Mason Earle’s Stranger Than Fiction (5.14), he remembered a video he’d seen while scrolling through Earle’s Instagram two years prior. The video hinted that somewhere in Moab, a mega-steep crack boulder had yet to be freed. He texted Earle for the coordinates.

“It’s easy to find, but I got lost,” Berthod admits. Earle sent him a precise GPS pin, but Berthod forgot to load the map before he lost cell signal near Moab’s popular Big Bend campground. At a fork, he veered off track. “I walked two hours right and then walked down. I almost bailed, but then I was like, no, let’s check the second fork. Then I found it. It was almost like the crack boulder of your dreams—the definition of perfection.”

II. A hidden gem

The Anomaly is a 15-foot-tall cube of sandstone that looks like it fell from the sky and landed askew on one of its vertices. Its north face has a 60 to 70 degree overhang, and it’s laser-cut down the middle by a finger-sized splitter. When the crack rounds the lip into vertical terrain, it widens to a hand jam—the only restful position on the problem.

It’s a Saturday morning in late July, and my friends and I are ready to spot Berthod on one of his sessions. Lighthouse Tower, which hosts some of Moab’s most popular multi-pitch routes, sticks up its stumpy finger in the distance. From my spotting position, a thin border of sunlight sears the boulder’s edges.

To me, The Anomaly calls to mind an outrageously steep Kilter Board with all of its holds removed. Berthod swears he can’t get a toe in the crack at any point. Earle had worked the boulder with one shoe and one bare foot with taped toes. Without secure footholds, the first and narrowest section of the boulder looks impossible, unless you’re a freak of nature strong enough to campus off nothing but finger locks.

But Didier Berthod is one such freak of nature. From a sit start, he cranks up one-armed deadpoints, grunting through the finger locks as he swings both feet in the air. After two moves, he drops onto the pads and gives a disappointed sigh.

“I need to wait for the wind to come,” he says. He holds out a palm, as if to summon it.

We wait for another two hours; the air swells with motionless desert heat. It’s 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius) in Moab. The forecast shows nothing but sunny skies for weeks.

Berthod’s hype music of choice is Vivaldi, but today, he prefers to work The Anomaly in silence. He gives another two attempts, then calls it a day.

III. “A level up from Cobra”

Projecting a V13 finger crack in the middle of summer in the Utah desert was not Berthod’s original plan. On June 30, he drove into Moab to take a break from Squamish, planning to visit his friend and fellow 5.14 crack climber, Mary Eden, for just one week.

But Earle’s boulder was just 15 minutes from town. After finding it in March, it was too tempting not to check it out again. “I just stopped by to have a look,” he says. “I didn’t put my shoes on, but I felt the locks and tried to hang on them.”

“Just a look” turned into a compulsive routine. During his first week in town, Berthod hiked up to Earle’s old project three times to work each of The Anomaly’s seven consecutive V7-V8 moves. When I asked him how it felt compared to Cobra Crack, he said it “felt like a level up.” He explains that Cobra Crack felt like 13 moves of V5-V6. “It’s way shorter, but way more intense. I put it into Darth Grader and it said V13 or V14, but I think it’s more like V13. It could be two V10s or two V11s in a row. Everything is very, very sustained.”

At the end of the first week, Berthod had decided that all of the moves were possible, after doing two-thirds of them successfully. The most dramatic part of his beta, besides the first two campus moves on finger locks, was a heroic jump to the lip of the boulder—the last hard move before he could reach the hand jam. He finally stuck it in mid July, so he decided to commit to the project despite less-than-ideal temperatures.

Then he experienced an anomaly of his own. After four weeks of effort, for seemingly no reason at all, Berthod’s crux beta stopped working.

In particular, he could no longer perform an intermediate finger lock that set him up to grab a crimp and jump for the lip. “I needed to get my left hand up to a certain level in the crack,” he says. “But even when I succeeded at doing that multiple times, at some point, I was not able to do it anymore.” He had no choice but to re-choreograph the jump.

He decided to try something even harder: not jumping for the lip at all, and just staying in the 0.5 crack. “I tried to baggy-finger the 70-degree crack,” he tells me. I expect him to laugh, but instead, his voice lowers with emphasis, as if he’s revealing a miracle: “It came out of nowhere. I was able to do the moves.”

IV. Thirteen years a monk

This Swiss climber is quite familiar with overcommitment. Between making the first free ascent of Greenspit (5.13d) in Italy and The Crack of Destiny (5.14b) in Squamish, Berthod spent 13 years in a Franciscan monastery in Switzerland. In a 2024 article for eMontana Magazine, he describes his monastic self as a “hardcore Christian” who approached his commitment to God and priesthood with relentless focus and effort. “I was really dedicated to becoming a very skilled disciple of Christ,” he says. “I wasn’t slowing down at all.” His goal was to “become an angel” after death; to achieve this, he and his fellow monks engaged in nonstop prayer, study, and self-reflection. His mentor told him that he was chosen by God in particular, and therefore he should not leave the monastery for anything, including to see his family or attend the funerals of loved ones.

In 2019, after 13 years, Berthod finally left the monastery to work as a priest in the Swiss town of Collombey-Muraz. No longer isolated, he began climbing again at the Petit Cloucher du Portalet, a granite monolith 45 minutes away from his parish. In the meantime, he pursued a master’s degree in theology with a concentration in the origin of Christianity. Then, one day, while he was poring over texts about Jesus of Nazareth, he found an anomaly.

Being a priest naturally means explaining away the inconsistencies in Christian faith. But this one was different; it was bigger. If Christianity’s central figure had never existed, what had Berthod spent his last 14 years doing?

Despite his colleagues’ disapproval, Berthod launched a full-scale investigation that ultimately unraveled his faith. Within two years, he quit his job as a pastor, compiled his findings into a 278-page book, and committed to rebuilding his life in Squamish. His 16-year devotion to the Catholic church was over. It was time to obsess over something new.

V. Summer vacation

By early August, Berthod had completely re-choreographed his beta on the upper half of The Anomaly. His new sequence consisted of purist hand moves—all crack, no face holds. His taping method was, admittedly, less pure. To thicken his index fingers, he used thin strips of bicycle tube tire to create “finger knee pads.” This technique was inspired by Jean-Pierre “PeeWee” Ouellet, the first ascensionist of Necronomicon (5.13d/5.14a).

Berthod had also solved his wind issue by simply bringing an electric fan and a 500-watt Jackery battery up to the crag. “The temperature was definitely high,” he says, “Without the fan, I’d have no chance.”

Several weeks on The Anomaly had shown Berthod that he needed at least two rest days between sessions. “I was so tired after every session, and I wanted to take care of my finger joints as much as possible,” he says. Learning to rest, he says, was the hardest part of the process.

“It was almost the first time in my life when I was actually taking a holiday,” he says. “As soon as I was a teenager, every holiday I’ve ever had, I was just climbing. Then, in the monastery, I was praying and studying full-on. Then moving to Squamish and climbing a lot, I didn’t really slow down and take a day to myself. At least, that’s the way I felt.”

To fill the days of this “holiday,” Eden and I filled Berthod in a few aspects of pop culture he’d missed as a monk. We showed him Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (2006), Super Troopers (2002), Zoolander (2001), Inception (2010), Peaky Blinders (2013-2022)  and Derry Girls (2018-2022).

There was no movie, however, that Berthod held in higher esteem than The Matrix. The 1999 sci-fi classic follows Neo (Keanu Reeves), nicknamed “The Anomaly,” who discovers he’s living in a simulated reality controlled by machines. During his time in Moab, Berthod became obsessed with getting his friends to watch the film. He’d point out anything and everything that reminded him of The Matrix; after his morning bouldering sessions, he’d talk about the sequels and series breakdowns that he’d seen on YouTube. Among his friends, any Matrix meme became an instant Berthod reference. And if we made him watch any other sci-fi movie?

“It was good,” he’d say, after watching it through, “But not as good as The Matrix.”

VI. Solving The Anomaly

When Berthod finally pulled over the 15-foot summit of The Anomaly, he held his arms outstretched to the world. Then, still standing, he put his head in both hands and cried. It had taken him seven weeks to pull the 43-second sequence over the lip.

He later tells me that he felt vindicated by his send. “The more I was going up there, the more I was questioning my decision to stay here,” he confesses. “It’s not a good temperature, it’s not the season, and since the good season is now in Squamish, it was a bit of a bold decision to stay here and spend an entire summer trying it.”

Surprisingly, Berthod insists that he did not name the boulder after the Matrix, but after a 2020 sci-fi novel, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier. “I really loved the book,” he says. “I thought it would be a cool name because it was definitely an anomaly for me to try that boulder crack in the middle of summer. Every Moab crack climber is in Squamish, and I, a Squamish local, am in Moab.”

“What’s the book about?”

He thinks for a second. “It’s actually a little bit Matrix-y,” he says, then laughs. “It’s a fiction where a plane with all its passengers gets duplicated. Nobody knows why or how … It deals with psychology and their responses to meeting their own selves.”

Does Le Tellier’s book, like Neo’s journey in The Matrix, parallel Berthod’s own departure from Catholicism? Is The Anomaly a reference to Berthod himself?

He shakes his head. “I can understand that people think I’m an anomaly, not The Anomaly,” he says, explaining that he’s no longer comfortable with iconizing labels. “I don’t think you can give it to yourself.”