Expedition to Newfoundland’s Devil’s Bay

Many new climbers often ask what climbing in Newfoundland’s Devil’s Bay is like and why more climbers don’t climb there.

In 2012,  Hazel Findlay, Alex Honnold, James Pearson and Mark Synnott headed to Devil’s Bay for a look.

The idea started off as a good one: To establish new trad climbs on the amazing 400-metre granite big-wall rocketing directly out of the ocean. Five days of travel by car and boat into this land forgotten by modern time, the team finally arrived only to discover adverse conditions and suffering.

Expeditions are remembered for being either great successes or grand failures. But the reality is that most of the time, they are neither.

For the climbers, their experience became as much an inward exploration of their own hopes, anxieties and fears as it was an exploration of the vertical walls. “Tentbound in Devil’s Bay” is a portrait of the darker side of an expedition, a side that you rarely hear about.