Emma Twyford repeats Yma O Hyd, trad E10 in North Wales

British climber Emma Twyford has made a remarkable repeat of Yma O Hyd on the Skyline Buttress at Gallt yr Ogof in the Ogwen Valley. The route was established by James McHaffie in September 2024 and, graded E10 7a, currently stands as the hardest trad climb in North Wales. It adds an intense, direct start to the E9 Mission Impossible and joins this at its crux. It offers 8c/+ climbing, on gear, and was repeated last October by Steve McClure, who confirmed the grade.

After climbing Mission Impossible last summer, Twyford decided to raise the bar. She worked the lower section and managed to link this - but not entire climb - on toprope before tieing into the live end of the rope. Although the technical crux is on the first section - a hard 7B boulder just off the ground protected by two small cams - the actual redpoint crux is still on the upper section of Mission Impossibile. She fell off from here a couple of times, often due to poor conditions, before successfully sending the route two days ago.

Twyford joins only a handful of other women who have climbed E10 and she is now the first woman to have climbed this grade in the UK (in 2019 her compatriot Hazel Findlay sent the E10 Magic Line in Yosemite, USA). Interestingly, in September 2019 Twyford repeated Big Bang at Lower Pen Trwyn in North Wales and, in doing so, became the first British woman to climb 9a.