Superpod

SUPERPOD was a long-standing project that finally fell when young buck Alex Megos visited the New River Gorge region and attempted this cruxy extension to Pod, 5.13b, which is located in the heart of Summersville Lake. Sorry NRG aficionados, this isn't technically the 'New', just a beautiful crag on the periphery of the sunken Gauley River.  Rumors of V12 crimps and incredible sequences echoed for years in the Thunder Dome while cobwebs collected on crusted quickdraws hanging mysteriously above the tenuous-to-clip-no-victory-whip anchors of Pod.  This long-standing project thwarted both professional climbers Sasha Digiulian and Nick Duttle, whom both had better things to do, such as the FFA of Pure Imagination at the chossiest crag in America and Duttle clipping the chains on Hoax of Clocks on the swarmiest day of the year, respectively.

A horrendously cut Red Bull video of Megos proclaims 'No Excuses' and that 'friction' doesn't necessarily matter while climbing on some obvious splitter days in the region.  There are mere glimpses of V12 crimps, a wonderfully aesthetic rose move, and some incredible climbing by Megos, though the intro sequence into SuperPod is missing, one can assume Megos accomplished one of the region's most difficult climbs with incredible prowess.  To date, this line of technical difficulty has only seen a repeat by a visiting but potentially quasi-local climber Jonathan Siegrist.