Zach Galla: Two V17s, One Week

By the time Zach Galla stuck the last move of Shaolin, it wasn’t just a send, it was a release. The kind you feel when a storm breaks or a long skin track tops out and the valley opens below you. A literal weight lifted. A season of doubt blown clean off the ridge.

In one week in Red Rock, Nevada, the 25-year-old did something that reads more like folklore than a training log: two V17s (9A) back-to-back. Sean Bailey’s Shaolin. Daniel Woods’ Return of the Sleepwalker. Different climbs. Different styles. Same thin desert air. And a headspace that finally clicked.

Galla already had the résumé, four V16s (8C+) and a reputation for composure on the sharp end, but Shaolin had been haunting him. Last season, he fell some 25 times on the final jump. Twenty-five reminders that strength isn’t always the limiting factor. Sometimes it’s precision. Sometimes it’s belief.

“Finishing up Shaolin feels like it took a literal weight off of my shoulders,” Galla says. “My mind was finally free and all of my self-imposed pressure went away.”

If Shaolin was a mental crux, Return of the Sleepwalker was the counterpoint, a line he’d always kept at arm’s length. Not because it was too hard, but because the beta he thought he’d need felt like it would put the whole thing just out of reach. A little like staring up a no-fall line you’re not sure you want to commit to.

He’d try it on the side. Poke at it. Walk away.

Then this winter, everything changed.

“Coming back this year it felt totally different,” Galla says. “And with how soft Vegas sandstone is, it probably is.”

Conditions matter. So does time. Holds evolve. Bodies adapt. And sometimes the rock gives you just enough to rewrite the script. Galla found a right-hand crimp in the stand start he hadn’t been able to use before. That single detail unlocked the rest: skipping undercling shuffles, bypassing intermediates, opening a cleaner line to the crux sloper.

“Once I had found my new method, the links came quick.”

That’s the thing about mastery, it often looks sudden from the outside. Like a clean arc through powder after days of storm skiing. But the speed comes from all the unseen work, the quiet recalibration, the patience to return when it feels right.

What’s striking is how opposite the two ascents felt. Shaolin demanded obsession, session after session, seasons stacked on seasons, pressure building with every fall. Return came together almost casually by comparison.

“My process on this one this year was almost the complete opposite of Shaolin,” Galla says. “I only had a few sessions before sending Return where I thought I had a real chance of doing it that day.”

And yet, paradoxically, Return felt harder, at least physically.

“It’s kinda weird because Return felt substantially more physically difficult than shao on the send go, but it came together so much quicker.”

The difference was control. Return is powerful, demanding, but readable. A line where strength and sequencing decide the outcome. Shaolin hinges on accuracy, commitment to a jump where milliseconds and millimeters matter. You can do everything right and still miss. That’s a tough place to live.

“The style of Return made it far easier to control my outcome,” Galla says. “While the accuracy component of Shaolin made it harder to send, but it felt so much easier when it came together.”

That moment, when it all aligns, is why climbers keep coming back. Why skiers hike past the rope line. Why we chase lines that scare us a little more than we’d like to admit. Because when it finally works, the noise drops out. The pressure dissolves. And for a brief, perfect instant, gravity feels negotiable.

Two V17s in a week doesn’t just put Galla in rare company, it shows a climber coming into his own, learning not just how to pull harder, but how to let go. Red Rock didn’t change overnight. Zach did.

And somewhere between a move once felt impossible and a sloper that suddenly made sense, he found what everyone’s really chasing out there:

Freedom.