Fawcett's rival, English climber
Jerry Moffatt, had been
top-roping the route earlier that year, waiting for the right conditions to lead it, and had said that: "anyone who could do this climb without abseiling down it first, or practicing it on a top rope, would be a true master". In his biography, Fawcett said that by late 1983, he was desperate to find a bold new route and that someone had mentioned that Moffatt had been working on a new climb just below
Great Arete (E5 5c), at Millstone Edge, and had already called it ''Master's Edge
(in January 1983, Moffatt had freed a major new route he called Master's Wall'' E7 6b at
Clogwyn Du'r Arddu). While only 28 at the time, Fawcett remarked that "I was starting to feel part of an older generation whose time was passing, Master's Edge might give me the chance to turn the clock back a little". Fawcett, belayed by his wife Gill, completed the route in one day on 29 December 1983 after taking a few attempts, and one serious fall that was arrested by his new
Amigo protection but without the aid of top-roping. Fawcett said that Moffatt was pretty upset, but in the era before sport climbing in Britain (i.e. where climbers would take time to install bolts onto a route), "it was a free for all". Described as "Fawcett's Masterpiece", In September 1994, 19-year old
Airlie Anderson made the
first female free ascent of the route, and became the first-ever female to climb an E7. In 2009, American climber
Alex Honnold,
onsighted ''Master's Edge'', and in an interview afterwards said that he found the route "hard", "sustained", and "scary". While the route retains its "E7" grade due to the extreme level of risk, the technical difficulty has been lowered slightly from 6c to 6b; however, flashes are still rare enough to be worthy of capture in the climbing media, an example being English climber Nathan Lee's 2016 flash of what
Rock & Ice described as the "ultra-classic", ''Master's Edge''. ==Filmography==