[1] Twenty minutes away is the larger town of Angoulême, where limestone crags overhang many of the roads, with the best-known being Les Eaux Claires ("The Clear Waters"), with 15 to 20-metre overhanging extreme routes that require strong fingers to manage the small pockets used to ascend them;[1] and contains nationally-regarded extreme routes such as La Crépinette (1983), France's first 8a (5.13b).
[4] At his local crag of Eaux-Clairs, he freed a line he called Hugh with a double-overhanging bulge that required little footwork.
[1][10] Some major North American routes also relied on chipped holds for their development, with examples such as The Phoenix 5.13a (7c+) in Yosemite , and Just do It 5.14c (8c+) at Smith Rocks.
[4] Home again in 1995 as his wife was recovering from back surgery, Rouhling began work on a new route he called Akira [fr] in the Vilhonneur quarry.
Akira was a 65-foot long low horizontal roof (only circa 12 feet off the ground), that he estimated had an 8B (V13) bouldering problem, with a final 20-foot 5.13b (8a) vertical section beyond the lip (the only part for which he used a rope); such a route was unprecedented as a sport climb at the time.
[11] In 1997, Rouhling added another chipped route at Eaux Claire, L'autre côté du Ciel, a spectacular high roof, that he graded at 9a (5.14d).
[c][7][16] In 2004, Climbing sent Pete Ward (a future American Alpine Club Board member),[17] to interview Rouhling over several days, and see him on his routes.
[1][7][13] In 2020, Seb Bouin climbed three of Rouhling's routes in his local crags and found two of their grades accurate at 9a (Hugh and L'autre côté du Ciel), however, he felt Akira was also a "hard 9a", and that the roof was at V9 (7C).
[1] In 2007 Rouhling went on bouldering trips with French climber Romain Desgranges to Rocklands, South Africa and to Joshua Tree, California.