Women’s climbing is having an incredible moment. Built on the shoulders of 30-plus years of accomplishments, women are making ever more first ascents and pushing against the limits of technical difficulty as they climb incredibly challenging routes around the world.
Climbing sheer rock faces relies on balance and on nimble strength relative to body size, not on who is bigger or faster. This has enabled women to approach parity with men and sometimes exceed it. It also has led to pushback from what has been a male dominated world. But that is not stopping women from making history in the sport.
The center of the climbing world in the United States is in Yosemite National Park, where the enormous granite wall known as El Capitan rises 3,000 feet from the valley floor. The best known exploits on that wall no doubt are Alex Honnold’s “free solo” (meaning, without a rope to catch him should he fall) of El Cap’s “Freerider” route, and the roped ascent of the sheer Dawn Wall, perhaps the world’s most difficult big wall climb, by Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson. When people think of the magnificent, daunting walls of Yosemite, they most likely envision El Cap.
However, the very first ascent of one of the hardest routes on El Cap, “The Nose,” was done by a woman, Lynn Hill, way back in 1993. Everyone said it was impossible. Then Lynn did it. Afterward, in what could be construed as either an announcement or a challenge, she declared: “It goes, boys.” Her feat was such that the great German climber Alex Huber, who spent a lot of time in Yosemite back then, said her climb had “passed men’s dominance in climbing and left them behind.” It was all the more impressive because the number of women climbing big walls at the time — like Luisa Iovane, Catherine Destivelle and Isabelle Patissier — could be counted on two hands.
Beth Rodden’s first ascent of Yosemite’s 60-foot “Meltdown” route, in 2008, went a full decade before it was climbed again — this time, by a man. This was widely viewed at the time as the hardest single pitch traditional climb in the world. That means the climb was one rope length and that she depended on gear she placed herself, rather than on bolts permanently installed in the rock, to attach her rope.
Many impressive climbing accomplishments by women have followed. Angela “Angy” Eiter made history leading “La Planta de Shiva” in Andalusia, Spain, in 2017, becoming the first woman to complete an extremely challenging route rated as 5.15b on the Yosemite Decimal System. (The grading scale tops out at 5.15d.) The outdoor sports news and gear website GearJunkie said the climb was “at the cutting edge of what is humanly possible.” Other recent standout triumphs include Laura Rogora’s 2021 ascent of “Erebor” in Italy, graded 5.15b/c, and Barbara Zangerl’s big wall climbs of multiple pitches or rope lengths, among them, “Eternal Flame” in Pakistan in 2022. For perspective, only a handful of men have successfully climbed graded routes of 5.15c and 5.15d. Women climbers are close to bridging that gap.
Indoor sport climbing, as we’ll see in the Olympics this summer after it made its debut in the Tokyo games in 2021, just reached a new parity; there’s now nearly an equal number of men and women participating in the sport, according to the Outdoor Industry Association’s 2023 Participation Trends Report. Janja Garnbret from Slovenia, an eight-time world champion and reigning Olympic champion, will be one to watch. I’m hopeful that girls starting off in the gym will see what Janja is doing (and what I and other women have done), fall in love with the sport indoors, then take their climbing outdoors to continue their progression on big walls.
Women’s accomplishments on big walls are even more impressive because for almost every two men climbing outdoors, there is still only one woman, according to the OIA report. This means that women looking to do bigger outdoor objectives often climb with men.
I have made more than 30 first female ascents, and over a dozen first ascents globally. As I shifted early in my career to doing more multi-pitch and big wall climbs, I often partnered with men. Many of those successful ascents were attributed to my male partner, even though we worked equally to complete them. This was part of my motivation for building all-women teams for the climbs documented in my new film “Here to Climb.”
Together we are proving how high we can go. On Spain’s Rayu, a 2,000-foot vertical wall rated 5.14b, Matilda Söderlund, Brette Harrington and I captured a first all-female ascent and second ascent ever. The mountain sport website Planet Mountain called the climb “the hardest multi-pitch route climbed by an all-female team and confirmation, yet again, of how much female rock climbing has evolved over the last few decades.”
Yet with each success, there’s a new round of pushback. What often cuts the deepest are the efforts online, often anonymous, to reduce my and other women’s accomplishments in the mountains. One way this happens is what’s known as downgrading lines.
One of the beautiful aspects of climbing is that mountains don’t have genders, and neither do the grades applied to them to measure their difficulty. A 5.10 is just a 5.10; not a women’s or a men’s. But grades are by nature subjective; the first person to complete a climb will assign it a grade that can be challenged by subsequent climbers. When a woman climbs an extremely challenging line, its grade is likely to be downgraded by the next man who climbs it.
Then there are also the put-downs — the disparaging remarks about a woman’s body or looks. I’m talking about remarks like, “If I had small fingers like that, I could do it,” or, “If I weighed 100 pounds I could do that, too.” You generally do not see these comments about men’s climbs. After years of harassment, I finally stood up for myself on Instagram to a professional climber who had bullied me and other female athletes. He made disparaging remarks about my appearance when I was a teenager and then when I gained weight in my early 20s, he suggested I was obese. When this person was let go by his climbing sponsors, noting a pattern of behavior, a whole new round of bullying was unleashed. But I have found my voice and in recent years am learning how to use it most effectively.
Last month, a professional rock climber with a history of sexually assaulting women was sentenced to life in prison in Sacramento, Calif., for sexual abusing a woman in Yosemite. The prosecutor said he had “used his status as a prominent climber to assault women in the rock-climbing community.” Sadly, it’s no surprise to people in our community that women can face additional dangers in extreme environments where we are often a small minority.
It would be disingenuous to say that my femininity hasn’t also been an asset in turning my passion into a career. Strength and femininity need not be mutually exclusive; life’s beauty comes in living in your dualities. For instance; I love to paint my nails pink and wear makeup when I climb, but that has led to questions of whether I “look” the part of a “real climber” or am just a marketing vehicle for corporate sponsors.
When I’m climbing, I am thinking about the next move; the last thing that I’m thinking about is my gender. Women climbers have the same performance and earning potential as men — and for this, as in many pursuits where women are pushing against so-called traditional boundaries, we face resistance and questions about whether our success is actually deserved.
It is.