It’s 2 p.m. on November 4, 2020, in Yosemite National Park, and the afternoon sun is blasting the south-­facing Golden Gate route on El Capitan. Emily Harrington is a little more than 12 hours into her fourth attempt to free-climb the 3,200-foot-tall granite behemoth in under 24 hours.

Heat radiates off the wall, but , 34, is confident and mov­ing well. She’s at the base of a pitch called Golden Desert, a stretch of slick rock with a thin crack. A few minutes ago she took an unexpected fall when her foot slipped, but she’s anxious to get to the next pitch, the A5 Traverse—her prior high point. Despite already ascending 2,900 feet, she isn’t that tired, so she decides to try again.

Graded 5.13a, Golden Desert is one of the most difficult sections of the route. There are no dimples or edges in the rock to put her toes on. Climbing it involves a tenuous balance of keeping her feet high enough to maintain friction but low enough to push upward. After cruising through the section she had just fallen on, she gets to a roof where she must traverse left. The heat forces her to grip harder than she normally would, and fatigue is setting in. To conserve energy, she skips clipping a piece of gear. Suddenly she slips, and the world goes black.

When she realizes what happened, she’s hanging on the rope just above the belay ledge, blood pouring down her face and into her eyes. She’d come sideways off the wall and hit her head on a protrusion in the rock, which gouged a quarter-size hole into the left side of her forehead. The failures from her previous El Cap attempts come rushing back—giving up a few hundred feet from the top in November 2019, and later that month, a massive fall that required a rescue and left her bloodied, bruised, and concussed. Instantly, she feels tired and afraid. She »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t want to climb anymore.

“I think you’ve got more try in you,” says , Harrington’s fiancĂ©, who is her belayer and moral support for the top portion of the route. (Her friend Alex Honnold belayed her for the first two-thirds.) With tears running down her face and blood drying on her forehead, Harrington eats a handful of nuts. Ballinger attempts to lift her spirits. “You know I’d tell you if I didn’t,” he says.

“I can try,” Harrington mumbles. Yosemite Valley is quieter than usual, and her words hang in the air. With the country still in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the park is practically empty, and Harrington’s team, which includes a small film crew documenting the attempt, are some of the only people on the wall.

She knows how easy it would be to give up. But this is why she chose this goal, to test herself when it got hard.

After resting and waiting for shade to hit the wall, she starts to climb, focusing on what’s in front of her and nothing else. She enters what she’ll later characterize as a flow state, an experience she’d never had before. She executes moves flawlessly, and from that point on the climb is magical. She sends the A5 Traverse on her first try, then the following five pitches, reaching the top of El Cap in 21 hours 13 minutes 51 seconds. With that she becomes the fourth woman to free-climb El Cap in less than 24 hours—and the first woman ever to do it via the Golden Gate route.

The post Emily Harrington Made History on El Cap. She’s Still Ascending. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On August 3, 2016, the International Olympic Committee as a medal sport in the 2020 Summer Olympics. Exactly five years, dozens of qualifying competitions, and one global pandemic later, 20 men and 20 women from around the world will compete for gold at the Aomi Urban Sports Park in Tokyo. Starting on August 3, 2021, the competition will last four days, alternating between men’s and women’s events each day. Below is a short primer on climbing’s Olympic debut.

How Will the Competition Work?

There will be two rounds for men and women: qualifiers and finals. On Tuesday, August 3, 20 men will compete in qualifiers, which includes speed climbing, bouldering, and lead climbing (in that order, with rest periods between disciplines). From that round, eight men will move on to finals, held on August 5. Twenty women will compete in a qualifying round on Wednesday, August 4, with all three disciplines performed in one day. The top eight female competitors will move on to a final round on August 6. Due to COVID-19, organizers decided to , so there will be no live crowds at the events. The Olympics will be broadcast on NBC, but with all competitions happening on Japanese time, check our watch guide for air times. (Keep in mind that the official title in all Olympics-related material is “Sport Climbing,” so if you see that on television or news listings, that’s a reference to the entire climbing event.)

What’s the Difference Between the Three disciplines: Speed Climbing, Bouldering, and Lead Climbing?

In most climbing competitions, each of the three disciplines is a separate event. A climber could compete in one, two, or all three based on their preference. A winner is deemed for each category, and their performance in one discipline has no effect on their ranking in another discipline. However, the Olympics is a combined format, which takes the athlete’s cumulative performance in all three (more on that later). Below is an explanation of the disciplines and how rankings are determined within each.

• Speed climbing will be on a standardized 15-meter route that uses the same holds and layout every time, so climbers can practice year-round on the exact route they will compete on. It’s done with a rope, and the goal is to get from the bottom to the top as quickly as possible. This portion will be a bracket-style tournament, where two climbers compete head-to-head to advance to the next round until a winner is determined. One interesting rule for the Olympic event is that a false start (leaving the ground before the start buzzer) will result in instant disqualification, which could create some upsets in the field.
• Bouldering will be on a 4.5-meter wall with a series of boulder problems, four in qualifiers and three in finals. Climbing without a rope, the competitor will have four minutes to complete one problem, then get a short period of rest before moving on to the next problem. The climber can make multiple attempts during the four-minute time limit, and the climbers have never seen these problems before. The holds, wall angle, and movements will be different for each boulder, focusing on technical sequences and gymnastic, parkour-style movements. Points will be given for reaching the top of each boulder and matching the finish hold with both hands while maintaining control. If the climber »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t reach the top, points will be given for reaching the marked “zone” hold approximately halfway up. Each climber’s score will read like this: 2T 2Z, meaning she reached two top holds and two zone holds. If there are ties after the scores are determined, the number of attempts for each top hold or number of attempts for each zone hold will be factored in, with fewer attempts resulting in a higher ranking.
• Lead climbing will be done on a 15-meter wall with one unique route, so the climbers have no prior knowledge of it. They will be allowed a six-minute preview session, where all the climbers get to see the route before competition starts. The lead discipline utilizes a rope and requires the climber to figure out technical movement sequences and have the endurance to stay on the wall for longer periods of time. With a total of 40 to 60 holds, each hold is worth one point, and the climbers will only have one attempt. If they fall, their turn is over. The highest score will be ranked #1, second-highest score is #2, and so on. A tie, or two climbers with the same number of points, will be broken by giving the better ranking to the person who climbed to the same hold faster.

How Does the Combined Format Work?

With the IOC only giving climbing one set of medals per gender, the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC), the governing body for international climbing competition, decided to combine the disciplines to include more athletes and countries. The Olympics’ combined format requires each climber to participate in all three disciplines at once: speed, bouldering, and lead. The climber will receive a ranking for each, then those will be multiplied together to determine a final number, and the lowest overall score wins gold. For example, if a climber places 1st in bouldering, 4th in lead, 18th in speed, the score would be 1 x 4 x 18 = 72.

The climbing community initially criticized this format because speed climbing is physically much different than bouldering and lead climbing, and it requires specialized training. Many speed climbers do not fare as well in lead and bouldering, and many top bouldering and lead competitors don’t do well in speed. A fair comparison might be requiring a track athlete to run a marathon and a 100-meter sprint as one event. Climbing has already been confirmed as a part of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, and for that event, two sets of medals will be awarded per gender: one for speed climbing and one for lead climbing/bouldering.

Who Are the North American Climbers?

Each country was allotted a maximum of four spots, two women and two men. Unlike many other Olympic sports, no countries were guaranteed a spot, except for the host country of Japan, which was promised one slot for each gender. From the U.S., Kyra Condie and Brooke Raboutou will represent the women, and Nathaniel Coleman and Colin Duffy will represent the men. For our neighbors to the north, Alannah Yip and Sean McColl will represent Canada.

The post What You Need to Know About Climbing in the Olympics appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

A two-week canoe trip in northern Minnesota changed the trajectory of Natalie Warren’s life when she was 15 years old. From that pivotal point onward, she bucked the norm of her urban Miami upbringing to chase a life outdoors. More thanÌętwo decades later, Warren, 32, isÌęrecognized as one of the most accomplished adventure paddlers in the U.S.ÌęShe’s canoed 2,000 miles from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, paddled the entire length of the Mississippi River, carried out 30-Ìęand 50-day river expeditions in Canada, and paddled 450 miles in 53 hours to win first place in the Yukon River Quest. As a new mother, aÌęPh.D.Ìęstudent of environmental communication at the University of Minnesota,Ìęthe founder of Wild River Academy, a nonprofit that teaches urban youth about rivers, and the author of the adventure memoir , Warren is spreading the gospel of outdoor adventure for teenage girls who feel like they don’t fit in.Ìę

In 2005, Warren was burned out by daily three-hour saxophone practices and other rigors of attending an arts high school when a friend suggested YMCA Camp Menogyn, near Grand Marais, Minnesota. Despite having noÌęprior relationship to the outdoors, after herÌęfirst river trip with the camp, in which she spentÌęevery day paddling and every night sleeping outside, she wasÌęhooked on outdoor adventure. At thatÌęformative time in her life, she had finally emerged from what she calls the “blur of living in a large urban area that had a certain ideology and tastes for material things that IÌęnever identified with.” Living outdoors, moving slowly, observing everything around her with time to digest it, connecting with her boat partner—these aspects of canoe life helped shapeÌęWarren’s perceptions of the world.

She found her people, her place, and her own voice in the outdoors and on the water, which eventually provided the backdrop for the rest of her life. Now Warren’s goal is to encourage teenage girls to think critically about what they actually want in life—and how scheming adventures can help them get it. Here are four pieces of advice for teen girls ready to embrace adventure.

Fight for What You Want

“We’re constantly told all of these milestones that we’re supposed to have,” Warren says. “A lot of us sit back and we’re like, That’s not what we want.ÌęHow do we fit into a culture that’s telling us what we’re supposed to be doing when we’re not even sure that will make us feel fulfilled? You’re toldÌęyou can’t ever hop off the tracksÌębecause you can make one decision that will derail your potential for future marriage, job, kids, success, and retirement.”Ìę

“I really fought for what I felt like I needed,” she says. “For meÌęit was following a feeling of what I was supposed to be doing at the time. I couldn’t rationalize it. The surge of emotion when we’re teenagers or early twenties can be a really, really powerful force in directing us where we want to go.”

Forge Your Own Path

“Instead of getting an unpaid internship in the summer afterÌęcollege, I canoed for three months. I thought that would literally ruin my career, because an internshipÌęis what I was told I needed to do to be successful. I want teenage girls to think more critically about the messages that they’re receiving, whether they’re subtle or obvious, to be able to say, ‘I can do something different.’ Start to think, like, Oh, land is connected. I wonder if I could walk across the country? Water is connected. I wonder if I can sail across the ocean?”

“Wilderness trips, and canoe trips in particular, are aboutÌęgetting into a flow of everybody working together,” she says. “We all need each other. We all serve different roles. We’re trying to get from point A to point B. What are we going to eat? What is the weather like? And how do we solve problems together? That just strips away all of the added pressures and layers of what we’re supposed to look like, how we’re supposed to respond to certain things.”

Have the Courage to Take a Big Trip

“It’s important toÌęexplore all the different pathways in life,” Warren says. “I stand out so much more because I lived in a canoe for six months. It provides fodder for interviews. It’s group work. It’s not a hole in your rĂ©sumĂ©Ìęat all. It’s actually something that could make you stand out and could become your career in many ways. Without feeling like we’re safe to take those risks, we often forego the possibilities that those trips can provide for us.”Ìę

Find Your Place in the OutdoorsÌę

“What I found in that first trip especially was that I felt really confident in the outdoors. I sort of discovered what made me feel the most me when I was at that age, when high school was traumatic. I had a lot of teen angst, and when I was in the outdoors, when I was paddling a canoe, when I was living in the wilderness, I felt a sense of peace and belonging that I had just never found in the city,” Warren says.

“I have already introduced my daughterÌęto just being outdoors and being by water, telling her stories and reading books about women doing adventures,” she says. “I’d really love to be able to support her in taking those risks, especially at a young age, without feeling like if she stepped off the track, she would lose her future. When we step off the track, we get on another track that can be so much better.”

The post This Veteran Paddler Says Teenage Girls Need șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

We spend a lot of time testing the newest gear every year, but often know very little about the people behind it. So, we sent a handful of our writers out to talk to them. Julie EllisonÌęspoke with Heinz Mariacher, the climbing shoe category manager at Scarpa. The brand produced our Buyer’s Guide testers’Ìęfavorite new climbing shoe of 2020,Ìęthe Veloce, a comfortable training model that’s technical enough to appeal to all users. Here’s what Mariacher had to say about the past and present of climbing shoesÌęand how he likes to approach the design process.

Know Your Roots

In the early eighties, we had one climbing shoe: the EB. It was extremely painful, and you had to wear it really small to get it to work well. The big challenge was to make shoes that would be less painful and still precise. That’s where I started.

Trust the Process

The most interesting part is the first time you go out with the prototype and test it on the rock. There have been models where I’ve made 50 prototypes before it works. On the other hand, many times the first prototype looks bad but works well. Then you want to make it better, and you actually make it worse.

Lean on Experience

I’ve always insisted on being the developer and the tester, so I’d directly feel if a proto­type worked or if it didn’t. Everybody has a different opinion, because everybody has a different foot shape. It’s very hard to put all those opinions together and come up with solutions. When you can feel a shoe yourself, it’s much easier.

Keep Evolving

As indoor climbing has grown, shoe design has changed a lot. Precision and sensitivity on small footholds used to matter. Now it seems that nobody cares about that. People only care about heel hooking and toe hooking. But it can be fun to create really nice shoes for the gym. It’s a new challenge.

Check out Scarpa’s Veloce climbing shoes.

The post Climbing Is Evolving, So Heinz Mariacher Is Too appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

[Editors’ Note: If you are having suicidal thoughts, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 (TALK).]

Nathan Smith has it all planned out. On June 15, 2017, the 41-year-old climber will pull out of the driveway in Salt Lake City and head 25 minutes to a trailhead in Little Cottonwood Canyon. From there it’ll be an easy approach to the South Ridge of Mount Superior, a 2,800-foot scramble with Class 4 and some Class 5 climbing. Most locals do the route in a few hours before or after work, so there’s little chance of running into anyone midday on a Thursday. Wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and an ultrarunning hipbelt, Smith will climb until reaching the knife-blade ridge, with its treacherous loose rock and exposed no-fall zones on either side. The South Ridge is considered an easy climb, but a memorial plaque in this spot serves as a reminder that even competent climbers can slip. If someone were to fall here, no one would suspect a thing. And it has to look like an accident—just another tragic but faultless climbing death.

It might take a day, Smith figures, before anyone finds the body. While the area is popular, it’s a confusing maze of fractured rock in every direction. Maybe search and rescue will notice the late-model Subaru abandoned in the parking area. Or maybe Smith’s wife, Cheri, who is away for a month on a well-earned girls’ trip to Europe, will call the police after not hearing from her spouse for a few days. None of the “after” details matter.

Depression has taken hold before, but lately the fear and sadness fill every waking second. It’s like a game Smith used to play as a child, lying down in a blanket and rolling up like a burrito. Except now the blanket gets tighter and thicker every day, to the point where it’s impossible to breathe or think. Maybe, Smith thinks, it would be better for everyone if Nathan just disappeared.

But that’s tomorrow. Today, Smith sits at home working, with two large monitors on the desk and stacks of papers all around. Hundreds of climbing guidebooks, a few of which bear a Nathan Smith byline, along with antique climbing gear, pitons, ice axes, and old carabiners, line the bookshelves. On the wall is a large custom poster, a triptych of photos showing a younger Smith climbing Boris Badenov (5.12a), a sport route Smith established in 2012 in the East Canyon 20 minutes above Salt Lake; Smith on another first ascent, this one a backcountry ice route; and a shot of Cheri leading an ice climb.

It’s all tangible evidence of a life filled with accomplishment: a great career, a wonderful marriage, countless achievements. For nearly two decades, Nathan Smith has been a familiar name in climbing photography, establishing more than 150 roped first ascents on rock and ice throughout Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, and traveling from Mongolia to Madagascar. Smith has shot magazine covers, been published regularly in Climbing, Rock and Ice, and Alpinist, and written five guidebooks. About a month before, Smith quit working as marketing manager at the gear distributor Liberty Mountain to concentrate full time on the freelance venture Pull Media, which offers everything from photography and illustration to packaging and product design.

But it seems, increasingly, like it’s all been a lie. The person known for those photos and bylines and first ascents is not the same person on the inside. That person isn’t called Nathan at all. Her name is Nikki.

Scrolling through Facebook, she thinks back to a trip she took to Denver two weeks earlier. She was there for an American Alpine Club meeting, but in her free time she got a makeover at Sephora, the cosmetics store. It was scary but exhilarating. The employees opened early, showed her how to apply every­thing, and explained why each product was chosen. Instead of a ragtag collection of colors that didn’t match her skin tone—the typical result when she’d tried makeup before—she saw, for the first time, a beautifully put-together face. But the euphoria was short-lived. She had to wipe off the makeup and walk outside, back to life as Nathan. Happiness turned to self-hatred.

Back in Salt Lake, the makeover is present in her mind when she comes across a friend’s Facebook post that stops her. It’s a quote from author BrenĂ© Brown.

Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.

The words on the screen might as well have been written specifically for Nikki. She has tickets for a concert in Las Vegas in two days—Pink Floyd alum Roger Waters—that she and Cheri purchased before the Europe trip was finalized. With Cheri out of town, Nikki had no one to join her, and as her depression worsened, the excursion fell away. Now she reconsiders. Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe she could go on her own, dress as herself in public for the first time. She could show up and be seen as Nikki.

The next day, she will make the six-hour drive, get dressed up, and go out dancing at a queer club. For a few blissful hours, she’ll live her life as Nikki. She’ll dance all night. When she gets back from Las Vegas, she’ll go to therapy, take steps to understand what all this means. She still feels suicidal, but Cheri will be gone for two more weeks. In the meantime, maybe Nikki can find enough clarity to figure out what to tell her wife—and decide where to go from here.

Nikki was born in Portland, Oregon, on January 25, 1976, and christened Nathan Karl Smith. That year the family moved to Utah, where her father, Karl, worked for the Bureau of Land Management. From a young age, Nikki (like many transgender people, she goes by her chosen name even when discussing her early life) explored the nearby desert and wilderness with her father. Her mother, Margery, taught her to draw, paint, sew, and quilt. The Smiths were Mormon and prayed together every night; then Nikki was expected to have individual prayer time before bed.

“Starting when I was about five, I would kneel every single night and pray that God would make me a girl,” she recalls. She wished for the same thing at birthdays and Christmases, too. When she was eight, her dad was diagnosed with leukemia. With a modest income and a lot of medical expenses, the family collected aluminum cans to supplement the aid they received from the Mormon church, and the Smith kids mostly wore secondhand clothes. Perhaps because of this, Nikki was bullied and beat up, so she started pulling away from her peers, which made her feel like even more of an outcast.

“Parents wouldn’t let some of their kids play with me,” she says. “I was trying to be everything a boy was supposed to be. I don’t know, maybe they picked up on things that I didn’t even realize I was putting out. Or maybe it was just because we were poor and my father was dying, so people didn’t know how to be friends with my family.”

The Smith kids found solace in each other, riding dirt bikes and running around the fields outside their house. Nikki “was always there for me, my best friend,” says her sister Heidi Pearce, who is six years her junior. After their father’s diagnosis, Heidi says, the family made it a goal to spend as much time together as possible, camping and mineral collecting in red-rock country. By this time, Karl Smith required multiple blood transfusions, and they didn’t know how much time he had left.

Around the age of ten, Nikki stopped praying to be a girl. Her body just wasn’t built that way, and everything she knew said she was supposed to be a boy. Talk shows like Jerry Springer featured cross-dressers and drag queens in demeaning ways, like it was all one big joke. Nikki knew she wasn’t like the people on TV, but she also knew that she was different from everyone else. Something was wrong with her, messed up. She hated herself for it.

After nearly six years battling cancer, Karl Smith died. It was hard on the close-knit family and financially challenging for Margery, with four kids to support. At 14, Nikki stepped into a caretaker role, doing yard work and helping with her younger siblings as much as she could.

“I think our family kind of went down after Dad died,” Heidi says. “My mom is a softie, and everything made her cry. We all got along for her sake.” Heidi, who was eight, would hang out in Nikki’s room, listening to Pink Floyd and talking with her eldest sibling.

Three years later, Margery married Richard Obrey, who Heidi describes as “the love of my mom’s life.” While Nikki’s step­father, who worked as a delivery driver at the time, had a good relationship with her little sisters, he didn’t get along as well with Nikki and her brother.

Nikki escaped this friction through climbing. She’d started seeing a family counselor after her father died and soon began helping the therapist lead younger kids on desert trips. The first time she went climbing was at a crag called 9th Street, near Ogden, on a 30-foot corner graded an easy 5.7. She wore basketball shoes and an oversize harness, but once she got on the rock, she was hooked.

“Everything went quiet,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about school. I wasn’t thinking about my stepfather. I wasn’t thinking about my father being gone. I wasn’t thinking about all my identity issues. I was just totally focused in a way that I never had been before.”

Nikki gathered up some old gear and drafted her siblings to belay her. She would go bouldering alone or convince a schoolmate to come along. A climbing gym opened nearby, and having found another outlet in art, she traded some pencil drawings she’d made from climbing photos for a membership.

In 1994, at 18, Nikki participated in a climbing competition at Snowbird ski resort. Here, in person, were the stars she’d seen in magazines and Masters of Stone videos: Tony Yaniro, Bobbi Bensman, Steve Schneider, Timy Fairfield, Jeff Lowe. There were hundreds of spectators, many outfitted in Five Ten approach shoes and shirts with climbing logos. On the arti­ficial walls, a photographer and videographer dangled above the climbers on fixed lines. Nikki was accustomed to suburban Utah, to a small life where you don’t experience much beyond school and church. The Snowbird event showed her that the climbing world was much bigger than she’d imagined, and that within it, much more was possible: travel, purpose, a career, a sense of belonging. Still, it all seemed out of reach.

Nikki graduated from high school that year and got a job at a factory in Ogden. But she kept looking for a way out, something that would cure this thing—whatever it was—that made her a girl. “I wanted to be a man,” she says. “That’s what I was supposed to be.”

At 18, Nikki decided to join the Army.

Cheri returns to the States from her trip to Europe on June 30, her 42nd birthday, and Nikki suggests that they celebrate the next day with a night on the town. Cheri knows that her partner has been depressed—she almost canceled her vacation because of it. At one point while Cheri was away, Nikki called her to talk about starting therapy, but Cheri attributed this to the general funk Nikki had fallen into after leaving Liberty Mountain to freelance. She »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t realize the full extent of Nikki’s depression, or that Nikki has been contemplating suicide.

After dinner, the couple have cocktails at the Red Door, one of their go-to bars in downtown Salt Lake City. Sitting in a corner of the patio, Nikki seems nervous at first but relaxes after a few drinks. She pulls out her phone and shows Cheri some ­pictures of a woman with long, dark hair and makeup, smiling and dancing at a club in Las Vegas.

“Who is that?” Cheri asks.

“That’s me,” Nikki says.

By this point, the couple have been married for 21 years. They met in the fall of 1995, when 19-year-old Nikki was stationed at Fort Hood, in central Texas, and 20-year-old Cheri Stumm, a fellow Mormon from Spokane, Washington, was spending the summer visiting her sister.

Nikki brought Cheri a single rose every Saturday when they were dating. “We just had a blast together,” Nikki says. “I couldn’t be myself with myself, let alone anyone else. But I could be more of myself with her than anyone else I’d ever been around.” They were married the next spring.

Before meeting Cheri, Nikki had found military life and its discipline a welcome distraction. There was physical training, tactical training, and military history. But she also worked hard to seem masculine. When she ran, she kept her lower arms rigidly fixed—she didn’t want to seem limp-wristed. She changed the way she spoke, adopting some of the other enlistees’ words and cadence.

At the same time, she was always eager to tap into the feminine—she wore knee-high pantyhose under her combat boots, for instance, to prevent blisters. (In later years, she’d shave her legs like some male runners, and when her male climbing buddies wore toenail polish for fun, she did too.) “At that point, I felt like I was a guy,” she says, “like I was able to do it. I convinced myself that I was fine. That didn’t last long.”

In 1997, the couple moved to Salt Lake City, and Cheri began working full-time at the large company where she’s still employed as a contract analyst. Nikki attended the University of Utah on an ROTC scholarship. College was a revelation, exposing her to things she hadn’t seen growing up or in military life, like the existence of the queer community. But with the internet still in its infancy, finding information on being transgender was difficult. Nikki read about club scenes in certain big cities where older trans women would act as mother figures to newer arrivals. She wasn’t aware of anything like that in Utah.

With climbing areas like Little Cottonwood Canyon, Maple Canyon, Joe’s Valley, and American Fork within a few hours’ drive, Nikki began climbing obsessively. Every vacation the couple took was about climbing.

In 2001, Nikki was hired as a gear buyer for Liberty Mountain, ultimately becoming the company’s marketing manager. It was a dream job, entailing travel to Europe, photographing climbers on big trips, and managing professional athletes. With two incomes, the couple bought a house. They started trying to have kids.

Everything was going well, but whenever Nikki put on a slideshow at a local gym or gear shop, she felt like a fraud. “I would just be a mess inside,” she says. “It was still kind of this, ‘Well, if you knew who I really was, you wouldn’t be here. If you knew who I really was, you’d punch me in the face right now. If you knew who I really was, you’d be disgusted by me.’ ”

One night in 2003, Nikki and Cheri went out to dinner, and Nikki confessed that she was transgender. She remembers trying to comfort Cheri by telling her that she would never transition—never live as a woman publicly or have hormone therapy or surgery. She was stronger than other transgender people, Nikki recalls saying. That’s not me. I was in the Army, I’m a climber, I’m a guy.

Cheri »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t remember that night.

She does remember, a few years later, when her spouse offered to cook dinner for her and asked her to leave the house for a few hours. When Cheri returned home, she went into the kitchen and saw Nikki in a dress and makeup.

“In the back of my mind, I thought, If this is all you need, to dress up like this once or twice a year,” Cheri says. “I didn’t associate it with being transgender. I didn’t know what it meant.” Several times, Cheri would come home from a work trip and notice that the blinds were closed. They never closed all the blinds. “I would wonder if she dressed up, and I would be happy that she got it out of her system,” she says. It made Cheri uneasy, but she didn’t want to face the larger implications. Her strategy was: don’t talk about it and it never happened.

Now, as the couple sit at the Red Door in the summer of 2017, Nikki tells Cheri that, after a few weeks of intensive therapy, she needs to explore living as a woman. Neither of them knows what that might mean for their relationship.

During therapy while Cheri was away, Nikki hoped to find the answer to a single question: Can I be happy living as Nathan? After a few sessions, the therapist, who had worked with several other trans people, asked, “If you had magic abilities to change things and you could snap your fingers, would you be a girl?” Without hesitation, Nikki answered yes. Saying it out loud for the first time made her realize that she couldn’t go on living as a man.

But deciding that she had to transition and actually doing so were worlds apart. From Nikki’s extensive research, it seemed like you had to be shorter, more petite, and “passable as a woman” to survive. If you weren’t, your life would be filled with harassment and discrimination. Nikki is six feet four inches, with broad shoulders and a muscular climber’s build.

What’s more, she had learned, most couples in which one partner transitions during the relationship don’t stay together. For two decades, Cheri had seen and loved her as a man. Now what?

Nikki also feared—and still fears—the reactions that transitioning might invite, for herself and for Cheri. Despite strides made in LGBTQ+ equality in the past few years, the status of trans people remains dire. Being transgender is complicated, something many people don’t understand. There’s the sexual and physical . The constant hate speech and negative online messaging. The pressure of politicians .

“It’s easy to garner votes when you attack trans people,” says Dani Hawkes, a lawyer specializing in trans issues and chair of the Utah chapter of the ACLU. “You can get votes by hurting women, too. You get a double whammy with a male-to-female trans person.” Hawkes has known the Smiths for 20 years; she says that suicidal thoughts or attempts have been part of nearly every one of her trans clients’ stories. “It’s time to put trans people first,” she says. “They should be the focus of what we do, because they’re so vulnerable.”

In September 2017, I received an e-mail from “Nikki Kovach” regarding an article I’d just published in Climbing magazine. It was about Jamie Logan, a transgender woman climber. Formerly known as Jim, Logan is a pioneer of North American climbing who transitioned at age 65.

“I just want to thank you for your story on Jamie Logan,” the e-mail began. “It could not have come at a better time for me personally. I’ve been fighting the fact that I’m transgender my entire life, and this year it’s finally come to a head.”

Nikki wrote that she’d been working in the climbing industry a long time and this was the first article she’d seen about a transgender climber. The day she read it, she said, she made an appointment with an endocrinologist for hormone-replacement therapy.

Nikki also sent an anonymous message to Deanne Buck, the former executive director of Camber Outdoors, an organization dedicated to increasing the level of inclusivity in the industry. (Buck resigned this February after a backlash to Camber’s erroneous description of its CEO Outdoor Equity Pledge as the first of its kind.)

“I worried that nobody would want to buy guidebooks from a trans person,” Nikki eventually confided in Buck, “that companies wouldn’t want to hire a trans person. Even if the company was liberal enough to be OK with me, I worried that they would still be too afraid of their customers’ reactions.”

Buck countered those fears. “There are always going to be detractors,” she remembers telling Nikki at one point. “But I know the companies who are doing the work, the ones that are open, easier to work with, and might actually see this as an asset.”

Indeed, many brands in the outdoor industry are recognizing the quickly evolving demographic in America—and what that means for their workforce. “What we’ve seen,” Buck says, “is that they are really leaning into the understanding that equity and inclusion are going to drive better business results.”

In the past several years, the outdoor world has seen an increase in dialogue, events, and organizations connected with the LGBTQ+ community, including Massachusetts-based , which leads backpacking trips in New England, Colorado, and the Pacific Northwest for the queer, nonbinary, and trans communities, and Colorado-based , which offers nature education with a transformational component. In 2017, the first-annual LGBTQ Outdoor Summit was held in Seattle, organized by Washington, D.C.–based and Seattle-based . With sponsors like REI and the North Face, the summit aims to increase queer representation in the industry and to create more accessibility for them to “get OUTside,” according to its mission statement.

The founder and executive director of the Venture Out Project, Perry Cohen, is a 43-year-old transgender man who grew up an outdoorsy kid in New Hampshire. In the forests and mountains of the Northeast, he remembers, there were no bathrooms, no mirrors, and no one to comment on his tomboy clothing. At 38, he transitioned. Shortly afterward, while standing on the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock, Cohen realized that his body, from which he had always felt disconnected, was what got him there. He decided to quit his job and help other trans and queer people have the same experience. A former intern at Outward Bound, he founded Venture Out Project in 2014. In 2018, VOP had more than 900 participants, of which, Cohen estimates, at least two-thirds identify as trans or nonbinary.

“By not seeing anyone like us, not having support, not having any visible role models, we got this micromessage that you can be outside, but don’t be visibly queer,” Cohen says. “You can be here, but don’t come out in groups and don’t make your identity a prominent part. By raising awareness, we’re saying you can be here as your authentic self and you don’t have to tamp down the clothes you’re wearing, the way you talk, who you’re out with, or what piercings are showing. To me that’s the difference. We were always here, and now we can be here more authentically, more visibly.”

Social-media accounts like and , with 55,600 and 121,000 followers, respectively, are starting to reflect a more inclusive outdoors. Wyn Wiley is the 26-year-old photographer behind Pattie Gonia. Wiley is a gay man in daily life, but once he puts on six-inch heels, his drag-queen persona, Pattie, takes over. In October 2018, Wiley went backpacking on the Continental Divide Trail with friends and took some photos and videos as Pattie. When he got home, he posted a short clip just for fun. When he woke up the next morning, the video had been watched 123 million times.

“I had REI reaching out to me the second week that Pattie was even a thing,” Wiley says. “That kind of response really let me know that this was needed. I was completely blown away by how ready the outdoor industry was to accept me. It’s been a cool lesson that when you do the thing you think the world isn’t gonna love you for, often the world loves you for it.”

Of course, dressing in drag has nothing to do with being transgender. But a larger message remains: the outdoor community is evolving.

At home in Salt Lake City, Nikki packs for a work trip to the ice-climbing mecca of Ouray, Colorado. There are two roller bags on the floor. One contains crampons, ice tools, ropes, camera gear, mountain boots, and technical outerwear; the other, a zippered makeup kit, colorful dresses, necklaces, and high heels. It’s January 2018— three months into hormone-replacement therapy—and Nikki worries that her developing breasts will be noticeable.

Those won’t be the only changes. In the coming months, she’ll lose muscle mass and redistribute fat, giving her body a softer shape. Her red-blood-cell count will go down, and she’ll become more susceptible to cold weather. Her skin will get thinner, softer, and drier, causing splits and cracks when she uses chalk for climbing. Her body hair will become lighter in color and density, and she will bruise more easily. The plan is that, after Nikki completes hormone therapy, they’ll decide whether to pursue surgery. Cheri has been supportive and has gone to a few therapy sessions herself. But she isn’t sure whether she wants to stay married.

When Nikki and I meet the next day in Ouray, she’s sorting gear on the snowy pavement next to her Subaru. She’s growing her hair out—it barely covers the tops of her ears—and wearing a blue puffy coat and men’s size 13 mountain boots. She has a downcast air. This isn’t necessarily surprising, as she’s still living as Nathan.

The previous month, when she was corresponding with me as Nikki Kovach, we talked on the phone for the first time. Just before the call, she sent me a text: “Just a heads up that we know each other. I didn’t want it to be a surprise.”

Sure enough, we did. “We’ve dealt with each other in the past,” I heard as soon as we got on the phone. “You know me as Nathan Smith.” As an editor at Climbing, I’d been in contact with her for several years, both as a photographer and as the media rep at Liberty Mountain. We saw each other at industry events and had always been friendly. My impression was of someone soft-spoken and kind, but with a certain dejected quality. As Nathan, Nikki had reminded me a little bit of Eeyore.

I’m here in Ouray to film Nikki for a documentary about her transition—in 2016, I started along with three other women in the outdoor industry to tell overlooked stories like hers. Since Nikki is here at the ice-climbing festival as Nathan, we devise a cover story: I’m making a film about a day in the life of a climbing photographer.

The hike to the route is snowy and steep. Nikki is accustomed to carrying the heavy pack of a photographer, but the hormones are taking a toll. She stops often to catch her breath. She never used to get cold, but now she’s cold all the time. She adjusts the straps on her pack so they don’t press against her breasts, which are slightly painful as they grow.

We return to the rental house Nikki is sharing with a dozen men and a few women who are also working at the festival. Others have started to arrive; they’re all friends of ours, but we’re both tense. We are the only two people in the room who know the truth, and I feel like I could let it slip at any moment. There’s nothing preventing me from saying something, and it’s terrifying. I’ve only been hiding this secret for five minutes. Nikki has been hiding it for a lifetime.

Everyone has a glass of bourbon, and people start to loosen up. This is one reason that Nikki didn’t drink much for years, afraid that the truth would spill out, and why she began pulling away from social interaction. While the climber dudes crack jokes, we mostly keep silent, exchanging knowing glances. At one point we head up to Nikki’s room. Here she stands up straight, smiles wide, and starts talking a mile a minute about the future.

I pack up a few hours later, leaving Nikki effectively alone. Though it’s not as pronounced as in her military barracks 20 years earlier, to Nikki the conversations among male climbers can be filled with casual sexism. Even as the climbing world has moved closer to gender equity, alpine and ice climbing still attract fewer women, and the guys tend to possess a certain level of bravado. During a climbing trip Nikki went on in 2017, one guy made a joke about getting a friend drunk and hiring a transgender prostitute to have sex with him. Nikki stayed quiet while the rest of the group laughed.

When the scene in Ouray gets to be too much, she heads to her room or out to the car to practice vocal exercises. Nikki has a deep baritone, and the voice therapist has assigned a twice-a-day routine to strengthen her vocal cords and raise the pitch of her voice.

This in-between time, no longer Nathan but not yet fully Nikki, is the worst. All she wants is to be able to style her hair, to shape her eyebrows, to have breasts big enough to fill a bra, and to wear her clothing all the time. She has tasted the freedom of being Nikki, and each minute spent as anybody else feels like a step back.

AtÌę6:15 on a Monday morning in May 2018, I meet Nikki and Cheri in their driveway in the Sugar House neighborhood of Salt Lake. The three of us load up into their car, and Nikki puts on her surgery playlist. Rachel Platten blasts through the speakers: This is my fight song / Take back my life song / Prove I’m alright song.

Nikki reaches over and puts her hand on Cheri’s leg. The couple look at each other, and they both let out a nervous chuckle.

It’s been tough so far, not just emotionally but financially: paying for therapy, hormones, doctor visits, surgeries and recovery time, laser hair removal, voice therapy, and lawyer and court fees to change her legal sex and name. Insurance has covered the doctor visits for hormones, as well as the voice therapy, but everything else has come from the couple’s savings. They’ve spent almost $100,000 in the past year and have been living off Cheri’s income.

On the 30-minute drive to the University of Utah’s South Jordan Health Center, Cheri extends her hand and gently runs her fingers through Nikki’s hair. In this moment, worrying about money is just about the furthest thing from their minds. Today’s surgery is the second of three, and it’s a big one—breast augmentation.

Gender transitions can happen on three levels: social, hormonal, and surgical. (To these, Nikki would add mental.) Many transgender people will take every step available to them, but many will not—for cultural, social, or financial reasons, or just out of personal preference. “Bottom, or genital, surgery is the one that people always want to know about,” Nikki says. “For most trans people, that’s not something we really want to talk about. You wouldn’t walk up to any other woman and ask if she’s had a hysterectomy or any other delicate surgery down there. Even when close friends ask about bottom surgery, it’s invasive and inappropriate, and it »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t change who I am. I don’t have to have any of these surgeries in order to be me.”

Today’s breast surgery is a turning point. After the two-hour procedure, there will be no hiding her new chest. On a daily basis, Nikki is finally beginning to see herself in the mirror. Procedures like fat transfer to the cheeks, rhinoplasty, and a tracheal shave mean that everyone else will see her, too.

Nikki hasn’t come out publicly, but between her and Cheri, they’ve told about 80 of their close friends and family. “The problem with coming out to someone,” Nikki says, “is there’s so much fear behind it that you analyze every interaction you’ve ever had with that person. You go back and try to remember every post they’ve ever made on social media, every comment, joke, whatever.”

Nikki’s mom passed away from health complications in 2011, at age 59. Her siblings have been supportive, as has Cheri’s family, though they were initially surprised. In August 2018, the Stumms had a family reunion at Bear Lake in Utah, with Nikki, Cheri, and her five siblings. Elizabeth, Cheri’s youngest sister, has noticed that Nikki seems happier, laughing more than before.

And most of the Smiths’ friends have stepped up. “You can either be really shell-shocked or you can be really supportive,” says Heath Christensen, a family friend for more than 20 years and one of the first people Nikki confided in. “Intrinsically, she’s the same person. But the smiles come way easier, and there’s a lightness. You can see that a dark cloud has lifted. She’s liberated.”

After checking into the hospital with a temporary copy of her new driver’s license—Nikki Karla Smith, sex: F—she’s led into a pre-op room. The only sounds are the beep of a heart-rate monitor and the quiet voices of nurses prepping her for surgery. The doctor comes in to discuss the procedure and then takes her to a separate room for “before” photos. There’s an anxious silence until the doctor cracks a joke about how awkwardly Nikki is standing in order to keep the oversize hospital gown from falling down. Everyone laughs, and we all breathe a little easier.

“Relaaaaax,” Cheri says to Nikki.

Cheri never considered not supporting Nikki through her transition, though there were times when she felt bleak about their future together. “Seeing how happy she is as a woman, but I married a man—I didn’t know how we’d get through this,” she says. “I didn’t know what it would do to our future, not just with us but with everything. I thought we would lose everybody. It wasn’t what I signed up for.”

The breakthrough came in February 2018, during several days of counseling. On the last day, Cheri sat on her therapist’s couch scrolling through photos on her phone. “There was one of Nikki, and I remember thinking, Yeah, this is who I love, this is who I want to be with. It was just, Aha.” When she looked at shots of Nikki living as Nathan, she saw a sadness she had never noticed before. In the new photos of Nikki as herself, she saw a new light in her eyes. For Cheri, it became so simple: “Why would you want to be with somebody who is so sad but not want to be with that same person who is now so happy?”

No single event in the gear industry is bigger than the Outdoor Retailer trade show, held three times a year in Denver. It’s here, at the 2018 summer OR show, that Nikki will make her professional debut. Six months ago, after the Ouray ice-climbing festival back in January, she attended the OR Winter Snow Show. Days were spent networking as Nathan, uncomfortably making plans for future trips and work assignments that she knew wouldn’t happen, at least not in the same way. Nights were spent going out, with a few close friends, as Nikki.

A few weeks before the summer show, Nikki came out as transgender on Facebook and to the 30,000-plus followers of her Pull Media account on Instagram. While the post garnered hundreds of positive comments, as well as e-mail and text messages, she had no idea how people would react in person. Under the fluorescent lights at the ­Colorado Convention Center, it’s obvious how un­com­fortable Nikki is. She fidgets with her hands and constantly scans the crowd as she walks the show floor. While the event is meant to be a place to do business, it’s equally a social affair, with everyone looking to connect. Many people come up to Nikki and say the requisite lines: “You look so great! I’m so happy for you! Congratulations!” Few of the conversations go very deep, partly because people don’t know what to say and partly because it’s impossible to say much at an event that’s jam-packed with meetings, dinners, and happy hours.

Several interactions are rough. At one point, a longtime acquaintance asks Nikki if being dressed as a woman is some kind of shtick. “I kept talking and didn’t let them know how much their comments hurt,” she recalls. “But inside I was crushed.”

There’s no protocol for how to handle any of this. Nikki goes from elated to disappointed and back numerous times. After a few hours she gets tired, and any time there isn’t an unambiguously positive reaction, she’s on the brink of tears. She sees strangers whispering and pointing as she walks by, and a few times she goes into the bathroom to cry.

On the last day of the show, Nikki grabs coffee with Deanne Buck. The two have stayed in contact throughout the transition, and now the women talk about the reactions Nikki received on the show floor—the good, the bad, the judgmental. Buck notices that Nikki is wearing jewelry, and realizing that she might never have had a safe place to buy it, she asks, “Do you want to go shopping?” Nikki assumes she means leave the convention center and go into downtown Denver, but Buck leads her across the show floor to the booth for Bronwen Jewelry, an Oregon-based brand. “My friend has great jewelry, and I think you’d love it,” she explains.

Nikki meets designer Bronwen Lodato, and they discuss the difficulty of finding jewelry that fits her wrists and neck. Lodato offers to make some custom-length pieces, and a few weeks later there’s a package on Nikki’s doorstep and an e-mail in her inbox asking her to be an ambassador for the brand.

Her affiliation with Bronwen Jewelry is just the beginning of a seismic shift in Nikki’s career trajectory. She still works as a photographer and is still building Pull Media, but she’s been invited to more than a dozen climbing events—some women specific, some not—to present slideshows and speak on panels. After these appearances, she often receives private messages from queer people who are struggling, including people wrestling with gender identity. Seeing Nikki in person, they explain, makes them realize that there are other trans climbers out there, and that transitioning is possible.

In March, Nikki signs a contract to be an ambassador for REI—she’ll lead clinics, consult on company policy, and speak at events. “Ultimately, she’s helping to make way for a more vibrant and inclusive outdoor community,” says Nicole Browning, a senior marketing program manager at REI, “to shift the narrative about gender equity and get closer to the level playing field we know the outdoors to be. Raising up Nikki’s voice and story is one way to help people feel a more personal connection to someone whose life and experiences might be different from their own, but who may also have a lot in common.”

Nikki feels ready to be heard. “I delayed this decision for way too long out of fear,” she said when she first contacted me. “I delayed because I did not have anyone else to look up to. I delayed because I did not feel I had a voice. I delayed for too many reasons, but I am no longer going to be forced to be someone I am not. If I can help make real change in the outdoor industry and beyond, I plan on doing so.”

Nikki and I are back in her driveway. It’s still dark at 5:30 a.m. on a cold October 2018 morning when we leave her house to head up into the Uintas. She spotted some ice forming on a route called Golden Spike when she was scouting the area a few days before. This is one of her favorite seasons. Every year, she likes to see if she can be the first person to climb ice in the lower 48.

“Are you psyched?” her climbing partner, Jason Hall, asks while they pack their gear at the trailhead.

“I’m always psyched for ice,” she says with a grin before heading down the snowy trail. This time she’s prepared for the cold, with extra layers and warm gloves. She’s wearing mostly women’s outerwear, though her boots are still men’s. They probably always will be. A long brown ponytail hangs down her back, and turquoise earrings dangle just below the edge of her beanie.

Out on the ice, Nikki is fully in her element. Here in her backyard range, she’s finally climbing ice with a partner who knows who she really is. Each swing of the ice tool sprays snow and ice onto her face, but she keeps her head up and her smile wide.

While her new life in the spotlight can be difficult—Nikki’s still the shy, reserved person she’s always been—she feels a sense of connection she’s never had before. She’s able to open up completely, one thing she could never do living as Nathan. Becoming a trans advocate wasn’t necessarily part of the plan, but she’s growing into her role.

“Life is getting better and better,” she says, “but it’s still challenging.” She’s been groped or propositioned by men wanting to have sex with her for money or drugs. She’s misgendered almost daily, stared at, and occasionally harassed walking down the street. Every day, she faces new encounters that range from good to egregious, and she must figure out when to ignore the slights and when to stand up for herself.

“It is pretty amazing seeing who this person becomes who you never knew existed,” Cheri says. “She’s been buried for so long.”

For Cheri, the hardest part has been saying goodbye to Nate, the person she fell in love with almost 24 years ago. She still has good and bad days, some when she’d rather hole up in the house than go out as a couple and face people’s stares. She still hasn’t gone out in the T-shirt a friend gave her that reads, I’m not a lesbian, but my wife is. But she’s learned to care less about what people think, to let her guard down and live life how she wants. “I spent too much energy on making sure everybody else was happy with what I was doing instead of just doing what I want,” Cheri says. “I’m not afraid anymore.”

While Cheri still struggles with the romantic aspect of their relationship (“I’m not attracted to women at all, but I’m attracted to Nikki as a person,” she says), she and Nikki both say they’ve never been closer. There are no secrets anymore. Before, they were so concerned about hurting each other’s feelings that they wouldn’t discuss deep issues at all. Now they can just talk.

Talking without fear or judgment, in an effort to understand someone who is different from you—it’s a concept that’s simple in theory but hard in practice. Using words the right way could be the one thing that prevents a trans person from killing themselves or guides a gender-confused teenager to someone who can help. Five words saved Nikki’s life, words that are now tattooed on her left wrist. Show up and be seen.

Julie Ellison () is a former editor in chief at Climbing Magazine. With her partners at Never Not Collective, she’s working on a film about Nikki Smith’s experiences as a transgender climber.

The post Being Nikki Smith appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

“Hayden and Inge died.” (October 8, 2017)

The text lit up my phone late one night, four words that seared themselves into the back of my skull. The texter, my friend Leslie, called a few minutes later to relay the details. Renowned climbers Inge Perkins and Hayden Kennedy got caught in an avalanche while skiing in Montana. Perkins died, and unable to bear the loss of his love, Kennedy returned home and killed himself. I had met Inge a handful of times, a sweet and lovely young woman who quietly climbed circles around everyone. I didn’t know Hayden, but I had followed his impressive career for almost a decade and knew him to be a thoughtful and brilliant person.

After getting off the phone, I sat in the dark of my van, wondering what to do with this pain. It was an ache that made me uncomfortable by its very existence. I didn’t know either of them very well; do I even have a right to be this upset? Is my sorrow valid? Parked in the middle of the woods just south of Meyers, California, I was alone and didn’t know anybody within a six-hour drive. It was after 11 p.m., too late to call other friends. Hayden and Inge were so loved by so many. All I could do was get in bed and cry. As much as I wanted the night to be over, I dreaded waking up to the heartbreak that would be sweeping the rest of our little climbing community.

“Did you hear about Savannah?” my friend Shelma asks. I say no, assuming Sav has done something super cool I should know about. Shelma continues, “She died in a climbing accident yesterday.” Ìę(March 29, 2018)

I sat in front of my laptop at Black Sheep Coffee Roaster in Bishop, California, the work I’d come there to do now forgotten. Savannah Buik, a 22-year-old climber from Chicago, was leading a route at Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin. She fell, and the two pieces of protection she placed came out. She hit the ground and died on impact.

I met Savannah six years ago in Horse Pens 40, Alabama, at a boulder problem called Genesis. As the only two girls among a sea of climber boys at the crag that day, she and I struggled with the problem’s huge crux move. In between burns, I overheard her telling a friend about her efforts to get better at climbing writing, and that she hoped to intern at Climbing magazine one day. At the time I was an editor there, and the person in charge of hiring interns, so I mentioned this to her. Even though she was only in high school, I admired her stoke and drive. We talked for a long time at that boulder, the conversation carrying over into countless emails exchanged for years afterward. She would send me links to her recent work; I would send her feedback and encouragement.

After hearing the news, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I got up and walked around aimlessly outside. I called a few friends, then my mom. I walked back in the coffee shop and stopped near the cash register, unsure of what I was doing there. Shelma approached me, and I just put my head on her shoulder and cried.

“Can I call you? One of my best friends from Bend died yesterday in a climbing accident at Smith.” (April 11, 2018)

Another text, this one from my friend Bobby. His buddy Alex Reed was unroped on easy terrain, scoping new-route potential in Smith Rock. The 20-year-old climber slipped and fell 300 feet. On the phone, Bobby told me about Alex, a loving and genuine person who’d become a bright fixture in the Bend climbing community. Unsure of how to deal with his sorrow, Bobby decided to drive ten hours from Bishop to see Alex’s Astrovan one more time, to go to Smith Rock and be with mutual friends. He texted me again a few days later: “What’s one thing you would tell someone who just lost a friend? People are really hurting.” I responded as best I could—say you’re sorry, listen, be there for them—but it felt pathetic.

Because what do you say? How do you tell someone you’re sorry a hundred times and not feel like a useless piece of shit? How do you deal with your own grief, let alone someone else’s? We do what we can by turning to friends, posting tributes on social media, and analyzing what contributed to the misfortune. Maybe if we look at the scenario and what went wrong, we can avoid the same fate. Death »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t discriminate, but it sure does seem to like climbers.

Like a building thunderstorm, the risk of death follows climbers throughout our vertical lives. At first we view the clouds from afar—we’re aware of their presence but they don’t affect us directly, like a well-known alpinist disappearing in the big mountains or a rappelling accident at a faraway crag. Time passes, you climb more, and the clouds grow larger and darker with each “Oh, my buddy was friends with her…” Then crack—lightning strikes, the bottom falls out of the sky, and death strikes someone close to you.

Pro climber Madaleine Sorkin has been climbing for almost two decades, but a slew of accidents last year hit really close to home. In August, Sorkin and climbing partner Kate Rutherford helped a woman out of the Wind River Range in Wyoming after the woman’s partner died in a rappelling accident. Kennedy, whom Sorkin was close with, and Perkins died in early October, and a few days later, Quinn Brett, a longtime climbing partner of Sorkin’s, took a Ìęon El Capitan and was paralyzed from the waist down.

“There was raw grief for me with these losses and changes,” Sorkin says.Ìę“I felt stunned and depressed. I wasn’t finding climbing fulfilling and didn’t know how to process the pain that I was feeling related to climbing.ÌęAnd as I looked around our climbing community I didn’t see much guidance or resource for how to process this grief.” Ìę

SoÌęSorkin teamed up with the American Alpine Club to create the , a resource for climbers affected by the death. The idea is to help the climbing community, as a whole and on an individual level, cope with trauma and grief. It will start with a grief resource webpage, individual counseling grants, and groupÌętherapy sessions at climbing events, like the nationally touringÌęfestivalÌęAAC Craggin’ Classics—all coordinated by the AACÌęwith plans to expand as more funding comes in.

Right now the fundraising page’s goal is set at $12,000, and Outdoor Research has agreed to match the first $5,000;Ìęthey are hoping to grow the fund in the coming years through individual/private, corporate, and organizational donations. To raise money for the Grief Fund,ÌęSorkin and climber Mary Harlan have planned a 24-hour link-up of three big routes in Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison, calling the attempt . Originally she was going to attempt the link-up in late May, but a large portion of the canyon was closed indefinitely due to a shifting football-field size flake in the area called The Flakes. The climb has been postponed to September.

The only way to truly avoid the tempest of death is to stop climbing altogether. Since most of us won’t stop climbing, eventually the thunder and lightning will find us. The aim of the Grief Fund is to provide some shelter from the storm, just enough protection to get us through the heaviest part of the downpour and into the bright sunlight that follows.

The post This New Fund Will Help Climbers Cope with Death appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Most climbers agree on one thing: rappelling is terrifying. While the concept of using a rappel device to descend a rope is simple, in practice it requires the utmost attention to detail. This proves difficult when you’re mentally and physically exhausted after a long climb and all you can think about is cheeseburgers. The margin for error is razor thin,Ìęand accidents often result in death.

Those risks are compounded by the fact that most big climbs require multiple rappels to get to the ground, which adds logistical challenges. If you want to rappel more than 30 to 35 meters (roughly 100 to 115 feet)Ìęat a time (or half the length of one rope), you need to bring along another rope. But a second rope adds weight, and when you’re committing to big days in high mountains, extra pounds matter.Ìę

, aÌęnew detachable anchor systemÌęfrom French climbing-gear manufacturer Beal, could solve that problem, allowing you to rappel the full length of a single rope, then retrieve the rope by pulling on it a certain wayÌęand keep descending. Weighing in at 3.2 ounces and packing down to the size of a beer can, the device seemingly offers a weight-saving solution. ButÌęwhile making it possible for climbers to get to the ground with fewer rappels and thus descend faster, the mechanism it uses could prove risky and make rappelling more dangerous. We tested it out to see if the pros outweigh the cons.

How It Works

The design of the Escaper is simple but brilliant. There’s a four-foot section of dry-treated dynamic climbing rope withÌęa Dyneema wrap, a bungee cord, and an attachment loop at the bottom. Thread the end of the Escaper through the anchor and then all the way down through the Dyneema wrap, which resembles a friction hitch. TieÌęyour main rope to the attachment loop below the Dyneema wrap. As with aÌę, pulling on the Dyneema wrap (or, in this case, weighting it for rappel)Ìęcauses it to tighten, effectively locking it in place. The rappeller can then descend.Ìę

Once on the ground, it’s time to get your rope back. Pulling and releasing the rope sharply causes the bungee to stretch and then spring back up, moving the Dyneema wrap along with it. With each pull and release, the Dyneema wrapÌęinches down the Escaper rope. Yank the rope enough times (Beal says it takes a minimum of eight, but in our testing it was closer to 12)Ìęand the friction hitch inches right off the end of the Escaper. The device’s rope segment slides through the anchors, and the Escaper and climbing rope fall to where you can retrieve them.

Beal isn’t just marketing this as an emergency tool; the company envisions it as a tool for competent climbers familiar with the terrain to routinely make full-length, single-rope rappels, lightening their packs and getting to the ground faster.Ìę“The name is Escaper, so it isÌęfirst a backup device,” saysÌęa Beal representative. “But when you know the routes, you can use the Escaper as a standard way to rappel with aÌęsingle rope. SoÌęit’s a back-up system, but not only a backup system.”

Why It Might Be Dangerous

Holding aÌęRappel

The device is designed to come unattached after a rappel, which raises the question: Could that happenÌęduring a rappel? Rappels are rarely straight or free-hanging. Climbers will likely unweight or partially unweight the rope as they comeÌęto ledges or bulges. Theoretically, unweighting the rope mid-rappel could mimic the yanking and releasing action that makes the Escaper inch over itself and ultimately release. In the instruction manual, Beal requires a consistent weight of ten kilogramsÌę(22 pounds) to keep the bungee taught, but how do you know if you’re exerting the minimumÌęamount of force on the device to keep it engaged?

Asked whether unweighting the rope could mimic the pull-release motion of rope retrieval, the Beal representativeÌęsays, “It is possible, which is why we say you need to maintain ten kilograms of weight on the rope.”

But the representative adds that “the pull and release actionsÌęare very active movements,” meaning that they should be quicker and more forcefulÌęthan those used when unweighting the rope during a rappel.

Backing It Up

Beal recommends using a backup knot and a testing system for each rappel: fix the Escaper with a knot at the end of the rope segment and send your partner down while you stay at the anchors to make sure that the friction hitch »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t move during rappel and does move when yanked for retrieval. Then you can removeÌęthe knot and rapÌędown. This requires communication between you and your partner, which isn’t always possible. Consider this situation: You noticeÌęa problem during your partner's rappel, but your partner is now 200 feet below and out of earshot. What are youÌęto do?

With respect to that scenario, the Beal representativeÌęsays that the Escaper isn’t any different from a typical two-rope rappel. “What can you do when you rappel with your two strands of half rope and the knot is stuck somewhere?” he asks. “The Escaper is as efficient as any other method to rappel down.”

Rope Retrieval

Will you reliably be able to retrieve your rope after you rappel in all conditions?ÌęTesting the Escaper as a demo on a trade-show floor—as Ed Crothers, who directsÌęthe Ìęclimbing-instructor program, did—went smoothly. But that was under ideal conditions. “It was in a free-hanging, vertical orientation, attached to an eyebolt, which nearly eliminates the friction that would be found in many climbing situations,” Crothers says. “I still have a lot of questions.”

For instance: What happens when you factor in the weight of a full 60- or 70-meter rope or a wet rope? What if the rope runs overÌęledges, cracks, orÌęslabs, causing friction? In the field, yanking your rope won't always beÌęas easy as it is in aÌędemo situation—and if you’re more than one rope length off the ground, getting your rope back is essential.

Our Test

Our team of testers—me and several experienced climbers and canyoneers, including Spencer McBride, a guide in Zion National Park—used this device in several situations: on a testÌęanchor at chest height, on single-pitch climbs, and on multi-pitch climbsÌęwith one big rappel to the ground.ÌęIn all these situations, the rope ran straight,Ìęwith fewÌęledgesÌęand little contact with the rock, and the Escaper performed perfectly, staying put during rappel and coming free after about a dozen harsh tugs from the ground. However, we couldn't mimic a long, jerky rappel, weighting and unweighting the rope, without abandoning our backup protocol, which none of us felt comfortable doing.

As for retrieving the rope after rappel, we found that pulling a 70-meter rope with the added resistance of the EscaperÌęwas quite similar to pulling the added weight of a secondÌę70-meter ropeÌęon a standard double-rope rappel. The biggest difficulty for me was getting the snap of the pull-release motion, especially with more than half the rope out. It requires a powerful, coordinated, full-body motion at odds withÌęthe slow and controlled method of pulling ropes in a standard rappel. Ìę

The Upshot

The Escaper isn’t the first device of its kind. In the late fifties, French climber and inventor Pierre Allain created the Decrocheur Allain, a metal device with a spring-loaded hook that popped off the anchor as soon as it was unweighted. It never caught on. A similar approach involves hooking a standard piece of aid-climbing gear called a fifi hook to the anchor—it, too, requires consistent weight during the entire rappel. Some climbing guides use a specialÌęrope hitch that comes undone with a few pulls, but it has resulted in at least one death.

The Escaper is the first device designed toÌęallow the user to unweight the rope multiple times before it releases. AndÌęunlike similar tools and tricks, Beal is claiming it isn’t just a last-ditchÌęemergency device. As the Beal representativeÌęsays, Beal wants the Escaper to become a regular part of the experienced climber’s kit.

For Ron Funderburke, education director at the , it’s the lack of certain caveats and concerns in Beal’s instruction manualÌęthat are the cause skepticism. “They don’t mention icy conditions. They don’t mention vegetated or loose terrain, where the Escaper could dislodge debris or get stuck,” he says. “Are we to believe that none of these circumstances impose conditions on the Escaper’s use?” (Though as the Beal representativeÌętoldÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, “Beal feels like they covered this in their product-use guidelines,” pointing to a bullet in the instruction manualÌęthat warns that “in wet or icy conditions the system will become more susceptible to abrasion and lose strength.”)

With the device so newÌęand testing limited, it’s nearly impossible to answer many of these safety concerns right now. In the meantime, most of the professionals we spoke with encourage climbers and canyoneers to think of the Escaper as an emergency-only deviceÌęrather than a replacement for a conventional rappelling setup. More important, they emphasize that only advanced and experienced climbers should use it.

“In the hands of the unaware or incompetent, this device could be deadly,” Crothers says. “But if over time it proves itself to be a viable, versatile tool, then it could be a game changer.”

The post Testing Beal’s Controversial Escaper Rappel Device appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

At the 2018 Women’s Climbing Fest in Bishop, California, we talked with professional climbers, guides, and industry workers to soak up some advice for beginners. Here’s their best advice for advancing your technique, taking care of your body, and overcoming mental obstacles.

Climb with Your Feet

Many beginner climbers think the sport is all about upper-body strength, says , an outdoor photographer and climber. But paying attention to where you place your feet often allows you to reach higher holds more easily and puts less strain on your arms and fingers. Instead of focusing on pulling on the next hold, she says to “always think with your feet first.”

Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

Negative self-talk can seem insignificant, but it may actually hinder your growth in climbing, says , a professional climber and nutritionist. “Climbing is an individual game, meaning it’s unique for each of us, and that’s the beauty of it. Make it your own thing, celebrate in the differences, and support one another’s triumphs.”

Stretch Your Hips

Flexibility is often overlooked, but it can help you reach different holds, creating more options for solving climbs, according to pro climber and coach Molly Mitchell. Flexibility in your hips opens the door to higher or distant footholds. She suggests this stretch: Lie on the floor in a frog position—as if you’re doing the middle splits, but bend your knees. Stretch for one minute on and one minute off for five total minutes of stretching.

Rely on All Your Fingers

“Always use your pinkies,” professional climber Kyra Condie recommends. “Not only do they make your grip position stronger, but they also help you avoid injuries.”

Take Care of Your Skin

“When your skin is good, climbing »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t hurt as much and your day lasts longer,” pro climber Abbey Smith says. She keeps her fingertips clean with a small, durable spray bottle of rubbing alcohol. Smith rests to cool down her body temperature so her hands are dry before attempts, and she files away any rough edges on her hands with fine-grade sandpaper. Post-climbing, Smith repairs her skin with an anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, moisturizing ointment. “Neosporin with pain relief is my favorite,” she says.

Embrace Failure

“Understand that climbing is mostly about being comfortable with failing,” pro climber says, whether that’s a fear of falling, the inability to complete a certain move, or a lack of confidence. Instead of trying to push away feelings of insecurity, Harrington tries to acknowledge them. “I felt so bad about myself every time I was afraid, because none of the boys seemed to be scared. I wanted to be like them,” she says. “I wish I had known that it was perfectly OK to be like me.”

Top-Rope to Learn to Place Gear

To take some of the risk out of gear placement, start on top rope, says , a guide and professional climber. She suggests new climbers weight each piece of gear and bounce-test it. Then, look closely at what the piece does under a little bit of force. “This will not only help you learn how to place gear properly and quickly in a safe environment, but it will also help you learn to trust your gear,” Oakley says. “If pieces pop out—great! You’re learning.”

Focus on Getting Better Instead of Stronger

Professional climber Jenn Flemming says this simple mindset switch helps a lot. “When you’re a beginner, there’s an incredible learning curve in terms of technical knowledge about movement, body position, and strategy,” she says. “Developing competent technique will take you so much further than CrossFit or the hangboard.” How to up your technique: Spend time watching other people climb, observing movement and how different people use their body in different ways. Keep an eye out for how and when climbers rest, and notice their style choices—bent versus straight arms, open hips versus back-stepping. You will get stronger naturally as you climb more. “There’s plenty of time for training when you inevitably plateau a few years in,” Flemming says. “But technical knowledge is crucial and something you can begin developing at the outset.”

Go Ahead and Fall

“I just took my first lead fall outside, and I’m climbing 5.13 in the gym. I refused to take falls, because it felt like failure to me,” says Meaghen Brown, a writer for Patagonia and former șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű editor. “But falling »ćŽÇ±đČőČÔ’t mean that you’re failing. It means that you’re working on something and you’re learning.” As long as you master the proper techniques for lead climbing and you can take safe falls, don’t be afraid to jump right in and lead things at or above your limit, says Sara Nazim, a product developer at Outdoor Research.

Stay Psyched

No matter where you are in the climbing process, attitude is everything, says , a life and nutrition coach. Are you the person who brings eagerness to every climbing session, or are you the person who throws their shoes on the ground when they can’t send a project? Instead of jumping to find an excuse when you can’t finish a route, use your failure as a learning experience. “Enthusiasm and desire to learn are the character traits that really matter while learning to climb, not the grade,” McCandless says.

Want to refine your climbing skills? Check out our online course on , where șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű+ members get full access to our library of more than 50 courses on adventure, sports, health, and nutrition.

The post 10 Tips for New Rock Climbers appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The post Heroes of the Women’s Climbing Festival appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On Tuesday, February 6, Michaela Kiersch, 23, sent Necessary Evil (5.14c), making her the first woman to climb this benchmark route in Arizona’s Virgin River Gorge. Paige Claassen, 27, sent the same line the following day.

At 5.14c, is technically not the hardest pitch in the U.S. as far as grades go—, a 5.15b at California’s Clark Mountain, holds that title. But the conditions-dependent rock andÌętheÌęlong reaches between tiny holds on this historic routeÌęhave thwarted some of the world’s most elite climbers. Plus, the crag’s setting makes high-performance rock climbing difficult. The shape of the canyon blasts wind toward the limestone walls. The walls themselves areÌęlocated in the northwestern-most tip of Arizona, directly above I-15, where the roar of semi-trucksÌępassing atÌę80 miles per hourÌęcan be deafening.Ìę

Kiersch’s personal motto is “be strong enough to overcome minor inconveniences,” which came in handy her first day on the route. Within a few tries, she had figured out all the moves of the 90-foot line. That's when she knew it would be possible to do it clean.Ìę“Initially, the opening moves, which are the hardest and described as V10 to V12, were very physical for me and felt low-percentage,” she says. However, once she figured out the sequence, she was able to execute the moves every time.

She gave the route a few attempts each day, getting through the low crux every time but falling at the upper crux—another long reach to a small crimp, followed by a desperate stab for a bigger hold. She repeated that sequence for almost a week before it was time for her to head back home to Salt Lake City,Ìęwhere she was competing inÌę, an indoor climbing competition. “Leaving was really hard, likely due to a combination of disappointment, frustration, and eagerness to try again, but I had made a commitment to compete and I wanted to honor that,” Kiersch says. “Ultimately, I needed to walk away [from the route] anyway because I sensed that I was building a mental barrier.”

Meanwhile, Paige Claassen, a pro climber from Colorado, had also been trying the route for a few weeks. “Necessary Evil definitely suits my style, and I got really close in 2014, but it was just way too hot. It’s more of a mental crux because everything comes down to one move,”ÌęClassen says, referring to the tricky stab at the upper crux.ÌęBecause the rock was so rough on her skin, Claassen was limited to trying it every other day.

After making it to semifinals atÌęBouldering Nationals, Kiersch returned to the Virgin River Gorge on Monday. On Tuesday, she sent the route.ÌęClaassen sent the next morning.Ìę

“What struck me as interesting was not two women gunning for an FFA [first female ascent], because I don't think that’s what was happening,” says , a photographer and filmmaker who was in the VRG at the time. “It struck me as interesting that there were so many people getting close to sending this historic testpiece, which used to be a benchmark in American climbing.”

Both climbers credit the history of the route as their inspiration for trying the line. It was the hardest route in the country when Chris Sharma made the first ascent in 1997, and prior to this week, only about a dozen people had successfully climbed it, including Tommy Caldwell, Jonathan Siegrist, and Ethan Pringle. Alex Honnold, who has tried the climb but not sent it, calls it a “hard, old-school route.” He says, “It’s finicky—it can’t be too hot or too cold or too humid, because it will feel impossible. Unless it’s too dry, then it will feel slippery. It’s kind of heinous, and it’s extra hard if you’re shorter than 5’10”.”

Kiersch is 5’1”.ÌęClaassen is 5’6”.

“[Michaela and I] are very different climbers in terms of strength and size,” Claassen says, “but it was cool to cheer each other on, and we had a solid group of ladies up at the crag. Everyone was trying hard and having a lot of fun.”

Necessary Evil had been on a vision board Kiersch keeps in her home training room, along with other climbing and life objectives, like getting into grad school to pursue a doctorate in occupational therapy. While there are plenty of future goals to think about, for now, Kiersch is focusing on the satisfaction of crossing Necessary Evil off the list.

“I just want to enjoy this accomplishment a little bit longer,”Ìęshe says, “before shifting my attention to the next objective.”Ìę

The post Two Women Just Climbed One of America’s Hardest Routes appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.