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Outside Magazine, April 2005
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 

Climber Girls
Babes on Belay (cont.)

Sheyna Button
BABE IN THE WOODS: Sheyna getting cozy in Camp 4 (Jeff Lipsky)
THE PHYSICAL LIFE IS HEAVEN for young women. But as obvious as that seems these days, it used to be a well-kept secret. I learned it firsthand back in the late eighties, when I was 19 and working as a volunteer ranger at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, running up and down a mile of vertical relief every day and biking 50 miles to mountain hot springs on my day off.

Nothing can compare to being alone or with other girls, sweating the pure, clear sweat of youth, enjoying day after day of adrenaline followed by perfect sleep. For the first time since childhood, your body is fully organized, you feel great about yourself, and you're ensconced in a subculture with a ready-made sense of belonging and a ban on practical thoughts about the future. Your goal for the day is to bag your fourteener, flash your 5.12, beat your own speed record—that's it.

All the things I got from running and biking—fitness, focus, calm, direction—you get ten times over from climbing. It's also a nearly perfect sport for women, one in which balance, finesse,
Nothing can compare to being with other girls, sweating the pure, clean sweat of youth, enjoying day after day of adrenaline followed by perfect sleep. Your goal is to bag your fourteener, flash your 5.12—that's it.
and strength-to-weight ratio are more important than stand-alone power or speed. That's why, relatively early on, men had to accept women as equals. Climbs are rated according to an old class system that ranges from 5.0 to 5.15: A 5.1 climb is cake; at 5.13 you enter the realm of physical specimens who also happen to be climbing maniacs. By 5.14, you're talking mysticism and special effects, what my formerly 5.12-capable husband describes as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon stuff."

At that rarefied level, women have proved themselves frighteningly strong. In 1979, an 18-year-old kid named Lynn Hill put up the first ascent of 5.12+ Ophir Broke, a 400-foot route outside Telluride, Colorado. In 1993, she became the first person, male or female, to free-climb—that is, ascend without artificial aids—the 5.13+ Nose route up Yosemite's El Capitan, North America's classic big wall. In 1994 she was the first to free the Nose in one day. Both feats remain unrepeated by anybody, male or female.

Other women followed. In 1999, then-18-year-old Katie Brown on-sighted—climbed without having seen the route before—a 5.13d called Omaha Beach, at Red River Gorge, Kentucky. And last fall at Smith Rock, in central Oregon, 24-year-old Beth Rodden redpointed—led without falling—a thin seam called the Optimist, rated 5.14b, the hardest climb ever completed by an American woman. Her husband, 26-year-old Tommy Caldwell, arguably the country's best male climber, tried the route but failed to link it up.

The whole world had changed in the 20 years between Hill and the new generation. Whereas Hill learned her chops trad-style on the cliffs of Joshua Tree, Rodden cut her teeth on plastic holds. She and her peers were not so much feminist as postfeminist; they'd grown up in climbing gyms and reaped the benefits of Title IX, the 1972 law mandating gender equality in scholastic athletics. They'd never think of sitting in a meadow in a lawn chair with a nice pair of binoculars, watching their boyfriends' studly moves.


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