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Outside Magazine, April 2005

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Climber Girls
Babes on Belay (cont.)


	GROUNDED: Sarah rests up for the next ascent. (Jeff Lipsky)

NONE OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE WOMEN—so postfeminist they called one another both "hon" and "dude"—imagined she'd be the next Lynn Hill. Their more immediate role model was Heidi Wirtz, a.k.a. Heidi Almighty, whom Janet and Sarah had met the year before at Indian Creek.

At 34, Wirtz had fed her climbing jones with a smorgasbord of jobs, including baker, crab cooker, log peeler, builder, landscaper, guide, and speed climber at SeaWorld. She'd spent two winters living out of a tent in Crested Butte, Colorado, and nearly a dozen camping in her truck. In British Columbia's Bugaboos in 2002, she put up a 5.12 first free ascent called Bad Hair Day with Lizzy Scully, the 31-year-old publisher of She Sends, a Colorado-based climbing magazine for women. It was just the kind of thing these road-tripping girls admired.

Of the four, Janet was the closest to leading the committed life. She was working on moving from 5.11's to 5.12's and specializing in "off-widths"—cracks too big for hand-jamming but too small to wedge your body into. Peru would be her first major expedition.

Sheyna, on the other hand, was just getting started. A serious snowboarder from Center Ossipee, New Hampshire, she'd learned to place gear only six months before, at Cathedral Ledge. She was a natural, drawn more than the others to

The whole world had changed in the 20 years between Lynn Hill and Beth Rodden. The new generation would never think of sitting in a meadow in a lawn chair with a pair of binoculars, watching their boyfriends' studly moves.

climbing's life-or-death bargain. Five years earlier, her older brother had died; he'd spent the four years before that in a coma after a car crash. Since the coma, she said, she felt like she'd been living for both of them, which meant she'd been going full-blast. The long scar was from a snowboard accident; she'd broken her back so badly that she'd had to have vertebrae T11 and T12 fused. In another snowboard fall, she'd shattered her tibia and fibula; they'd been mended with a titanium rod. Sheyna was comfortable trad-climbing at 5.10, but not much higher—though things wouldn't stay that way for long.

If Janet and Sheyna were ramping up, Sarah and Anne seemed to be shifting focus. Anne, tall and poised with a sly, silly streak, came from a well-to-do Connecticut family—she'd flown out to Utah while the rest had driven—and displayed the best technique of the bunch. But for now, at least, she seemed to have the least fire in the belly to push herself further. An ace photographer—she'd nearly swept Climbing magazine's reader photo competition in 2004—Anne would spend hours taking pictures on a static line instead of climbing. In her quieter moments she talked about trading her retail shifts for a job as a photo editor and, possibly, way off in the future, family life with a husband and kids.

"What do you think is the right age to get married?" she asked me one morning. She'd been invited to the wedding of a friend, the first in her group to marry, and it had gotten her thinking.

Sarah—Janet's longtime climbing partner—was preparing to let go as well. A petite North Carolinian, she'd enrolled in a Ph.D. program in geology at the University of Wyoming and was moving to Laramie in the fall. She and Janet climbed at roughly the same level—competent 5.11, working on 5.12's, the upper limit for most mortals. She too had considered going pro but had since abandoned that goal. Even the top women climbers, she pointed out, had a hard time making ends meet.

"I'm not sure I want to live that way," Sarah said.

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