Can you describe that moment to me, when you reached the top—when you’d completed it and achieved your goal? How did it feel?
The moment was a collection of moments, to be honest, and I’ve done a lot of reflecting in the weeks since. My first reaction was just laughter, because how ridiculous is it to not have walked for 23 days, and have only been hanging in a harness? Gravity is such a bizarre thing. You know, when you’re on the wall and living there, you can’t drop things. Everything is tied in, even your water bottle, because if you drop it, it’s going 3000 feet to the valley floor, and could potentially be a fatal accident for someone at the base. Then there’s the emotion of, like, I can’t believe that this dream has come true; the surge of of tears and happiness and just gratitude for the opportunity to have been there and to have been able to go after this wild, audacious goal and actually believe in myself and my team. To be able to complete it. It was a pretty unparalleled feeling. It made me grateful for my sport and for life in general, to be able to provide those opportunities, to be able to have that intense of a feeling.
How do you think about the external impact of this achievement, and what it means for others?
Climbing is this sport where there’s no gender division. The course is the course, and that is the rock. The rock doesn’t care about anything: who you are, what you look like, what your background is, whether the weather is going to be in your favor or not. It’s just there, and it holds the test of time, like all of the historic ascents in climbing throughout the last centuries. Gear improves, the training that goes into us as climbers progresses.
Granted, climbing has such a male-dominated background, and when I started climbing, I didn’t have a person that I wanted to emulate. I came from a city background. I learned about this sport, even though my parents and family didn’t really know anything about it, but I loved it, and I pursued it, and it’s enabled me to live this really incredible lifestyle of exploration and adventure and living by curiosity. I hope that me, carving out my own path in this way, can serve as inspiration for other women and girls who may not see themselves in what exists right now, but have the courage and the determination and the confidence to think: I can do it too. I can go after my wildest dreams, whether it’s climbing or something else. You don’t have to have a certain background to go after it.