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Outside Magazine, April 2005

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Climber Girls
Babes on Belay
Four young climbers hit the road in search of big rock, girl power, and a heavenly interlude of physical bliss

By Elizabeth Weil


	CLIMB LIKE A GIRL: Anne Skidmore (front) and Janet Bergman gear up in Yosemite. (Jeff Lipsky)

The problem with an all-girl, cross-country climbing trip is that it doesn't remain all-girl for long. The rock-climber boys see sports bras drying on the slackline and take to sneaky strategies, like bivying in their trucks right next to your campsite. Still, the North Conway crew was making a valiant effort to remain Y-chromosome-free.

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Two weeks ago they'd lit out from New Hampshire; 2,400 miles later they'd landed here in Beef Basin, Utah, to hone their crack-climbing skills on the erupting red-sandstone crags of Indian Creek. The all-girl plan hadn't been a huge deal, really: They'd simply wanted to train on their own. It wasn't that they didn't have boys to climb with—in truth, three out of the four had strong, young climber boyfriends, one of the small perks and complications of being a contemporary climber girl—but, as Sarah Garlick, the blondest and waifiest of the four, explained, "climbing with our boyfriends isn't nearly as much fun."

Sarah and her friends Janet Bergman, Sheyna Button, and Anne Skidmore were all 24, all solid amateur climbers, all poised on the precipice between college and adult life. The girls—who were, of course, young women but mostly referred to themselves as girls—lived in North Conway, a vacation and climbing town in eastern New Hampshire's Mount Washington Valley. Anne and Janet had started climbing together in 1998, as freshmen at the University of New Hampshire at Durham; they'd met Sarah when she'd drive up on weekends from Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, to climb at nearby Rumney and Cathedral Ledge. The year before, Sheyna had appeared as a new face at Cathedral Ledge; they'd adopted her instantly, because she seemed to pull herself up rock on grit alone.

Like many of their peers of both sexes, the four held down various disposable jobs around North Conway to support their rock habits: Janet worked as a freelance writer; Sheyna managed the terrain park at Attitash; Anne was starting out as a photographer and cobbling together shifts at a climbing store and a coffee shop, where Sarah jerked lattes as well. As for careers, well, they had ideas—geologist, nonprofit manager, aesthetician, photo editor—but right now they wanted jobs they could quit, or at least bail on, for six weeks at a time.

Trips like this used to be the sole province of guys. Not anymore. The girls had put together their own racks of climbing protection, and they'd tricked out Janet's Subaru wagon and Sarah's Toyota truck themselves with a dozen bins for food, clothes, and gear. Under Sarah's camper shell there was also a sleeping bunk that she'd built with her dad. The plan was to spend three weeks in Indian Creek, then drive to Camp 4, in Yosemite Valley—stomping grounds for every big-wall great from Royal Robbins to Dean Potter—where they'd rendezvous with their boyfriends and test their skills on 3,000-foot faces. From there, Sheyna and Anne would head back to New Hampshire. After a brief pit stop in North Conway, Janet and Sarah would fly to Peru to attempt the first all-female ascent, via the 14-pitch Original Route, of La Esfinge (the Sphinx), a 17,470-foot granite wall in the Cordillera Blanca.

That April, as always, Indian Creek was a mecca for rock rats. The rutted roads were thick with mostly male and coed groups, camped where the piñons give way to cottonwoods down by the creek. Their all-girl posse attracted attention, but thus far the crew had been able to simply focus on the rock and one another. They had a friend climbing with them for the Indian Creek stint, a 31-year-old publicist from Boston named Alycia Cavadi, and the only guy around was Janet's 27-year-old brother, Andy. Andy had just gotten out of the Navy and driven his own truck out from California, plus he made killer peanut-butter-and-pineapple pastries, so no one had the heart to turn him out. Day after day, the girls woke up to a high-desert Eden, emerging with teeth unbrushed and hair in knots to do yoga, knit, and swap barrettes before hitting the rock all afternoon.

In one more week, they'd be leaving the idyllic spaciness of Indian Creek for the hothouse of Yosemite. Along the way, they faced gnarly off-widths, gobies that wouldn't heal, the predictable road-trip squabbles, routes with macho names like Way Rambo, and, more than anything, the not-unwelcome distractions of climber boys.

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ELIZABETH WEIL is the author of They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus: An Incurable Romantic Builds the First Civilian Spaceship (Bantam).

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