Paige Claassen Brings Her A Game Physically and Mentally

A few weeks after Paige Claassen started fourth grade in Estes Park, Colorado, the school office called her parents because she wouldn’t stop sobbing.

The issue was that she had just won a bike in a raffle, and the administrators had called her name over the intercom. Most kids would have howled with joy. Claassen instead shrank, mortified to be the center of attention.

She’d been doing that—the shrinking thing—for months. Her parents, Dan and Anna, describe a “personality switch” that happened upon their move from Parker, Colorado, to Estes Park in 1999. Both Dan and Anna had grown up in small towns in Kansas and eastern Colorado, respectively, and wanted to raise their kids in a similarly tight-knit community. And because they were both entrepreneurs—Dan runs a geology consulting business, and Anna makes custom window coverings—they could move anywhere. They chose Estes Park, where Dan had spent childhood summers.

But after changing schools, the outgoing Paige they’d known in Parker was gone. What was left was a shell, and somewhere, locked inside, was their little girl. “Like Paige, I’m very introverted,” says Dan. “So we were always watchful of that. We wanted her to be able to give a talk and speak in public and do all those things that she can do now that I’ve always struggled with.”

Read About Claassen’s Send of Dreamcatcher

To break the spell, they tried enrolling her in sports. But, Claassen’s parents recall, the only thing worse than watching their daughter shrink from social situations was watching Paige swim. “I remember her first meet,” says Anna. “She was really slow. It was just so very painful to watch.” They also tried soccer. Says Dan, “She wouldn’t really kick the ball. She’d just kind of run alongside it.”

Then they remembered a spark they’d seen at a children’s museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when Paige was seven. There had been a small climbing wall, with kids falling all over it in their cheap seatbelt-style harnesses. Paige had hiked the route. So the Claassens nudged her onto the climbing wall at the Estes Park Mountain Shop, which had just started an afterschool program.

A lean, lanky kid, Paige was a natural. She joined the fledgling Estes Park climbing team and slowly came out of her shell. She trained five days a week and made the podium in local competitions, then nationals. By age 15, she’d made her first Junior World Championships, coming in fourth. Paige’s younger brother, Sam, who now works as a marketer and lives in Colorado, also climbed and competed. Together, the Claassen family traveled the country—and the world—for climbing competitions.

Now age 31 and based in Longmont, Colorado, Claassen makes her living as a professional climber. Over the past decade, she’s become one of America’s best redpoint climbers, ticking three 5.14d’s, including the second ascent of Algorithm in Idaho’s Fins, in 2018 (see timeline, below). Back in 2014, she made the first—and so far only—female ascent of Smith Rock’s Just Do It (5.14c). Over the past few years, she’s put down dozens of mid-grade 5.14s. And yet every time her name surfaces in climbing media for an ascent, it feels like a distant reminder—Oh yeah, Paige Claassen. That’s right, she’s still out there. Then she descends again, ducking out of the public eye and back into her training cave only to emerge stronger than ever.

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