Katie McKinstry Stylos Just Broke the Glass Ceiling for Women in Drytooling

There are a few reasons you may never have heard the name Katie McKinstry Stylos. For one thing, she’s relatively new to climbing, period; she didn’t touch rock until 2015 and didn’t start projecting hard routes until 2021. For another, her discipline of choice, sport drytooling, is incredibly niche. But within that niche—an incredibly powerful, gymnastic, and male-dominated sub-discipline of mixed climbing—she’s quickly become a tour de force, flying through the grades faster (and further) than any woman has before.

To illustrate: Stylos first started drytooling in late 2020. A little over a year later, she followed a climbing partner to Italy on a whim. They spent a few weeks at Tomorrow’s World, the iconic drytooling crag developed by the late alpinist Tom Ballard. On that trip, Stylos sent Edge of Tomorrow (D13), one of the cave’s most famous lines. (D13 is essentially an ice-free M13—a grade comparable to 5.13 in rock climbing.)

In 2023, Stylos came back and sent her first D14. The year after, she successfully redpointed Ballard’s A Line Above the Sky (D15). Line was the world’s first D15 and is still considered a global endurance test piece. Sending it was a big deal. But that was only the beginning.

On March 18, 2025, Stylos bagged Parallel World (D15+/D16), the cave’s hardest route. In doing so, she became the first woman in the world to climb the grade.

While her sends may seem to be firing off like clockwork, Stylos says the actual process has been anything but smooth.

“Parallel World pushed me to my absolute limits,” she says. In the process, she had to scrap almost everything she knew about projecting and rebuild her mindset from scratch.

Getting skunked

When she first arrived to try Parallel World in the fall of 2024, Stylos figured she’d make fast progress. Then she pulled on—and discovered that the line was nothing like what she’d envisioned.

For one thing, two of the holds were missing. For another, the moves were way bigger than she expected—many at the absolute max for her 5’6” height and 5’8” wingspan.

“Parallel World is a more interesting but significantly harder route than Line Above the Sky, ” says Chris Snobeck, who was the first American to climb Line and to climb both D15 and D15+. “It has some really long moves. When Katie started working on it, one of my big question marks was whether she’d be geometry-limited in not having a longer wingspan.” (Snobeck, it should be noted, has a tall frame and long arms. And more so than other climbing disciplines, drytooling tends to favor a longer reach.)

That first trip, Stylos spent eight weeks in Italy and failed to make much serious progress. Coming home, she felt like a failure.

“I had been really secretive about the route up to this point. I hadn’t told anyone what I was working on. I thought that it would leave me feeling less expectation from other people,” she said. “As it turns out, my expectations for myself were way too high. So I felt both crushed by them and completely isolated.”

When Stylos came home, she started opening up about what she was working on—and about her lack of success. Suddenly, there were people there to support her, both when things were going well and they weren’t. She also worked on her mindset, planning to approach the route with patience and curiosity rather than rigid expectations.

“When I went out to Italy in the fall of 2024, I wanted to send when I was ready to send,” Stylos says. “But it wasn’t ready to happen yet. I needed to wait, and to find peace with that.”

She also needed to totally overhaul her training plan.

Training overhaul

Stylos has always had superhuman endurance. Power? Not so much.

That winter, Stylos spent three months rebuilding strength and focusing intensely on her power endurance. She did four-by-fours, move repeaters, and linkups of limit moves with a 10-pound weight vest on.

She also replicated Parallel World as accurately as possible on the 12-by-12-foot woody her climbing partner Kevin Lindlau had built in the corner of Bozeman’s Mountain Project training facility. For a full month, she projected her replica.

“I can’t think of anyone else I’ve seen give that much commitment to a route,” Lindlau says. “Katie will stick to her training to a T. Even when some of us decided to do something at night and skip training the next morning, Katie wouldn’t. When she sets her mind to something, she puts 100 percent of her whole body and soul into it. She does not waver.”

For three months, Stylos was in the gym three hours a day, five days a week. To fit in a full workweek around her training, she worked seven days a week doing freelance graphic design all winter long.

Redemption

When Stylos went back to Parallel World this spring, she felt ready for anything—be that spectacular triumph or total failure. That approach, she says, made all the difference.

On March 18, Stylos trudged through the snow to the base of the climb, warmed up, and tied in. And for some reason, on that day, all the stars seemed to align.

She floated the first section of the route—a panel of heads-up D10 on poor-quality rock. The clips went smoothly. Her footwork was perfect. She made it to the roof within minutes.

There, she paused to shake out, because that’s where Parallel World starts to get real. All of a sudden, the angle kicks back and the rests disappear.

“From there, things get really thuggy and punchy—you’ve got these comp-style moves back to back to back and these huge cuts that strain your grip,” says Lindlau, who sent Parallel World a few years ago. “Then you just have to hang on through the middle section and keep going until it spits you out at this final boulder problem—a seven-move section that’s foiled all of us who have climbed it at some point or another.”

The boulder problem is burly and reachy, forcing the climber to do a full 360 on their tools to switch their grip and angle of attack. That kind of full spin is exhausting, as is using the tools in “reverse grip”—i.e. holding them backward to squeeze out an extra inch or two of reach. For Stylos, the moves were at her absolute limit. She had to cut feet, then reel them back in to reset for the final throw.

“That last move is one of the hardest on the route—it’s a huge deadpoint to a tiny hold that’s no bigger than a dime,” Lindlau says. “You have to swing to it—even after you’ve been climbing full-on for 30-plus minutes—and hope you hit it the first time.”

But on her send go, Stylos didn’t hit it the first time. Or the second. Desperately pumped, she had to reset yet again. Exhausted, nerves frayed, her whole body thrumming with adrenaline, she forced herself to breathe, one hold from the finish and almost within reach of the chains.

Don’t fall off here, she remembers telling herself. Don’t you dare fall off here. 

On the third go, she stuck the move, hurriedly clipped, and lowered to the ground amid cheers. It was finally done.

A step forward for the sport

The send, Stylos says, is still sinking in—as is the fact that she was the first woman to notch the grade

“I hope that, by doing this, I can be the kind of inspiration to others that Angelika Rainier was to me,” Stylos says. “Angelika was the first woman to send Line Above the Sky. Getting to talk to her about it—and having a woman in the sport to look up to—that’s been huge for me.”

Lindlau says the send isn’t just a big deal for Stylos; it’s also groundbreaking for the climbing community at large, and especially for women in the burgeoning discipline of sport drytooling.

“It hasn’t been known if this route was possible for a shorter frame given that it has so many big reaches,” Lindlau says. “But now Katie’s proved it’s possible. Hopefully this is going to inspire more people to get out and try these big routes and not be intimidated by them.”

Snobeck adds that breaking this grade ceiling in Tomorrow’s World—often considered the global ground zero for hard drytooling—makes it all the more poignant.

“I’m so stoked for Katie. She has so much strength, motivation, and drive,” Lindlau says. “I can’t wait to see what she sets her mind to next.”

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