Katie Lamb On Becoming the First Woman to Climb V16 (Again!)

Yesterday, American boulderer Katie Lamb announced that she’d scaled The Dark Side in Yosemite National Park. The Dark Side, which has a V9 intro followed by sustained V15 climbing, is 17 moves long and graded V16, making it the hardest boulder problem in Yosemite, and among the hardest in the United States.

“Despite everything in this world that is built to minimize friction,” Lamb wrote on Instagram, “there are moments of stickiness for a scaler. And in these high stakes times, when it becomes clear all the ways we could have been more ready, the most important thing is to just show up to the session.”

By finishing The Dark Side, Lamb, 27, marked the end of a strange saga in climbing history, becoming the first woman in history to solve a boulder graded V16… a second time.

In July 2023, Lamb climbed Box Therapy in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The boulder, which was previously completed by three men—Daniel Woods, Drew Ruana, and Sean Bailey—was considered to be a V16. So when Lamb made the fourth ascent of Box Therapy, the climbing community naturally showered her with praise, both for the singular achievement of climbing an extremely hard boulder, but also for becoming the first woman in history to climb the grade. As it was Lamb’s first time climbing a V16, she says she was naturally inclined to agree with the other three who had solved it before her.

But a few months later, Brooke Raboutou and her brother Shawn also sent Box Therapy. They didn’t agree with the grade, suggesting that the problem was merely V15. In the wake of this, Woods, the first person to climb Box Therapy, also amended his original proposal, saying that he’d probably been wrong, and it was probably only V15.

The result was an odd sort of bait-and-switch. Lamb—who had merely been climbing hard problems that she enjoyed—was told by the climbing community that she was the first woman to climb a V16, was heaped with laurels, and then was told she wasn’t. On online forums like Reddit, keyboard pounders filled in the cracks, theorizing an artificial rivalry between Lamb and Raboutou, or suggesting that Lamb was chasing easy grades. “It felt like a drama generated by others,” Lamb told me. “It was imposing a feeling on me that I didn’t quite feel myself, a narrative that I didn’t expect, or ask for.”

Although she tried to keep things in perspective, it was hard not to lose the plot. “Feedback about that experience almost changed the way the experience actually felt to me,” she said. “I realized there was a disconnect between what other people think about my climbing, and how I actually view my own climbing.”

For a while, Lamb said, she was upset by the way “people felt like they could shape a narrative,” but over the past year has come to accept that it’s just part of being a professional athlete. “I guess it’s natural that people look for that type of thing, to try to craft a narrative about our climbing world,” she said. “I don’t feel so tied to public opinion anymore.”

The Dark Side was established by Carlo Traversi in December 2023, and Lamb began working it in February 2024. Given its central location in Yosemite, near the famous climbers’ hub Camp 4, The Dark Side has been tried by some of the world’s best climbers over the last year. Only Aidan Roberts and Keenan Takahashi have managed to solve it. (Both also agreed that it was V16.)

“I was pretty intrigued by The Dark Side from the beginning,” Lamb said, “because it just looked so improbable. I started trying it just out of curiosity. It felt like there was so much to learn and discover. It was something I could puzzle away at for a long time, but that I wasn’t sure if I could actually execute. So I liked the idea of seeing how much progress I could make.”

Although Lamb first began working on The Dark Side a year ago, it only took her around 20 days to complete it. For most of the year, she was unable to even work the sloping, friction-dependent problem because Yosemite is typically too warm and humid during late spring, summer, and early fall to make a proper attempt. Lamb set aside Yosemite’s coldest months for The Dark Side, but often struggled to retain a bit of moisture on her tips. “I have really, really dry skin,” she explained, “so I was doing a combination of things; licking my fingers, spraying my fingers with a [water] spray bottle, spraying the sloper, all these different things to create humidity. I also found that trying after a rainstorm, when the ground is actually wet, created pretty good humidity on the sloper rail.”

By the end of February, stagnating on the problem, Lamb was ready to throw in the towel and wait until next season. “I had one good try in late February where I felt like I was climbing really well, but I fell near [the end],” she said. What followed were several “really bad sessions, where I was regressing to the point where I couldn’t even do the moves.”

Lamb retreated from The Dark Side, left Yosemite Valley, and had some physical therapy done on her shoulder. By now, she said, Yosemite was getting warmer (temperatures were climbing into the 60s), and she began to let go of the idea that she’d complete the problem this year. “I had this big mindset switch, and started feeling okay about not doing it this season,” she said. “I wrote myself off a little bit, actually, and reframed my sessions to think about what I could learn in order to improve and come back with a better chance next season.”

This mindset, ironically, was the shift she needed. When she returned to Yosemite in March, she started making progress again. On the day she climbed the problem, it was quite warm, and Lamb actually thought it might be one of her last days of the season. “Then I did it, which was a total surprise.”

For better or worse, The Dark Side cements Lamb at the apex of female bouldering, and her ascent comes with the same spotlight and external labels she was tagged with after Box Therapy—the first woman to climb V16.

But Lamb said The Dark Side is meaningful to her simply because it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done. “It was almost cliché, but I went through this arc of trying something at my limit, not being sure if I could do it—like, genuinely not being sure if I could do it—then detaching a little bit from what [the climb] would represent in a larger sense, reaffirming to myself that it was something that I wanted to be doing regardless, then succeeding for myself.”

She’s certainly proud to be advancing women’s climbing, but added that, after Box Therapy, she had to learn that “the external perspective should coexist with my own internal experience.”

“I don’t know if I felt like that was possible in the past,” she added. “I feel proud that women might find this inspiring or that this is a new level for women’s climbing, but that can exist without me personally feeling like I embody that. Those two things have to be kept separate.”

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