After Losing Six Toes to Frostbite, Anna Pfaff Is Back in the Game

Thousands of years ago, Icarus flew too close to the sun—and in April 2022, Anna Pfaff strayed too far from it. After two decades of climbing rock, ice, and mixed routes in frigid conditions, it took just one nasty case of frostbite on an Alaska expedition to threaten both of Pfaff’s stable, carefully cultivated careers: professional climbing and nursing. Now, in the documentary short Anna, which will premiere at Telluride’s Mountainfilm festival in late May, Pfaff shares an intimate look at how she resisted—and eventually accepted—her new life.

Pfaff’s frostbite was an insidious surprise that took two separate expeditions to fully manifest. In July 2021, she and two partners established Cerveza, Pan, y Acido (ED), a 2,300-foot route up 90-degree terrain on Concha de Caracol (18,403 feet), an icy pyramid in the Peruvian Andes. Pfaff and her team packed light for a single-day attempt. But when they found themselves running behind, still below the ridge at 18,000 feet at sunset, they were forced to spend the night without a sleeping bag or even a blanket. Pfaff suffered frostbite on her feet—but ostensibly recovered.

“I had trouble walking for a week,” Pfaff says in the film. “And then things got better. I just didn’t know all the damage that had happened to my vasculature and capillaries. I had no idea that I was setting myself up for a worse case of frostbite.”

She thought she had healed, so she returned to her expedition schedule. The next year, in April 2022, Pfaff and her partner, fellow American alpinist Priti Wright, summited the 4,000-foot Harvard Route (WI3 M6 C1) on Mt Huntington (12,241 feet). It wasn’t until they were back at basecamp on the Tokositna Glacier that Pfaff realized her numb feet had actually turned purple. She had to get to a hospital immediately, but a bad forecast had just moved in. The small plane couldn’t come get her until the next day. Her toes steadily darkened and blistered.

Anna’s film soundtrack does a great job of recreating Pfaff’s slow, panicked wait for extraction, followed by her slow, panicked search for just one doctor that didn’t recommend amputation. The background music shifts uneasily between spooky cello and delicate harp notes, like sunlight filtering through heavy curtains. In one shot, Pfaff takes calls from her wheelchair in the pharmacy aisle. In another, Marin unwraps her toes for her. They’ve now blackened so fully that they look like fragments of volcanic rock.

Ultimately, Pfaff permitted her medical team to do the necessary surgery to prevent a possible infection. On May 25, 2022, surgeons severed all five toes on her right foot, and three months later, on August 12, they cut off the big toe on her left.

She left the surgical room in crutches, without which, she later wrote on Instagram, she “could barely walk more than a few steps.” Marin insisted that they’d be back in Nepal in a year. But to Pfaff, that seemed like “a distant unobtainable dream.”

Three years after her surgeries, on May 7 of this year, Pfaff appears on my computer screen with a friendly smile. She’s back home in Ouray, Colorado with an abstract mountain painting on the wall behind her, and she’s got good news: She and Marin just returned from a two-week trip to Alaska, where they and Tad McCrea established a 3,000-meter route: Journey Through the Castle of Providence (WI4 M5 5.10), on Mt. Providence (11,250 feet). She compares unconsolidated snow climbing on Mt. Providence to offwidth climbing. “You feel like you’ve been up there for hours, then you look down and you’re five feet away from the anchor,” she jokes. As an offwidth climber, I grin at the familiar description.

Pfaff, admittedly, is something of a hero for me. When I started climbing at age 21 in a New York City basement gym, I felt ancient and clumsy compared to the comp kids. I secretly feared I’d never catch up. I first discovered Pfaff by scanning professional climber profiles for proof that anyone—specifically, any woman—could start climbing in her twenties and still make it to a world-class level. I wondered back then: Was climbing like gymnastics? By not starting as a child, had I already missed my chance?

I’d laugh at this question now—and Pfaff does, too, when I tell her that she answered it for me. But to my beginner self back then, her late bloomer arc felt important and inspiring. So when I settled in to watch Anna, I was excited to learn more about her early adventures in climbing.

Unfortunately, in the movie, Pfaff’s career is a blip: Her friends let her top rope Supercrack (5.10) in Indian Creek, and she tells the camera that she went “full throttle.” We hear a jaunty beat, and exactly 30 seconds later, she says, “After doing lots of first ascents and new routes, I got picked up by The North Face.” Then we meet Marin and skip to Mt. Huntington. Even in a 20-minute movie, it’s painfully rushed.

In reality, those 30 seconds took about 10 years, during which Pfaff self-funded her expeditions through travel nursing. “If I wanted to go to Nepal and do an expedition, I would mark out how many shifts it would take me to save all the money and go,” she tells me. “But I was always broke because all that money went to climbing.”

After spending her early dirtbag days in Indian Creek, Yosemite, and Patagonia, Pfaff took her first trip to the Himalayas in 2007. It was in Miyar Valley, India, that she became inspired by “exploratory alpine climbing,” the passion that she would pursue—alongside her career in nursing—for the next 15 years and across five continents. Even after she transitioned to climbing full-time, Pfaff has kept her nursing licenses current; from 2020 to 2021, she helped Covid patients by taking shifts at her local hospital.

When I ask how being a nurse affected her perspective as a frostbite patient in 2022, Pfaff explains that she dismissed the first three surgeons who “wanted to take my toes off.” The annoyance is still evident in her voice, but it fades when she talks about the fourth surgeon. This one asked her to think like a nurse.

Pfaff recalls: “He said, ‘What would you think if you walked into a patient’s room and saw their feet looking like this?’ And I just had to think about it in a different way. Then I understood the severity of it.”

In my perspective, Anna makes up for breezing over Pfaff’s pre-2021 achievements by offering a candid look at her raw emotions during her hospitalization and recovery.

The most powerful scene in the film happens to be Pfaff’s least favorite. It takes place in April 2023, eight months after her final surgery, on a trip to Indian Creek. She’s leading Soulfire (5.11), a splitter 1’s crack climb—meaning that small hands and feet can easily jam it—that she tells me she’d sent “no problem” pre-frostbite. Pfaff is almost at the anchor when she finds that she can’t stand up in the crack on her right foot—the one with zero toes left.

“In that moment, I felt like, if I was able to clip that anchor, everything was going to be okay,” she says. “My [right] foot hurt really badly, and I was just smashing it in the crack and trying to make it happen. And then I just couldn’t.”

We see Pfaff panic, breathing faster and heavier, then rip away from the crack with a yelp. When she lands neatly from a 15-foot lead fall, she explodes. The calm, polite person that we’ve observed for the last 15 minutes—soft-spoken even in grief—is suddenly kicking the air, cursing, slapping the sandstone, and tipping back her head with balled fists and closed eyes. She screams at the top of her lungs, over and over.

It’s a bucket of ice water for the plot. It’s at this moment that I finally understand how badly Pfaff wants to get better—and how much anguish she feels in the process.

“That part of the movie is really hard for me to watch because I don’t do that,” says Pfaff, sounding more curious than embarrassed. “I was really surprised that I even had that reaction. I guess it’s nice to know that I’m capable of doing that. But also, I was like, woah, who is that person?”

Now, three years after hospitalization, Pfaff admits that climbing looks different for her, even though she’s back to a regular schedule: ice climbing in the winter, rock climbing in spring and summer, and “probably something in Nepal in the fall.”

She’s still not sure about labels: whether she should call herself an adaptive athlete, a paraclimber, or something else—but says that the adaptive community has been “super helpful” to her.

One of the first things Pfaff had to figure out, after learning to walk and hike again, was how to wear climbing shoes. As a La Sportiva athlete, she ended up with two options: a regular-sized TC Pro for crack climbing and a modified Otaki, molded to her self-described “stumpy foot,” for face climbing. The extra space in the TC Pro didn’t bother her: She can stand up in the rubber without pain.

For face climbing, however, she needs a tight fit. Thomas Gehrlein, a cobbler for Rock and Resole in Boulder, built a custom Otaki for Pfaff and passed on the design to resolers from Greater Tahoe Gripworks. Last summer, Pfaff climbed 5.11d—a grade she never thought she’d climb, post-surgery—in the modified Otakis.

“I just wouldn’t be able to do that with the space in my toe,” she says. “I feel like without that modification, I wouldn’t be climbing anything harder than 5.8.”

Last year, in the Black Canyon, Pfaff brought one of each pair so that she’d be able to switch between crack shoes and face climbing shoes, depending on what each pitch demanded. “I’m just high maintenance now,” she laughs. “I have to bring all my shoes and makeup with me everywhere I go.”

The hardest style for her, predictably, is slab, which Pfaff describes as “really just balancing on your toes.” Prior to surgery, Pfaff had called steep climbing her “nemesis,” but now she’s decided to lean into it because it’s the style “most conducive to my foot condition.” This spring and summer, she intends to focus on building up mileage on rock, partly by spending time in the sport climbing hotspot of Rifle, Colorado.

“I just want to know my abilities,” says Pfaff, “so if someone’s like, ‘Do you want to come do this route with me?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m capable of X, Y, and Z.’”

In the film, Pfaff’s summit of Kyajo Ri (20,295 ft) in October 2023 serves as the ostensible climax, ushered forth in a crescendo of violins. While climbing Kyajo Ri, as opposed to any other Nepalese peak, feels somewhat arbitrary to the viewer, it represents the triumphant answer to Marin’s promise from the year before. At the summit, Pfaff raises her arms to the clear, blue sky—she’s back in the Himalayas, doing what she loves.

Since descending from Kyajo Ri, Pfaff has racked up several other summits, using each to practice and redefine her tactics for managing her feet. In October 2024, she stood atop her first 8,000-meter peak, Shishapangma. She climbed it alongside North Face teammate and guide Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, for whom Shisapangma was her 14th 8,000-meter peak.

“I was super happy to stand on the summit with [Dawa Yangzum],” says Pfaff. “And actually, my feet were too hot on the summit, which was awesome. I was not complaining.” With her last four toes remaining vulnerable to frostbite, Pfaff now wears Therm-ic’s heated socks on every expedition.

In April 2025, Pfaff returned to Mt. Providence and completed Journey Through the Castle of Providence, the same route that she, Marin, and Thomas Bukowski were forced to abandon due to bad weather last year. She describes it as an “aesthetic, classic route,” consisting of two pitches of 5.10 rock climbing, some “good mixed climbing,” a few water ice pitches, and steep snow. While three existing lines on Mt. Providence, including one that leads to the summit, Pfaff and her team wanted to go directly up the south face.

Having experienced the effects of frostbite, Pfaff is now more selective about her mountaineering partners. “If my feet aren’t doing well, I have to go down,” she says. “I can’t just be convinced to keep going.” She wouldn’t, for example, tie her fate to any partner who wouldn’t be emotionally ready to bail. “I have a condition now that I really have to be aware of and take care of, so having good partners like Andres and Tad with me [on Mt. Providence] was super important.”

This summer, Pfaff hopes to gain a better understanding of what she can and can’t do. In a sense, she’s back in “exploratory alpine climbing” mode, chasing her own limitations with a healthy dose of caution. “I feel like this year is the first year I can really try hard again because my feet don’t hurt as much as last year,” she says. “But I’ve learned to let go of grades and stuff. I just want to go rock climbing and see how it feels.”

While her new film is far from a thorough biopic, Anna captures an important transition in Pfaff’s life: the one-year window of pure uncertainty between Mt. Huntington and Kyajo Ri. For anyone facing down a life-altering injury, Anna is an inspiring and powerful look at how Pfaff reacts to the unthinkable, accepts that her old life is over, and moves forward with a clear-hearted vision.

Anna will make its world premiere in Telluride, Colorado on May 24.

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