Sasha DiGiulian and Marianna Ordóñez Pick Up Where Lynn Hill Left Off in Madagascar

At the cusp of the new millennium, Lynn Hill led an expedition to Madagascar to establish what was likely the hardest big wall route put up by a female team at the time. In the remote Tsaranoro Valley, on a 2,000-foot granite wall known as Tsaranoro Kely, Hill developed a 13-pitch 5.12c A0 and named it Bravo Les Filles. But she left Madagascar with one pitch unfreed: the 5.13d (8b) crux.

Decades later, while developing Queen Line (5.13c/d) in her backyard of Boulder, Colorado with Sasha DiGiulian, Hill reflected on her unfinished project halfway around the world. DiGiulian was intrigued by the prospect of picking up where her mentor had left off.

This June, DiGiulian traveled to Madagascar with Marianna “Mango” Ordóñez. While Ordóñez has limited big wall experience, DiGiulian says she’s never met anyone “so positive, down for adventuring, and down for trying.”

Aside from Ordóñez’s relative inexperience, numerous questions hung over their objective. Could the 26-year-old bolts still be trusted? Was the route as runout as it was rumored to be? And would they be able to send in spite of scant beta distorted by time and memory?

Bravo Les Filles: A short history

In addition to Hill, the filles of Bravo Les Filles—French for “well done, girls”—consisted of Nancy Feagin, who had put up first ascents in Alaska and Patagonia; Kath Pike, a biologist working at Access Fund at the time; and a 19-year-old Beth Rodden. Due to a competition scheduling conflict, Rodden had to leave the expedition early.

Following their ascent, Hill wrote a trip report for the American Alpine Journal. Her report recounted how she boldly developed the route from the ground up, hanging from precariously placed skyhooks to power drill in the bolts. But after over two weeks of hard climbing and bolting, she remarked that her body “was thrashed,” dashing her hopes of a redpoint. Hill also reflected that Bravo Les Filles was “probably the most difficult rock climb ever put up by a team of women.”

In 2000, an NBC Sports documentary, introduced by English rock singer Sting, shared the story of Hill on Bravo Les Filles. Sting’s songs play in the background as Hill hammers in bolts, the team grinds grain with locals, and a young Rodden watches her three mentors talk logistics and quarrel over a misunderstanding about the length of their ropes.

The first free ascent of the route came in 2004, made by the Basque brothers Eneko and Iker Pou. Three years later, Czech climber Ondra Benes and Austrian climber Harald “Hari” Berger freed the line, too. The last reported ascent of Bravo Les Filles occurred in 2010, when Adam Ondra traveled to Madagascar and redpointed the route amid a flurry of hard free climbing.

DiGiulian felt motivated not only to make the first free female ascent of the climb, but to follow in Hill’s footsteps. “Lynn, my childhood hero, went to Madagascar when I was walking into a climbing gym for the first time,” DiGiulian reflected. “It’s super impressive to see what they did so many years ago. They were the most badass of all time.”

Details on the climb proved limited. When DiGiulian and Ordóñez asked the Pou brothers what they remembered, they were intentionally vague, encouraging the women to adopt the “old-school style” and check it out for themselves.

The Filles free ascent team

“When I met Sasha, I became more hardcore,” laughs Ordóñez about how the two of them started climbing bigger projects together. When DiGiulian realized that Ordóñez was well-versed in multi-pitch systems, she suggested they “go and do everything” together.

DiGiulian explains that she chose Mango as a partner for Bravo Les Filles because “we’ve always had fun climbing together, and she has always been enthusiastic about new experiences and open to learning.” Since DiGiulian’s first big wall in the Dolomites in 2012, she’s gained significant experience in this discipline of climbing, which she now hopes to share with others. “I am proud of the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the last decade-plus,” she explains. “I feel empowered by the fact that I can be that [a big wall mentor] for someone else.”

For her part, Ordóñez is an avid sport climber with extensive multi-pitch experience up to 8b (5.13d). Aside from climbing around northern Mexico, she also owns Hanuman Cafe, a coffee shop and hub of the El Salto climbing community. (In case you’re wondering, they brought instant coffee with adaptogens and mushrooms to drink on the wall. “It was our battery for the day,” Ordóñez says.)

Ordóñez and DiGiulian’s first big project together? El Sendero Luminoso (5.12+; 455m) in El Potrero Chico in January 2024. The two-day climb was Ordóñez’s first big wall, so she let DiGiulian lead every pitch and aided up parts of the route. It’s no surprise that she signed up for this expedition on the condition that she would not lead the crux pitches.

Then there was the minor detail that Ordóñez had never led a trad route before. Back in 1999, when Hill powered between bolts, searching for a solid skyhook, she’d occasionally happen upon thin cracks—and stuff them with cams. As a result, trad climbing knowledge was crucial for this route, DiGiulian says. If one were only to clip the bolts, they might have just four pieces of protection per 180-foot pitch. On the route, DiGiulian describes digging out cactuses and brush to find somewhere—anywhere—to place protection.

Lost, hot, and “no good”

After multiple flights, DiGiulian and Ordóñez spent 18 bumpy hours throttling into the Tsaranoro Valley. When they arrived and shared their objective with a local climbing guide, he said, “You guys are climbing that? It’s no good. The bolts? No good.”

“Oh my god,” DiGiulian recalled thinking, “We just traveled around the world to arrive here.” They debated finding another project. Ultimately, they decided to check out the route for themselves before making the call.

At the campground of Tsarasoa Lodge where they were staying, they found a topo for Bravo Les Filles. It noted that the route was rarely repeated. A skull also adorned the topo (“because of the style,” DiGiulian hypothesized).

DiGiulian and Ordóñez made the two-hour bushwhack into the massif, where they observed that the bolts were not corroded on the first few pitches. They committed to the route. But with the sun setting at 5 p.m. and only about a two-hour window when their line fell under shade from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., they found themselves hiking out in the dark.

“We got super lost,” Ordóñez recalls. In the thick jungle brush, they became hopelessly disoriented. After five hours of wandering through the jungle, they began to panic and shout for help—only to find they were five minutes from their campsite. After that experience, they built a trail with cairns and ribbons tied in the grass so they wouldn’t become lost again.

By the second day working the route, Ordóñez started to feel more confident on the wall, and felt ready to try leading. She led the second, fourth, fifth, and seventh mixed pitches of Bravo, with climbing up to 5.12c. Before she led the second pitch, she watched Sasha lead it and put “a purple one in.” So she did the same. On the seventh pitch (5.12c), Ordóñez slipped and fell just before the chains. “I really thought I could have done it, but I was super happy for my effort,” she says. She decided not to try it again because they had another day of projecting the route ahead and she was “already running out of gas.”

One of the biggest issues they encountered ended up being that lack of shade. The unavoidable glare of the sun made it hard to find the line at times—a problem exacerbated by inaccuracies in the topo they were using. The direct sun also created painfully hot conditions for their feet.

All in all, the pair spent five days working the route and one night on the wall before attempting their redpoint from the ground up.

“Put on the batteries”

After two rest days, DiGiulian and Ordóñez camped at the base of the wall and started their redpoint attempt at 6 a.m. at first light.

Having sent the crux—the eight pitch—on her fifth try while working the route, DiGiulian anticipated that one of the hardest aspects of the route would not be the 5.13d climbing, but her headspace, given the profound runouts. One of the most dangerous pitches happened to be the last.

Though DiGiulian didn’t know it at the time, Hill recalled that Feagin had forged “a meandering route” on pitch 13 in order to find better gear placements. DiGiulian took a more direct route up the face to the top. So on that last pitch, she found herself 20 meters above her last piece of questionable protection: a  dead cactus that she’d slung. Her last cam lay 10 meters below that.

“Maybe try to commit,” Ordóñez hollered up to her. DiGiulian called down that she wasn’t sure what to do. She contemplated down-climbing to avoid a high-consequence fall. “I am not an adrenaline-chaser,’ DiGiulian admits. “I actually get scared quite easily while climbing.”

“In that moment, we were super scared,” Ordóñez recalls. “I was like, ‘Dude, what am I going to tell the world?’ She cannot fall there. I was about to cry.”

“What I was really scared of was rock breaking,” DiGiulian says, who up until this point, had tried to tread carefully on the friable face. “I need to ponte las pilas and go for it.” Translation: Put on your batteries. It was a phrase she’d picked up from another climber in El Salto.

Finally, DiGiulian committed to the small holds up Tsaranoro Kely’s final 10 feet. She found no bolted anchor, so she built one with cams and belayed Ordóñez up. Atop the wall, DiGiulian texted Hill that they’d summited. “Nice, you did the direct,” Hill messaged back. “Way to free solo the last bit. Now that I think about it, there’s probably no anchors.”

After two days of climbing, DiGiulian and Ordóñez had completed their ascent on June 24, 2025—a redpoint for DiGiulian and the first female free ascent for Bravos Les Filles. Ultimately, DiGiulian felt the crux of the route was indeed mental: “It was questing, being on really overgrown terrain, and figuring it out as a team.”

Will Madagascar pop off?

During their time in Madagascar, DiGiulian and Ordóñez were in good company. Anna Hazelnutt and Matilda Söderlund were tackling a big wall of their own. Originally, they’d come to try Mora Mora (8c/5.14b; 2,296 feet), which DiGiulian climbed in 2017 with Edu Marín. But after inspecting the route via drone, they found corroded bolts. So they pivoted to Aid Madagascar (8a/5.13b; 1,312 feet).

The two teams of women often met up for dinner after working their respective routes to talk about how scared they got on the wall that day. Air Madagascar apparently proved to be runout, too. “We’d go back and meet for dinner and it would be trauma therapy,” Ordóñez jokes.

It was, according to locals, a crowded season for the Tsaranoro Valley, with two other parties of climbers also in the area, including another all-female party. “Of eight people climbing, seven of them were super badass women doing big walls at the end of the world,” Ordóñez reflects.

DiGiulian adds that the level of women in climbing at this moment continues to blow her mind. “To get to play a small part in it and participate in this growth of women in climbing is really cool,” she says.

With three well-known climbers—DiGiulian, Hazelnutt, and Söderlund—sharing their experience in Madagascar with the world this season, Ordóñez speculates that “Madagascar is going to be popping next summer … there are many good routes, there could be more development, and the campgrounds are super cool. It could become a little Potrero Chico, or something like that.”

Post-Bravo

The first female free ascent of Bravo transformed Ordóñez and DiGiulian in different ways. For Ordóñez, she is proud of the supportive teammate she became on her second big wall. She’s also happy with their mindset on the wall. “We never had a moment where we were like, ‘We don’t want to do this,’” she explains. “We kept an open mind.”

For DiGiulian, the route represented an opportunity to step into a leadership role. On big wall teams, she hasn’t always served as the de facto leader. She cites various projects with male partners, as well as her 2022 ascent of Rayu (5.14b; 1,968 feet) in Spain with Brette Harrington and Söderlund. Harrington had the most big wall experience to lend on the trad pitches. On Bravo, DiGiulian got to be “in the driver’s seat.”

After making the 18-hour drive back to catch their flights out of Madagascar, Ordóñez headed north to live out her long-time dream of spending a few months in France. DiGiulian might meet her there in September, followed by a trip to Yosemite in October. The Bravo team hopes to tackle another big wall objective together soon, perhaps in Brazil or Peru.

“We got to retrace this legacy that Lynn and her team built,” DiGiulian reflects. “Hopefully, we can provide that for the next generation, too—go and develop a route together and create our own Bravo Les Filles.”

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