The Coolest Women I Knew Taught Me to Trad Climb. Their Biggest Lesson Took Me Years to Learn.

I. Girls Gone Wide

The first time I ever climbed with Mary Eden, outside of taking her offwidth camp, was on a cold Sunday in May. I woke up in my 4Runner a few miles outside Indian Creek, Utah, not knowing if she’d gotten my texts in the desert or found the hand-drawn map I’d left in her friend’s truck. The air on the bluff was dry, cold enough for a sweater. She’d agreed to meet up, but I figured she probably had something better to do than climb with a former student.

Then I saw her. In the center of the sandy clearing, a girl sat cross-legged, holding a hand mirror up to her face while she drew a pencil over her eyelids.

Mary didn’t stop applying her blue eyeliner when I walked up to say hi, but she told me to pack my thickest shoes, then drove me to an 80-foot offwidth called The Violator (5.11-) at Nuclear Wall. I pulled on her pink and green biking sleeves and felt like they were invincible armor. “Getting ready for offwidth is like getting ready for prom,” she said, and I should take my time with all the tape and knee pads. I didn’t send, but tried hard enough to win some praise, and she mentioned an upcoming offwidth trip to Vedauvoo (“the Voo”), Wyoming, with our friend Kaya Lindsay. “You should come,” she said. “We’re making a video called Girls Gone Wide.”

In the Voo, I followed Mary and Kaya through the wildflowers, tracking old coordinates for the 1.4-billion-year-old granite inverts that were apparently bastions of masculine toughness. The pair ticked off some of Vedauwoo’s nastiest, most sandbagged flares: Spatial Relations (5.13-), Stone Cold Stunna (V8), The Warden (V7), Squat (5.12-), Big Pink (5.11b), Right Torpedo Tube (5.11+), Bad Girl’s Dream (5.11), and Whipping Boy (5.11c). Routes that made Bob Scarpelli, the Voo’s most prolific first ascensionist and local grumpy man, show begrudging some respect when he met us on the trail. I was happy to carry a crash pad, toprope their routes, and practice pivots until my abs burned out and I hung upside down, arms out in surrender. My own Voo project was a short 5.10c crack called Cupcake, which climbed up a diagonal gash in a boulder. Every time I clipped a piece, I felt a piercing terror, like I was about to slip and smash my ankle. Most sessions ended in fits of hysteria. I’d thaw from my disappointment in time to process Mary giving me instructions like you need to breathe and it’s time to take a break.

When I wasn’t focused on breathing or taking a break, I studied Mary and Kaya, who always knew where we were going and what we’d be climbing next. They had a magnetic energy that always drew a small crowd, and I loved being in their inner circle. Soon I got the sense they had something to prove. Not on the climbs, which they talked about like personal obsessions we were all there to support. But about the stubborn girliness they brought to the whole trip. I learned that little flairs of femininity—matching crop tops, impromptu group selfies, bursts of emotion while someone else sends, leading on the pink rope—made them particularly happy. Every time we met a new girl in the Voo, they invited her to climb with us—with borrowed gear, free belays, and free mentorship. And I learned that these flairs were not, under any circumstances, to be hidden away. Especially not for the sake of men.

Soon they became we. We wore makeup and high ponytails and neon biking sleeves every day, looking like a cross between rave girls and boxers lost in the woods. We blasted Kaya’s feminist, sex-positive playlist on our long hikes, and kept the volume up when we passed by older men who cringed at one of Ashnikko’s lyrics about cunnilingus. We dragged out black lights to an invert boulder, painted our faces, and modeled as a trio for an alien-inspired photo shoot. And most importantly, we didn’t shy away from how much fun we were having. This part was the hardest. I wanted to be as strong as they were; I hated to remember I was not.

One of the feminine flairs I loved most was the long, dangly earrings that both Mary and Kaya wore every day, including—and perhaps specifically—for their moments of glory, like when Mary flashed Stone Cold Stunna or Kaya muscled up Big Pink. Mary’s default pair was purple cam lobes, while Kaya preferred strings of multicolored beads. After a childhood of being told to tape over my earrings for soccer, I’d always thought of long earrings as unnecessary, even dangerous for sports. But if they were, Mary and Kaya didn’t seem to notice.

A few weeks into the trip, I stopped at the local mountain shop in Laramie and bought a pair of tiny, turquoise cylinders that tapered to a point. Later, someone told me they were shaped like .22 caliber bullets. I didn’t know enough about guns to say anything back. Still, I wore them back to the Voo, where I sent my first V4, Life Without Parole, and finally beach whaled over the top of Cupcake. Mary bought herself a matching pair. We strung lights between three vans and held a feast under it for our final night.

In the years after Girls Gone Wide, I doggedly pursued 5.10 and 5.11 offwidths around Indian Creek, Joshua Tree, and Yosemite based on a list Mary gave me called The Wide Tour. In 2023, I returned to the Voo and sent Big Pink, Bad Girl’s Dream, and The Forever War, among others. By mid-2025, I had done seven 5.13s; the girl who cried on Cupcake felt like someone else. And before I headed out to my projects, I’d almost always put on a pair of dangly earrings, without thinking too much about it.

II. Art and power

I learned what “the male gaze” was long before I heard the term on Tiktok. Years before the Voo, I took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum with my college painting class. I’d been to the Met before, but my professor Dana DeGiulio hurried us past all the typical draws. She shooed us beyond the Rembrants, the Velásquezes, El Greco’s scenes from Catholic mythology. Finally she arrived at a nondescript painting of a girl turned away at an awkward angle. “This is truly revolutionary,” she said. “Wow.”

All the other portraits of women in this room, she explained, had the women posing as if they knew they were being watched and wanted to make their bodies as visible as possible. “Do any of you actually stand like that?” she asked us, puffing up her chest, sticking her butt out, and twisting at the waist to show both. She was right. Every naked, female subject had their butts and chests on full display. And if even the clothed female subjects were facing away, they looked back at demure angles, chins up to show the viewer their jawlines. These scenes subconsciously reinforced to their male painters—and by proxy, male viewers—that the women were aware of the men who viewed them, my professor explained. That they were posing for them.

But this one was different. I wish I remembered its name. The woman in the painting showed an utter indifference to the viewer, not bothering to turn her face in a way that allowed us to see it well. Her body was hidden under an amorphous dress. According to Dana DeGiulio, it was one of the first times in art history that a male artist painted a woman as his equal.

She ushered us to another frame. In this one, a young woman slouched unattractively over a desk in a corner, totally unaware that she should be subtly positioned toward us. She looked busy with something. I couldn’t tell what.

III. The close-up

About a year later, I found out the male gaze sounded like snickering.

Reel Rock 14 was playing in a theater in Hoboken, New Jersey, hosted by the local Gravity Vault gym. When the room darkened, the screen began playing a documentary about Nina Wiliams sending highball boulders in the Buttermilks of California. “I feel the fear,” she’d said in the trailer, with a wicked confidence that felt like it came from another world. “I hear it, I sense it. But I don’t have to listen to it.”

A few minutes in was a quiet morning scene. Somewhere near Bishop, Williams’s van was parked in a frosty patch of dirt. She brushed her teeth and spit in the bushes. Then she stared into a purple mirror, dabbing on mascara.

The theater burst into laughter. Male laughter.

I could almost hear their thoughts: Why is she putting on makeup to go climbing? How silly. The women next to me were silent.

As the movie progressed, I slightly relaxed; the crowd clearly respected Williams. By the time she was delicately stepping up the first female ascent of the highball Ambrosia (V11), they were struck still, cursing in hushed tones. The room applauded at her top-out, whooping with both relief and astonishment. She’d risked her life and walked away with the send.

But the laughter stayed with me for the whole bus ride back to Manhattan. What was funny? I wanted to make every one of them answer. It was light mascara. It’s normal. Especially when she’s a professional climber being filmed up close for a movie.

Today, I would have cheered aggressively in response to their snickers. But back then, I stared out at bridge lights and grew cold with anger. I had no words to defend that small morning routine. It felt too much like my own.

IV. Blue and white

There are certain lessons in visibility that I only have to explain to men because women and nonbinary people just get it. Like why I always prefer a female or nonbinary mentor (so I don’t have to constantly evaluate my safety in learning new skills). Or why Sasha DiGiulian wearing hot pink everywhere in the 2010s was so important for feminine climbers (so we don’t have to dress masculine to be seen as professionals).

But there are other things I haven’t yet explained to myself. Last week, on my way to the roof crack trainer, I accidentally left my pair of thin, gold hoops in my partner’s backpack. I still crushed the session, but some part of me felt incomplete. Muted. As if I was no longer that person that Mary and Kaya chose to join them on those long summer days in the Voo.

Sometimes, in training, I do go earringless. On hard offwidth climbs? Almost never. And I’d never really known why. Was there really something about sticking shiny bits of metal in my lobes that made me feel better about doing half-cartwheels and sit-ups in the underbelly of a cave?

There was. And I didn’t know what.

On my bus ride back from training, I scrolled back through my pictures of the Voo. Mary, Kaya, and I smiled for selfies on large granite mounds. We let giant #7 and #8 cams swing from our hips as we marched through sunlit groves. When I dressed up to go climbing with them, I didn’t do it from a place of fear—and certainly not to impress boys. I remember wanting to prove that increased femininity didn’t equal decreased strength—an insidious, persistent ethos that still pervades many toxic, male-dominated spaces. Just think of the last time you got respect for being “one of the boys.” Or the last time a man complimented you for not being one of those girls who [insert stereotype here].

We’re all those girls. That, I realized, was the “something” my mentors were determined to prove, with all that nail polish and loud Ashnikko music. That there was no level of femininity that reduces your strength in climbing, even in a style defined by bleeding shoulders, bruised knees, and “hard man” stereotypes. No amount of makeup or cute outfits that invalidates your skill. (Men might try to dismiss you as an influencer, but that’s another essay).

Now I know that when I put on accessories for my big projects—or even for a monster roof crack training session—that I’m doing it to assert that little feminine flairs are a part of elite performance. Battling my strongest, burliest wide cracks with makeup and turquoise earrings—just like Nina Williams sent her highballs with mascara on—is an assertion that I’m making that impossible strength a part of me, of my life and style and daily routine. It honors the fact that this sport, and specifically, high achievement in it, is aligned with my existence as a woman and not a contradiction of it. It’s anti-functional, purely for aesthetics. And to me, it’s absolutely essential.

I don’t live in the Met painting that Dana DeGiulio called revolutionary. I know where the dominant gaze is coming from, and I tend to face it head on. But I also get to choose my viewer. My audience. For whom am I subtly posing?

Two years ago, before our white, male U.S. president decided that every diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative in the entire federal government was “immense public waste,” part of my job as a Yosemite Climber Steward was to co-lead a Sunday afternoon bouldering session for female and nonbinary climbers. It was usually the most fun and relaxing part of my week. One day in September, I was at the Curry Village boulders, working a tricky slab with a group of 10 people, when a new girl pulled out a square box.

“I made these,” she said, opening the box. Inside were a dozen long, beaded tassel earrings in different colors. We could Venmo her for $15 each, and choose a pair, or we could just ignore them.

Something passed over the group: a wave of desire for this token, this flair that served no purpose but decorative. Within five minutes, the box was empty. Multicolored beads clinked from the ears of every climber that topped the slab that afternoon. We grinned at each other and angled our chins, showing them off.

I chose the blue and white ones, and still wear them on some of my hardest routes.

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