One Year After Her Historic V16, Katie Lamb Deconstructs the Mental Side of Bouldering

Katie Lamb is one of three recipients of Climbing Magazine’s 2025 Golden Piton. The award recognizes her achievement of becoming the first woman to climb a V16 problem when she climbed The Dark Side in Yosemite last April. Winners were selected by a judge panel comprised of Tommy Caldwell, Kai Lightner, Beth Rodden, Kitty Calhoun, and Mason Earle.

Almost exactly one year ago, just minutes from Camp 4’s parking lot, 27-year-old Katie Lamb did something extraordinary: She pulled onto the crimps of Yosemite’s hardest boulder, The Dark Side, and began traversing to the right.

Unlike most V16s, The Dark Side isn’t steep. In fact, it’s barely overhanging, but its notoriously glassy sloper rail and lack of footholds makes it one of the most technical climbs in the world. Carlo Traversi, who made the first ascent in 2023, called it his “most important addition to the bouldering world,” and a capstone to his 20-year Yosemite bouldering career. “It’s hard to conceptualize something being more technical,” said Keenan Takahashi in his own send video. Instead of flashy moves, The Dark Side demanded a preternatural subtlety and precision. To a layperson, it was merely a wall with a chalked-up crease.

Lamb was not expecting to succeed. Twice that season, she’d climbed past the sloper rail only to find her fingers too numb to hold onto the crimps in the outro sequence. Worse, for several sessions after her best go, she couldn’t match her high point. With the temperatures rising into the 60s, Lamb prepared herself to return next winter. But she kept showing up.

Then, one day in late March, her notorious focus clicked into place, and the warmer temps kept blood flow in her fingers. After making it to the end of the sloper rail, she high-stepped it, reached the final crimp, and pulled onto the mossy top-out. It was the first V16 climbed by any woman in history.

In the years and months before Lamb sent The Dark Side, a host of strong climbers tried it, with varying success. Both Traversi and Jimmy Webb called it “the most conditions-dependent boulder I’ve ever tried.” Too much humidity made it slippery; too much dryness made it impossible to stick.

Lamb had a different take. “It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating friction on this boulder like passive resistance—a force that each scaler is at the whim of,” she wrote in her Instagram announcement after the send. “But I learned to reshape this narrative: Friction is something to sit with, to actively attend to, to ask for help in understanding.” One year later, she insists that The Dark Side is not condition-dependent. “There’s a long season,” she says today. “It’s about figuring out what to do in different conditions.”

As a fellow computer science major, I interpreted Lamb’s urge to reject a passive role in her relationship with friction as an engineer’s instinct. When you write code, you learn to subconsciously expect every action to be determined by an underlying mutable command. Even in the real world, you can never quite shake the feeling that if you can only figure out the right input, you can control the outcome. An engineer’s worldview can range from empowering to delusional, but either way, it drives a powerful curiosity.

When Lamb’s send of The Dark Side ricocheted through the climbing world, it was enhanced by the air of a comeback after last year’s downgrade of Box Therapy. But she didn’t see it that way. To her, The Dark Side was neither a miracle nor a rebound. “It doesn’t feel like a version of me that did this incredible thing,” she says. “It feels like I would have done it this year if I hadn’t done it that season.”

Throughout the past year, the 28-year-old Stanford grad has continued to explore her own patterns, dig into the components of her life, and reshape them toward her chosen direction. Whether it’s customizing her training for upcoming projects, sewing her own clothes, or deciding how she wants to show up in the climbing world, each step she takes is thoughtful, intentional, and designed to last.

I wanted to know how Lamb applies her unique perspective to the hardest parts of bouldering, from the physical to the psychological. I caught up with her over Zoom, where she had just returned to Berkeley, California from another Yosemite session.

A conversation with Katie Lamb

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Sam MacIlwaine: It’s been almost exactly one year since you sent The Dark Side. What has your life been like since then? 

Katie Lamb: That sort of closed out my winter season last year, and then I took a couple months of down time where I wasn’t training or projecting anything. Then I spent the summer training in the gym for June, July, August, and September. I went to Europe in October and went back into a Yosemite season this year. November until now has been the outdoor season for me.

MacIlwaine: Do you always take a few months of downtime after your big projects, before you start training again? 

Lamb: I like to have a little bit of an offload or deload. I think it’s just good for injury prevention to take some time where it’s all shorter sessions or less frequent sessions. It’s good for motivation, too. There’s not a whole lot of leniency with the bouldering season these days; it’s pretty winter-focused, at least in the northern hemisphere. I’ve only been doing strictly summer training and an outdoor winter for the past three years. Going forward, I’d probably want to mix in a little more outdoor climbing in the summer.

MacIlwaine: Walk me through your average training day.

Lamb: A training day is mostly focused on working on the things I normally don’t have the opportunity to work on when I’m mostly climbing outside—namely, capacity and power.

I usually start at 2 or 3pm. I like to climb in the afternoon, and I actually like it when the gym is a little bit crowded. It’s fun to see people instead of being super focused.

I’ll do a warm-up on the hangboard and some band mobility stuff. It takes me an hour to warm up those days.

I’ll usually do two days on, one day off. If it’s the first day, I’ll do max power board problems. There’s a spray wall I climb on, here in the Bay, and I’ll have a set of like 20 problems in the rotation for a summer training period. I’ll board climb for two to three hours, then I’ll switch to more strength-based stuff—some pretty specific lifts or things like weighted pull-ups. Sometimes, I’ll switch to more physical therapy-based exercises if I have any strange injuries.

If I’m training for something specific and it’s long, then on the second day, I’ll do only power endurance, but if it’s for general fitness, I’ll stick to max bouldering and then a volume or lesser-intensity climbing day. I don’t really have a strict plan that I follow; I’ll just do what feels fun and motivating.

MacIlwaine: When you’re preparing for a big project, how do you translate that specific preparation into your training protocol?

Lamb: If I was going to try Lucid Dreaming, for example, it translates very well to a board because it’s a single angle and it’s a very specific, strength-based boulder, so I would be focused on finger strength and not very long boulders. It wouldn’t be simulators, necessarily, but something in that two- to three-move, high-intensity range.

But something like The Dark Side, I can’t really simulate well, so I’ll think more abstractly about what aspect of it is hard for me. For that example, there were a lot of very specific body positions that I can try to simulate in a gym, or finger strength, and maybe a little power endurance. I try to zoom out a little bit on a project and think, “What is the high-level category that makes it challenging?” rather than creating a replica of it.

MacIlwaine: When you’re not training, climbing, or working at your climate data engineering job, how do you usually spend your rest days?

Lamb: I’ve been hanging out with friends and reading a lot. Right now, I’m reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time. It’s my first Jane Austen. I was never exposed to it in high school, for some reason. I read a lot of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, but not much Jane Austen.

Actually, for the most part, I’ve only been reading essays for the past year, which is weird. I find them more bite-sized and easier to jump into. I used to read a lot of memoir, so it feels memoir-adjacent.

MacIlwaine: What kind of essays do you like reading? What draws you to them?

Lamb: Zadie Smith has a book of essays called Feel Free that I quite like. One of the more famous books of essays is Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

I think it’s a good way to engage with nonfiction without needing to read a whole book. It feels relevant to current events and current culture shifts without feeling like you need to have the background on the 200 years of history that led to a certain point. You get a real clear sense of voice, and it’s nice to hear unfiltered opinions that are based on experience rather than on something analytical.

MacIlwaine: Do you also write your own essays?

Lamb: I do a lot of personal writing. Most of it doesn’t get published, but I’ve had the opportunity to write for a few climbing publications and online stuff, which has been really fun. I’ve tried to do a lot more personal journaling over the past couple years.

MacIlwaine: How does your writing practice play into your projecting process?

Lamb: Unfortunately, a lot of my journaling is reflecting on negative experiences, but that can be helpful to look back at. The hardest part about projecting is when it gets frustrating and when you feel like you don’t want to go back or it’s no longer fun. In those instances it can be nice to look back and think, oh, I’ve felt this before. There’s a funny paradox where when you’re journaling, you try to write like nobody’s going to read it. So then to go back and read thoughts that weren’t meant to be read—it feels a little awkward. It’s more comforting to think about progress over a longer time frame. This time last year, I felt like I wasn’t going to do The Dark Side. Now, a year later, I’m like, “Of course I did The Dark Side.”

I do like to talk it out with other climbers, too. It can add a good perspective. It’s easier to be buffeted by good and bad decisions. I can watch my friend having a bad session and be like, “You’re clearly having a bad session. Don’t read into it; it’s more noise than signal.” But when you’re in a bad session, it can be hard not to read into that. In that sense, I think it can be helpful to have someone tracking along on a project.

MacIlwaine: Do you have anyone tracking along your current project?

Lamb: There are not many boulderers in Yosemite, so it’s kind of funny to be bouldering there because you see the same three people. This season, I’ve had a friend, Eric Bissell, filming a little bit, so he definitely has a wider perspective. He’s just been watching, so he has the ability to replay. And Aidan Roberts and I have been climbing in Yosemite for the past three months. We had a bigger crew in the Valley in December, but they all left, so it’s been a pretty quiet time.

MacIlwaine: You recently went on a climbing trip to Europe this fall. How did it go? What kind of intentions did you have for that trip?

Lamb: It went well. I went to this little bouldering area called Maltatal in Austria. I wanted to do this boulder called Bügeleisen (V14), which I ended up doing. It wasn’t the longest trip—it was like three weeks long, and it rained a lot—but it felt like a bit of a conditions battle. It was the first outdoor trip I’ve had since four months of almost entirely gym climbing, so it was a little bit of an adjustment period. I was trying this other boulder called Mount Doom (V17), which I did the [V14] stand start to, so it was a good trip. I didn’t have the highest expectations because it was really short. It was mostly a chill trip for fun.

MacIlwaine: What drew you to Bügeleisen?

Lamb: It’s always been on my radar. I’ve always thought it looked really cool. It’s very steep, probably 50 or 55 degrees overhanging, and it’s this very cool, power crimping style, which is pretty rare if you’re not climbing out of a roof. It’s a historic boulder in my mind because it was done in 2001, which felt quite ahead of its time. I’ve always thought it looked very unique and was a world-class boulder, so I thought it was worth a trip.

It was kind of off the beaten path, too. It’s more common for Americans who are traveling into Europe to bouldering in Ticino or Magic Wood, and Maltatal is a little more niche in terms of where people will plan a destination.

MacIlwaine: How do you decide which new boulders to focus on?

Lamb: I’ve been in a bit of a void of boulders I clearly want to do. When I was going to Colorado for the summer, I was very clear that I wanted to try Box Therapy. There’s been less of that in recent years, which is fine. It’s more like following motivation to different places. Like, “Oh, I want to have a Yosemite season” moreso than “These are the things I want to try.” I did travel to Austria to do Bügeleisen, but it wasn’t a huge goal of mine; it just felt right at the time.

I’ve been more recently focused on general strength and working on weaknesses, with the idea that it’ll allow me to do better on harder boulders. When location and season align, I’ll try the harder boulders that I have on a mental list, but it’s not like, “I need to go do this boulder right now.”

MacIlwaine: What weaknesses are you currently working on?

Lamb: I haven’t climbed in the gym in a really long time. Over the summer, it was a lot of board-style power, big moves on small holds, and climbing more in my shoulders. I climb a lot in my lats.

MacIlwaine: How do you define success in your own climbing?

Lamb: I don’t feel like I’m chasing a mold in any way or have an obvious path. It has felt transitional in terms of not needing to prove anything about my climbing, and taking agency over what I want to put forth into a climbing audience—finding ways to reach more people in different ways, besides just Instagram and whatever. It doesn’t feel clear to me how to do that, but that’s something I’m hopeful that I can do. Having climbing be a little more outward-facing than in the past.

MacIlwaine: What did you want to prove in the past?

Lamb: Coming out of school, I felt like I had a couple of years to do what I wanted and go climbing a lot before needing to try to find a job and be more serious about my career. At some point it evolved from being this thing I’m trying to squeeze in for a certain number of years to, “Oh, this is actually my career at this point.”

I’ve been thinking about how to break the mold a little bit. I don’t love the non-climbing work around being a climber, and it doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s not really about proving my physical ability to other people—at one point, that was an important thing to me, proving that  I can do this at a high level and learning about what I can do to reach that level. Now, it’s about shaping a perspective and going after what feels most motivating and what feels like tangible progress to me, versus looking at what other people are doing for signs of progress.

MacIlwaine: What’s your current project, and how is it going?

Lamb: I had two to three projects that I started this season, but it’s become a main thing, this undone project in Yosemite. I knew about it for a couple years—I think I saw it first in 2024. Our little group of climbers put some work into it at the end of last spring and the start of this fall. There’s so many things to do and so few people climbing there. People end up staying in their lanes and going after the style that suits them. This ended up being my lane.

I’m sort of the only one trying it. It’s by no means red-tagged or something I don’t want other people to try. It suits me quite well; at this point, it would be hard for someone to jump in and for me to feel defensive or like I have a personal stake in it.

MacIlwaine: What’s the movement like?

Lamb: It’s probably a 40-degree face with quite good crimps on it. The whole thing leans from right to left, so all the holds are side-pulling right or left, and they’re all in the wrong direction. It ends up being this strange mix of tension and crimp power. The feet are quite bad, too; all the hard moves are done off one foot. The crux is having enough trust in the foot to be able to move around it for six moves.

MacIlwaine: Last year, on The Dark Side, you pulled off the send at the very end of the season. Do you tend to work multi-season projects?

Lamb: Yes, with smaller projects—nothing as big as The Dark Side. I think I had a pretty bad season in 2024 and didn’t really get anything done, so at the start of 2025, I finished up a bunch of stuff. There was this boulder called The Rickery in Yosemite, which is not the physically hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it did take me the span of multiple seasons. And the weather can be temperamental from season to season, so sometimes you just get more days than others.

MacIlwaine: How do you handle being close to the end of a project near the end of a season? Have you ever experienced a terrible punt on your final day?

Lamb: I feel like it’s more of a slow peter out and not being able to maintain motivation for the whole season than having one day before needing to leave for the whole season. When I went to Japan, I was only in each location for two weeks, and I didn’t have a returned trip planned. Then it’s more like, “Oh shoot, I only have one more day to try this,” so it’s not a devastating blow.

I feel like with all of my projects, I usually get to the point where I feel like I’m regressing. That can be demoralizing, and the challenge can be about returning for another session and trying to build back up from a point of regression. It’s more about frustration and managing expectations. Obviously, I know it’ll be okay if I don’t do the project, but there’s a balance between setting personal expectations to hold myself to, versus being too hard on myself.

MacIlwaine: When’s the last time you experienced regression?

Lamb: Definitely on The Dark Side. Definitely on the project I’m trying now. For some reason, every time I’m close to my limit, there will be a point where I’m maybe overdoing it on the number of sessions. It feels like I’m physically regressing. I can’t be physiologically getting weaker; for some reason, I’ll have a couple of bad sessions and just need to build back from that.

MacIlwaine: How does your process on this current project compare to your process on The Dark Side? Is the regression similar?

Lamb: On The Dark Side, my sessions were very up and down. I was sort of hammering it. This project is physically more taxing, so it was helpful to take a bit of space. I took a week off and tried other stuff. There are factors I can’t control: The weather’s been really hot this year, very strangely hot, so if I don’t get a conditions window, I just need to be okay with it. I think I’m more tempered with my expectations and definitions of failing on it. I’d be okay coming back next season if I need to. To be fair, maybe I haven’t been that good at managing expectations or frustrations. It’s hard to manage expectations. It’s the perpetual crux of life.

MacIlwaine: What’s your definition of success and failure on this project?

Lamb: I might not be upset, but it would not feel successful if I didn’t do it at this point. I’m pretty close. Maybe it’s more about feeling okay on it ultimately and feeling like I didn’t have a successful season, and putting it in the category of progression into the next season, versus time-bounding it on this season as the definitive point of success or failure.

I don’t think it’s about deceiving myself into feeling good about not doing it, but more about being okay with not always meeting my own expectations. And about letting that be motivating, or feeling like it will lead to other successes in the future.

MacIlwaine: What’s your go-to tactic for handling a bad session?

Lamb: I recently found that physically taking space from a boulder has been really helpful—and not going back to try it again until I’m ready to confront a bad session. I can usually shake it off after leaving the vicinity of it. Rotating through other projects has also been helpful.

MacIlwaine: What advice do you have for up-and-coming boulderers?

Lamb: I see so many men and women in the gym who are really, really strong. It can translate to outdoor climbing when that person is super intentional or super patient.

I think a lot of people have all the tools they need. It’s about time on rock, which is not that easy for people to get, but also about making the most of the sessions you do get. Being thoughtful about it. Being introspective while you’re there. Thinking about what’s going wrong, versus thinking about what is not going wrong or blaming a specific physical weakness or mental weakness. Making sure those sessions are really high-quality. And trying things harder than you think you can do. I definitely feel that a lot of my physical progress is not limiting myself to what I think I can do and just trying harder things instead of counting myself out because I don’t do the moves or whatever. Feeling that I do have business trying it.

MacIlwaine: Last question: What is your climbing hot take?

Lamb: If you are an employee at a climbing gym, working at the front desk, and you have control over the music, you should impose your taste on the people at the gym. I don’t want to hear bland EDM. I want to know what you’re listening to. Don’t be embarrassed. Play it loud. It should be a performance: a curated DJ set.

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