One of North Amer­ica’s Lead­ing Trad Climbers- Gripped Magazine Print Feature

I first met Amity dur­ing one of the sweat­i­est and most humid Squam­ish sum­mers I’ve ever exper­i­enced. I was work­ing at the Chief at the time, and I would see Amity pos­ted up in her badass van, often cook­ing some type of nice meal or get­ting ready to go climb­ing. I cruised over in the golf cart one morn­ing and intro­duced myself. As I drove over, I was feel­ing a little nervous about intro­du­cing myself, espe­cially in my nerdy but­ton-down shirt park uni­form, but all my wor­ries dis­ap­peared as I was quickly met with a very warm and wel­com­ing greet­ing into her space, and, if I’m not mis­taken, some really nice nobake oat cook­ies that she had just whipped up.

I was chat­ting with Amity that rainy June morn­ing about what she was up to that sum­mer, and she men­tioned that she was psyched on Cobra Crack, a fam­ous 5.14 fin­ger crack behind the second peak of the Chief in Squam­ish, first ascen­ded by Son­nie Trot­ter. I was super fired up to hear that she was put­ting real effort into the his­toric line, espe­cially as no woman has ever sent the iconic split­ter.

COBRA CRACK

I caught up with Amity, and we star­ted talk­ing about her time spent on Cobra. She elab­or­ated that choos­ing a project like Cobra back in 2023 was “the first thing [she] had to project.”

Mean­ing it was the first route she had chosen that she “didn’t know if [she] could do it, but was just going to dig in and give it a bunch of time to see what hap­pens.”

Before her time on Cobra, she had never really spent more than nine days on a route, which I thought was crazy because she’s sent so many hard routes.

She explained to me why the 40-metre gran­ite pitch was giv­ing her a fight. The steep fin­ger crack had a stand­ard beta sequence that was “uniquely mor­pho­lo­gic­ally dif­fi­cult as well as phys­ic­ally and men­tally dif­fi­cult.”

Amity went on to explain that “the clas­sic beta is middle fin­ger, under­c­ling mono. My middle fin­ger’s knuckle was [some­times] way too big for the crack. People with that same issue will use their ring fin­ger, but my ring fin­ger was way too small for the crack, neither one was work­ing very well.”

She settled for slid­ing her middle fin­ger into the nar­row crack and reef­ing on the single digit to gain the next lock, but her fin­ger was rarely skinny enough to fit into the crack. This meant she needed to line up red­point attempts for when her fin­ger was at its least swollen state or the rock was at its least con­trac­ted state.

“Every day I would go up there, I would com­pres­sion-wrap my fin­ger to try and get all the swell­ing out. I was meas­ur­ing my fin­ger with a meas­ur­ing tape and my fin­ger was not chan­ging size and I was like OK, my fin­ger is not chan­ging size, it has to be the crack chan­ging.”

Amity reflec­ted on her jour­ney that star­ted in 2023: “I first tried the crack in 2023 but with no real tac­tics or beta. The sea­son I met you in 2024, I came way more pre­pared com­pared to the year before. I was way more ready phys­ic­ally and I knew what to do. Within the first three ses­sions I was one hanging [Cobra Crack] and over­lap­ping the crux of the route. Those first three ses­sions were early in the sea­son. My fin­ger was fit­ting in the crack.”

After Amity told me how close she got in early 2024, it soun­ded to me like she could totally do it, until: “Every ses­sion got pro­gress­ively worse. My fin­ger stopped fit­ting in the crack because of the combo of swell­ing and the actual crack size chan­ging as the tem­per­at­ure warmed up through the sea­son.”

The idea of a climb chan­ging size as the weather got warmer tripped me out, but I could also under­stand the crazy phe­nomenon. I was put­ting myself into her situ­ation, feel­ing the crack get­ting tighter and my fin­gers get­ting big­ger.

“It added pres­sure to every single day on the route. Because if my

fin­ger was the right size it meant that it would ‘be pos­sible’ on that day… when it’s going well that’s awe­some, and when it’s not going well it’s like ‘what am I doing here? Is this really worth my time and effort?’”

After some really close attempts early in the 2024 sea­son, Amity didn’t find the chains of Cobra. But her ded­ic­a­tion to dig into a hard project was totally inspir­ing for every­one along with her on that jour­ney.

SENDERO LUMINOSO

It was the same sum­mer Amity was pro­ject­ing Cobra in 2024 that she did one of the proudest accom­plish­ments in her climb­ing career: Sen­dero Luminoso, a com­mit­ting 13 pitch 5.13d alpine climb with a 15 mile approach. Sen­dero Luminoso is a stacked mul­tip­itch climb on Mount Hooker in the Wind River Range that has three pitches of 5.13 and three addi­tional pitches of 5.12+. Amity describes the route as “one of the coolest routes I’ve ever done.” She and her climb­ing part­ner Brent Bar­ghahn packed in sup­plies for two weeks in the range.

“We hiked in and star­ted work­ing on it right away. We had a big day of get­ting the ropes on it and spent some time micro-track­ing the cruxes.”

“I sup­por­ted a red­point go for Brent but it took me a couple more days and attempts to suc­cess­fully red­point the route myself,” she said. “I got it done on the very last day. It was a big one for me. I really had to dig in and sit in the dis­com­fort of know­ing I might have put all this effort and still walk away without a send. Because it requires so much effort to even get to the route and is so sus­tained at a dif­fi­cult grade, it only has four free ascents.”

Amity reflec­ted on the dif­fi­culty of the trip: “You’re worn down after being out there for nearly two weeks eat­ing only dehyd­rated food.”

That kind of trip is so fatiguing, I thought, and being able to grind it out for that long was really impress­ive.

“Ah man, it’s such a beau­ti­ful place,” she said. “The Winds are so spe­cial, I love it out there.”

I reflec­ted on the level of com­mit­ment and the pres­sure she must have been under, star­ing fail­ure in the face and push­ing through on the last day, send­ing the last 5.13d and the whole route. Amity’s send of Sen­dero Luminoso is another reason the Amer­ican climber is so badass.

AMITY’S MENTALITY

Amity per­form­ing under pres­sure is a tool that she uses to find her way to the top of so many iconic Yosemite free climbs includ­ing: Free Rider, El Nino, Pre Muir, and Golden Gate. I was curi­ous if Amity found that

“YOU’RE JUST TRUSTING YOUR BODY, ESPECIALLY IN THAT STYLE OF CLIMBING YOU DON’T FOLLOW SPECIFIC BETA. YOU JUST GO WITH RIGHT” WHAT FEELS

dig­ging into hard routes like Cobra helps with her men­tal­ity around try­ing hard on her big wall climbs.

“For sure I think that there are sim­il­ar­it­ies and dif­fer­ences,” she said. Amity explained: “Those big­ger object­ives on El Cap, or things in the moun­tains, come a bit more nat­ur­ally to me because it’s just more labour. It’s like how much dis­com­fort are you will­ing to tol­er­ate to be out there and get it done versus purely limit rock climb­ing.”

Amity then said: “I have the phys­ical mar­gin to do just a bunch of low-grade labour like haul­ing a bag or hik­ing with a heavy pack. I have a big base of phys­ical capa­city to do that and then go climb rel­at­ively hard. But the pure dif­fi­culty of limit single pitch pro­ject­ing is a huge area of growth for me.”

BOOK OF HATE

Amity’s men­tal­ity to dig in and try hard regard­less of the res­ult has solid­i­fied her as a total legend of the sport, and she has a repu­ta­tion for being one of those climbers who can really drop the clutch when it mat­ters most and get shit done. The per­fect example of Amity’s abil­ity to give ’er beans is her ascent of Book of Hate, a fam­ous 5.13d slip­pery stem corner in Yosemite Val­ley.

There is a viral video online of Amity send­ing the pitch. It shows her stem­ming and smear­ing up the open book corner. She cruises eas­ily through the bot­tom sec­tion of the climb, mov­ing effort­lessly through gran­ite edges that gain the corner. She gets up into the corner and as it steep­ens and reaches the route’s crux, you can see where she really turns it on and tries hard. She had to fight to gain a high right foot on a small ledge, and as she is mov­ing up onto the foot she slips, palm­ing her right hand down to where her foot was and sav­ing the fall.

As she saves her­self she lets out a battle cry: “No!” as if she is dis­agree­ing with grav­ity’s request for a down­ward plum­met. She battles to keep it together and drops deep into her shoulders. She barely gets her foot back to her right hand. And once she gets her foot up, she imme­di­ately presses both of her arms on the oppos­ing wall, grunt­ing and fight­ing to gain the ledge more solidly. She gets back into the pos­i­tion again from where she had slipped, and in clas­sic Amity fash­ion, she gains the ledge and sends the pitch.

I asked what was going through her head when her foot slipped on the send.

“I kinda think it’s one of those moments where you’re not neces­sar­ily hav­ing con­scious thoughts,” Amity said. “You’re just fight­ing. You’re just trust­ing your body, espe­cially in that style of climb­ing you don’t fol­low spe­cific beta. You just go with what feels right, you’re not like ‘oh take this crimp with this spe­cific fin­ger,’ it’s more like climb­ing intu­it­ively.”

Her resi­li­ence is inspir­ing: “It was one of those moments of not giv­ing up,” she said. “How uncom­fort­able am I will­ing to be to just keep fight­ing for this?”

Think­ing about Amity drop­ping in on these crazy try-hard moments had me won­der­ing if she had always been that kind of full tilt climber.

“Yeah I have,” she said. “I grew up doing gym­nastics and recently went and vis­ited my old coach from when I was a kid. I was catch­ing him up on my career as a pro­fes­sional climber and telling him this is what I do now. He said something like yeah you were always in it to grind. It wasn’t even about win­ning, you were just here to work. And that was from the time I was seven. And he saw me almost every day for nearly 10 years dur­ing that devel­op­ment.”

I was curi­ous if that try-hard bled into other aspects of her life, as well, and Amity told me, “I think it par­tic­u­larly plays out in the phys­ic­al­ity of climb­ing. For bet­ter or worse it plays out in [my] abil­ity to put my head down and be fine and not neces­sar­ily pick my head up and look around and be like ah this isn’t actu­ally that sweet.”

That abil­ity to push through dis­com­fort reminded me that Amity had men­tioned she had a torn A2 pul­ley dur­ing her ascent of Book of Hate.

“That sea­son right before I went to Yosemite, I stabbed my fin­ger with a knife very badly,” she said. “It really hurt, and I have a really high pain tol­er­ance and it hurt a nine out of 10. It super hurt to crimp any­thing and was gen­er­ally just very pain­ful. I spoke to a doc­tor and they thought that I might’ve nicked the ten­don sheath. They said it’s going to hurt to climb, but you’re not going to make it worse.”

It was the same sea­son Amity had plans to do Pine­apple Express, a crimpy 5.13 face climb vari­ation to El Nino on El Cap. She had already had a film project lined up and paid for and felt com­mit­ted to the object­ive.

“I’m up there on El Cap,” she said, “my fin­ger is huge and swollen, but I’m like whatever and bear­ing down, full crimp­ing because I don’t even know I have a fully rup­tured A2 pul­ley. We found out later that I had par­tially lacer­ated my pul­ley when I cut my fin­ger with a knife. But I kept climb­ing on it because I didn’t know that at the time.”

Amity’s tough­ness allowed her to per­severe, as she told me, “I ended up climb­ing El Nino with a fully rup­tured A2 pul­ley.”

Once the team was down, Amity real­ized things with her fin­ger weren’t OK.

She said, “I came down and was like yo, something’s wrong with my fin­ger, like this is not OK. They thought it was an infec­tion so I got on some heavy duty anti­bi­ot­ics, and that’s actu­ally par­tially why in that Book of Hate video I was so shaky. I was respond­ing pretty weird to anti­bi­ot­ics and get­ting muscle cramps.”

WHAT’S NEXT

It was really impress­ive to me that Amity was able to over­come that injury and still send hard in Yosemite that sea­son. It was really obvi­ous that whatever she set as a goal she would even­tu­ally achieve.

I began to feel more curi­ous about what the Amer­ican climber had in her mind for the upcom­ing sea­son. I asked her for a pre­view of what the next six months are look­ing like for her.

“Sport climb and train through Feb­ru­ary,” she said. “Then a non climb­ing trip with my dad at the end of Feb­ru­ary. In March I want to try Dreefee in Red Rock Canyon out­side of Las Vegas, a crimpy face route on the Rain­bow Wall. In April I’d like to climb in the Black Canyon, Colo. May and June I think I’ll still be in Col­or­ado and maybe do a big Rifle sea­son or more of an alpine sea­son. The reason I want to be spend­ing time in Col­or­ado at some alti­tude and doing big days is because I want to spend July and August try­ing to fin­ish put­ting up a new route in the Winds. It’s going to be hard, like a bunch of pitches of 5.13 at higher alti­tude.”

Amity’s goals of put­ting up a new route in the Wind River Range soun­ded amaz­ing. I could totally see that being pos­sible for her. With her pre­par­a­tion of big days in Col­or­ado lead­ing up to the two months in the sum­mer, she is set­ting her­self up for suc­cess.

Amity is a great ambas­sador of the sport and really embod­ies what it means to be a climber. She is will­ing to put it on the line, dig in, and try hard. That is what makes her one of the most accom­plished climbers in the sport.