Climbing
The Consequences of the Climb: Sasha DiGiulian
Sasha DiGiulian is one of America's best-known climbers. But the limelight can be isolating. With a new film looming, she opens up about the prizes and perils of being unapologetically yourself.
Let’s start with the little girl.
She was almost 7 years old. It was her brother’s birthday party, and they were at a rock-climbing gym. The gym smelled like stinky feet and pizza. When it was finally her turn to climb, she scampered all the way to the top, pushed off the wall and dangled in the air high off the ground. She looked down. She felt happy.
While her brother’s friends ate cake and ice cream that day, the little girl kept climbing. Eventually, she started competing. At competitions around the Washington, D.C., area, where she grew up, she was not like the other kids, goofing off and socializing. She acted like an adult going to work, a local coach noted. “She was there to win.”
And she won a lot. At age 12, she started attracting sponsorships. She was business-minded as a teen, even writing herself a mission statement. Her sponsorships were small, but she was proud of them because they meant she was a real climber. Things were still simple then. She was the hometown sweetheart. Everyone liked it when she won.
Her house feels secluded, partly hidden by a curving driveway, which peels off a winding mountain road above Boulder, Colorado. She owns four acres of this hillside, including the towering sandstone rock formation that casts shade on the prairie grass and prickly pine. She owns the custom-wrapped pink Tesla in the driveway, too. The little girl who loved climbing grew up, and so did her sponsorships.
This is the home of Sasha DiGiulian, 31, perhaps one of the most famed female professional climbers of her time. She has nearly half a million fans on Instagram. She’s a three-time national champion and two-time world champion. She was the first North American woman to climb a 5.14d (9a), then one of the hardest sport climbs achieved by a woman. She has more than 30 first female ascents.
But DiGiulian’s significance extends well beyond her athletic achievements. She was among the earliest climbers to recognize and harness the power of social media, and she’s attracted mainstream interest and sponsorships to a historically niche sport. Adidas signed her at 17. Red Bull signed her in college as its first American climber. She co-designed the rock climber in the rock-climber emoji. She’s appeared in advertisements for makeup, tires, Seamless food delivery and even lingerie (for a campaign that aimed to present strength and femininity as being fundamentally compatible, a stance that DiGiulian champions).
Sasha's home gym includes a pink Kilter Board with a 45-degree overhang.
© Greg Mionske
She’s also caught a fair amount of shade. Her polarizing nature is central to a new film, Here to Climb, about her career, and her comeback from an injury that nearly ended it. In the film’s opening scenes, members of the climbing community, including free soloist Alex Honnold, recount some of the criticisms and outright abuse that have been levied at DiGiulian: that she’s sexualized the sport, that she’s dumb and anorexic, that she presents a highly curated public persona. “Sasha’s story is amazing,” Honnold says. “That’s why it’s so frustrating when she overhypes some ascents.”
But at the moment, it’s hard to square the image of the polarizing, narrative-controlling influencer with the unassuming 5-foot-2 athlete who’s showing me around her house. “We have a pigeon problem,” DiGiulian tells me, waving at some milky streaks below the rafters over her deck. She wears climbing pants, gold- studded earrings, a shirt smudged with chalk and a Coros fitness watch with a special-edition pink Coros x Sasha wristband that reads TAKE THE LEAD, the title of the memoir she published last fall. Our plan for the morning, hammered out by my editor and her manager, had been for me to accompany her while she trained in her personal climbing gym. But when I arrived, she asked if I just wanted to go for a hike instead. “I feel like it would be easier for us to talk,” she said, tilting her head with a smile.
On our way out, I ask for a tour of the Digi Dojo anyway—that’s what DiGiulian calls her gym—and she gamely demonstrates the workings of the various programmable walls for which the she- cave is named: a pink-framed Treadwall, which rotates like a treadmill and is tilted at a 35-degree overhang; a Kilter Board, with a 45-degree overhang and LED lights that allow DiGiulian to set thousands of routes; and a similarly LED-lit MoonBoard with a 40-degree overhang. Boulder has no shortage of climbing gyms, but here, away from the distractions and the scene, DiGiulian can focus. She can have her coaches or other pros over to session uninterrupted.
“But honestly,” she adds, “a lot of the time I’m here alone.”
When DiGiulian was 7, her mother learned to belay her.
© Greg Mionske
DiGiulian paid for her college tuition with her climbing earnings.
© Greg Mionske
The girl was by nature independent, a trait sometimes at odds with a sport that requires a partner. When she was 7, her mother learned to belay her so she could climb lap after lap. She went to college even though other pro climbers told her she’d be wasting her prime athletic years. At Columbia University, where she studied creative nonfiction writing and business, she was the only one she knew who attended classes during the week and jetted off internationally for climbs or sponsor obligations on weekends.It wasn’t easy juggling professional climbing and a college education, but she wanted to prove that you could do both.
Though her parents were loving and supportive, she was on her own financially, too. She had to pay her Ivy League tuition with her climbing earnings, so she said yes to every opportunity. Saying yes to one thing often led to another, and soon she was bopping between fundraising galas and the crag, photo shoots and the gym. She wore makeup and pink nail polish on the wall; she climbed in a pink sports bra. She enjoyed being both feminine and athletic—again, she wanted to prove that a woman didn’t have to choose.
By now she had racked up some impressive climbing feats outdoors, including first ascents and first female ascents. She was featured in magazines and on TV. But as her profile rose, so too did the chatter. She didn’t yet know not to read the comments: about her body, her lifestyle, about whether she was a real climber. Some of the comments, especially about her weight, were cruel. She spent more time than she’d like “anguishing,” as she puts it in the film, over what people thought of her.
DiGiulian's new film, Here to Climb, charts her comeback from injury.
© Greg Mionske
The naysayers will always be around, always coming from a place of fear or competition.
In 2015, the summer before her senior year, she attempted a big-wall climb on the 13,000-foot Eiger, a mountain in the Swiss Alps. The route lay on the mountain’s deadly north face, nicknamed the “murder wall” for the 60-plus lives it had claimed. On the wall, a male climber working another route told her, “I don’t know if little girls belong on the Eiger.” Then the sky unleashed rain, hail and snow. She and her partner were forced to retreat.
She felt immense pressure to finish. Traditionally, climbers slipped away for their objectives, emerging triumphant only at the end with photo and video evidence. But for the Eiger, she had done a Skype call with NBC from her bivvy and sent regular dispatches provided to ABC. She had an audience. With time running out, she and her partner diverted to an easier, drier route that had also never been climbed by a woman. She got to the top, and when she returned home, her phone blew up with requests from reporters eager to talk to the American woman who had conquered the “murder wall.” She was embarrassed, not sure the climb warranted the hubbub, but she still said yes, again, to the opportunities. There were so few, fleeting moments when the mainstream media paid attention to her sport.
The reporters didn’t understand climbing, and some used the wrong language, which made her achievement sound bigger than it was. This made other climbers angry. They said she overhyped her climb. But she says she didn’t make the claim—the media did. It didn’t matter. “People were ready to pounce,” says her friend, Kati Hetrick, a former professional climber and filmmaker. “They wanted to poke holes in her approach to climbing, and this was an opportunity to do it.”
In 2018, trouble found her again. She got into a public tiff with a popular male professional climber who, according to her, had bullied her for years. This time, he posted a photo making fun of her body on a private Instagram account shared with other pros. She called him and asked him to take it down; he blocked her. She outed him online; he lost his sponsorships. The community chose sides. Some people supported her. Others she considered friends disappeared. She was heartbroken, but she compartmentalized. She kept climbing.
In early 2020, she was aiming for a first female ascent of a big-wall sport climb in Mexico called Logical Progression. Her hips had been hurting, so she went to the doctor. He told her she had hip dysplasia and would need five surgeries—urgently—to repair both sides. Worse, he didn’t know if she would return to the level she was climbing at. It was two weeks before her big climb. Her doctor agreed she could start the surgeries when she returned.
But the night before she left, she got a phone call. A member of her film crew had fallen and died on route while rigging ropes for the cameras. She still flew to Mexico, reeling with shock and guilt, but now the trip was a rescue and body-recovery mission. Days after she returned in March 2020, the world shut down for the pandemic.
Her five surgeries began in May 2020. During the two reconstructive procedures the doctors cut out her lower abdominal muscles in order to break and reassemble her pelvic bone in multiple places. For 10 months she got cut open, stitched back together, recovered, went in, got cut open again. In between, she did PT, she crutched around, she started writing a book. She kept busy. But without climbing—without the daily opportunities to feel strong and competent; without the ability to set goals, work toward goals, achieve goals—she lost touch with the feeling of success, she says. She lost touch with part of who she was.
Athletes have a platform, but "you have to know what you’re talking about.”
© Greg Mionske
DiGiulian and I pick our way up a rocky ridge trail, enjoying the sunshine and its dry, uncomplicated warmth. Her moppy black-and-brown Bernedoodle, MooseChaga, trots behind us. The climber and her husband, film producer and director Erik Osterholm, got the pup a few years ago, marking a shift in their priorities. The surgeries and the pandemic had forced DiGiulian to stop traveling, and she enjoyed her newfound sense of community and groundedness. Osterholm warned her that a dog would change their ability to travel, but she told him she was ready.
Still: she’s on the road a lot. (The couple has great dog sitters.) She just got home a couple days ago from a trip that included speaking to the UN and meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris, and she’s about to head out for another travel block that includes training for a new project in Yosemite as well as a trade show for her nutrition-bar company, Send Bars, which she and her co-founder launched in 2022.
DiGiulian has always been brainy (“what do you think AI will do to journalism?” she asks me) and was raised to value education and other traditional measures of success (“you went to Berkeley, right?” she asks at the start of our hike). As a teenager, her role models were never pure climbers. She deeply admired those like Lynn Hill, who was the first person, man or woman, to free climb the Nose on Yosemite’s El Capitan in 1993, famously quipping afterward, “It goes, boys.” DiGiulian hung a poster of Hill with the quote on her bedroom wall, and today Hill is a friend who plays a prominent role in DiGiulian’s film. But the athletes DiGiulian really wanted to emulate were those like Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams, women who wielded influence beyond the court. “I didn’t see many climbers transcending sport or really crushing it in the business space,” she says.
Perhaps because she grew up outside of D.C.—one of the family’s neighbors was then-governor, now-senator Mark Warner—she’s also gravitated toward advocacy work. Since 2016, she’s lobbied on Capitol Hill with the nonprofit Access Fund for legislation that protects public lands, and she works with the climate action group Protect Our Winters. Actually, today, she tells me, a bipartisan bill she testified for in Congress, called the EXPLORE Act, was passed by the House.
“I don’t think climbing rocks will ever fully satisfy my desire to do something positive for the world,” DiGiulian says, as we walk the trail back toward her home, our feet crunching on the dirt. “It’s been more like, how can I use the influence that I have from climbing to effect positive change?”
“And even that feels vapid,” she continues, seemingly aware this might sound rote. “Can you really make a difference as an athlete? But at least success in athletics gives you a platform to get welcomed in the door. And then you have to actually know what you’re talking about.”
In a sport that can be described as monomaniacal, DiGiulian has broadened the definition of what it means to be a professional climber. “I think Sasha will be remembered as one of the most important climbers of her generation,” former Climbing magazine editor-in-chief Shannon Davis tells me, citing the difficulty of the grades that she climbs, the variety of disciplines she’s excelled at and the longevity of her career. But, he says, “where I think she’s really helped push the sport is just helping us think of climbers as a whole person.”
In 2021, DiGiulian surmounted the Logical Progression route in Mexico.
© Pablo Durana
DiGiulian and team on a 3,000-foot, 5.13 ascent wall in Chihuahua, Mexico.
© Pablo Durana
Every sport has its rules and traditions. Climbing originated in 19th-century England before it was brought to California’s Sierra Nevada in the 1930s, and many of its ideals were established during this time, historian Joseph E. Taylor III, tells me. Victorian-era climbers believed that accepting money as an athlete tainted sport: “Only the amateur possessed pure motives,” Taylor writes in his book, Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk. Later, 1960s Yosemite gave rise to dirtbags, climbers who left school and worked odd jobs to climb full-time and achieve peak performance. “You live this life of monastic poverty,” Taylor says of the dirtbag ethos. “You dumpster dive, you scrounge, you shoplift ... you do what you have to do because it’s the only way to advance yourself.”
While male climbers have certainly had to balance supporting themselves financially and not being seen as a sellout, as a woman, DiGiulian’s glossier presentation and lucrative sponsorships might attract more criticism in a sport where, as Taylor says, there was also “a strain of misogyny from the beginning.” Early English climbers extolled masculinity and did not see most women as real climbers, he tells me. “They established the conceits we still struggle with today.”
Not only is DiGiulian not a man, she also never tried to be “one of the guys.” She looks and acts traditionally feminine, she’s an advocate for women’s sports, and she’s spoken out about the toxic effects of body dysmorphia among female athletes. She didn’t just laugh it off and “let boys be boys” when the pro male climber body-shamed her on Instagram. She still believes she did the right thing in standing up for herself and says other women told her they’d been bullied by the same person. But confronting the boys’ club takes its toll: The fallout from the experience, and the resulting sense of alienation from her community, she says, was traumatic.
Even some of the most widely respected women climbers dealt with sexism. Lynn Hill, for example, earned undeniable cred for both her talent and years spent at Yosemite’s Camp 4. But she was still paid less than a less-accomplished male counterpart by a mutual sponsor; men also said she had an advantage on the Nose thanks to her small fingers. Had Hill ever heard a man’s first ascent attributed to his unique physical advantage? “Never heard of such a thing,” she tells me.
In the film, Hill explains that the climbing culture she grew up in prized self-effacement and humility: You didn’t talk about what you did; you let other people talk about it. It’s perhaps irked some climbers, then, to see DiGiulian promote herself unabashedly. But many male climbers didn’t have to promote themselves, Hetrick says. “If a guy did something, everyone in the core community talked about it, and sponsorships percolated from there.” Meanwhile, she says, “I watched many women work hard and accomplish incredible first ascents or podiums and think the telephone was going to ring, and it just never did.” Even Hill says that her first free ascent on the Nose was not fully recognized for the achievement it was until no one was able to repeat the feat for 12 more years. By then, she had become a mother and was no longer prioritizing climbing in the same way.
DiGiulian suggests that the criticism may also spring from run-of-the-mill jealousy. “I think a lot of the scrutiny that I’ve faced in my career is like, why is Sasha making this money and I’m not?” she says, as we walk back up her driveway. But haters aren’t just people who are jealous of what you have, I muse. They’re people who believe you don’t deserve what you have.
DiGiulian agrees, and the thought strikes a nerve. “Because as a female athlete you’re like, how many times am I going to do something to prove that I deserve it?” she says. “It’s this never-ending uphill battle.” Her recent experiences, especially the social media kerfuffle and her surgeries, have taught her that trying to prove your worth to people who are determined not to see it is like pouring yourself down the drain. “The athlete in me will always want to prove more and more,” she says. “But at the end of the day I’m just so grateful I can move and be fully functioning again, and it puts things in perspective.”
These days, she has a much lower tolerance for fake friendships, and she tries to surround herself with people who are genuinely supportive. And she stays off Reddit, she says, with a wry smile. It still gets to her, though. “It’s impossible to say I’m not affected,” she admits.
It can be exhausting, being a certain kind of woman in this world. But you can’t fight every troll. You can’t win every heart. So you pull your circle tighter. You stop reading the comments. And you become further acquainted with the sound of your own voice.
Logical Progression is a 3,000-foot, 5.13 ascent wall in Chihuahua, Mexico.
© Pablo Durana
Just four months after her final surgery, in June 2021, DiGiulian returned to Mexico to tackle Logical Progression. As Here to Climb documents, despite being less fit or prepared than she’d ever been before a climb, DiGiulian claimed the first female free ascent of the 3,000-foot, 5.13 (7c+) route.
But her real comeback, in her eyes, took place the following September, on a 2,000-foot, 5.14b (8c) route in Spain’s Picos de Europa mountain range, called Rayu. This time, DiGiulian wanted to free what would be the hardest big wall climbed by an all-women’s team. She recruited Brette Harrington, a North Face climber with a deep alpine-climbing resume; and Matilda Söderlund, an old friend and Swedish pro who had climbed 5.14d.
After two and a half weeks of sessioning various sections of the adventurous big wall, the women were ready to attempt the climb from bottom to top. On the second day, Söderlund sent the 5.14b crux, and the trio could have moved forward to claim the team ascent. But DiGiulian was determined to send the crux too: It would be the same grade as the hardest section of big-wall she’d climbed before her surgeries.
As DiGiulian describes it in an essay for Outside, over the next day and a half, she and Harrington attempted to free the section. The limestone was covered in sharp crystals, and their fingers left blood on the holds. A storm was coming in. On their fourth day, she took her last shot before the team had to push on.
How many times am I going to do something to prove that I deserve it?
A short film, Rayu, captures DiGiulian’s climb through the final section of the crux. Her fingers are bleeding so profusely she can’t use her right index finger. Söderlund and Harrington encourage her from below. “Everything you’ve got,” Söderlund calls. DiGiulian exhales, swinging a tan arm overhead to crimp three fingertips over a barely discernible ripple of rock. “Hold it!” Harrington shouts.
The wind whistles. “BAAAT!” DiGiulian yells and pastes herself against the blank gray face. She tiptoes leftward on invisible undulations. “BAAAT!” she shouts again. She hooks her left foot, pulling leftward once more. One more reach for the final hold. Now she’s standing upright at the anchor. “FUUUCK YEAH!” she hollers, pumping her fist in the air. “WOOOO!” she screams, her voice cracking with elation.
During my Zoom interview with Kati Hetrick, I show her this clip and ask for her reaction. I think she might say something about DiGiulian’s style or strengths. Instead, she tells me, smiling, “I’m just reminded how much Sasha loves climbing.” Some people have a perception that DiGiulian is in it for the wrong reasons, she says—that she’s in it for the money. If DiGiulian just wanted to make money, Hetrick points out, there are a lot of other ways for her to do it.
“She chose climbing,” she says. “And she chose climbing because she loves climbing.”
DiGiulian's Logical Progression climb is captured in her new film.
© Pablo Durana
DiGiulian's teammate in Mexico.
© Pablo Durana
She is 31 years old now, but on the wall, you can still see the little girl she was. When she falls off and cries out in frustration: “She tries so hard,” Hill says. When she reaches the anchor and howls in elation: “Outside climbing, she’s at her happiest,” Hetrick says.
But of course she is no longer a child. She has traversed the passage from girlhood to womanhood, one that includes the dawning realization that the world celebrates your wins when you are small and nonthreatening but questions your worthiness as your windfalls grow. It involves the hard lesson that sometimes you do have to choose—between speaking out or fitting in; between being humble or being seen. Try to please everyone and you’ll lose yourself. Stand up for yourself and you might lose almost everyone.
The choice isn’t easy, but she’s made the same one again and again. “The naysayers,” DiGiulian writes in her book, “will always be around, always coming from a place of fear or competition.” Climbing in the way that only she can has gained her a rare vantage point, a height from which just a handful of human beings will ever get to see the world. She’s shed some blood on the way up. But what a view it is.
Watch the trailer for Here to Climb!
Here to Climb, an HBO sports documentary from Red Bull Media House, debuts Tuesday, June 18 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.
