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Katie Lamb, 25, has skipped the V15 grade and made the fourth ascent of Daniel Woods’s Box Therapy in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. In doing so she’s become the first woman to climb V16.
“The pieces fit together on Box and quickly it was about silencing my doubts and flipping the switch,” she wrote on Instagram. “It’s a headspace fed as much by days outside shooting the shit as by days alone in the mountains. I spent some time in July walking up to this meadow trying to fill my cup, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.”
Lamb, who grew up in the Boston suburbs and has been climbing for most of her life, has previously sent a number of V14s, including classics like New Baseline, The Penrose Step, and Jade. Earlier this year, she made the long-awaited first female ascent of Dave Graham’s Bishop testpiece Spectre, which goes at either V13 or V14+ depending on your size.
Box Therapy is not an easy problem to project; it’s located seven grueling miles from the Wild Basin trailhead, at an elevation of 10,500 feet. The boulder was first found 15 years ago by Tommy Caldwell, who established Box Therapy’s stand start, Spread Eagle (V11), which starts halfway out of the seam that cuts across the boulder’s 20-foot, 50-degree overhanging face. Box Therapy starts at the bottom of the seam and links into Spread Eagle after some vicious crimping on micro holds with limited foot option. Speaking to Climbing shortly after his FA in October 2018, Woods said that the problem was V14 or V15 to the stand start, which goes at V12 because you come into the stand with your hands mismatched on the starting hold. Woods put seven days and 90 miles of hiking into the problem before making the first ascent. The problem was repeated by Drew Ruana and Sean Bailey in 2020 but has otherwise repelled the efforts of numerous other world class climbers.
Lamb is as well known for cherry-picking classics as she is for her all-in approach to projects. “I prefer to be pretty single-minded,” she told Climbing in an interview last year. “If I get sucked into a project and I think that I can do it, I like to be pretty focused.”
Case and point: In the winter 2021, Lamb went to Bishop, California, to try The Swarm, a classic V13 first climbed by Dave Graham. During the month of December, she climbed only six days, and all of them were on that boulder. The other days she devoted to healing her skin.
There are downsides to this approach, of course. “I do end up in positions where I haven’t summited a boulder in a couple of weeks,” she admitted, “and maybe sometimes I should just try to get on top of something, but I’m really bad at that. I don’t really do volume days—I’ve never been a volume climber. For me the best days are not the ones when I’ve just done a ton of V8s.”
Negatives aside, clearly the project-first approach is working for Lamb.
About Box Therapy, Lamb wrote, “A lot of my progress can be attributed to just showing up. I know where I can be and keep coming back until I get there. It’s an asset, but can make climbing less fun. Recently I’ve been feeling less excitement, but more joy.”
Stay tuned for a new interview with Lamb. In the meantime, check out our feature interview from last March 2022 here.