Dangling upside down one minute, stuck to smooth rock like a lizard the next, pulling herself up by a finger and jumping from crack to knife-edge up an overhanging cliff, a girl from New York is believed to have conquered the most technically difficult rock climb ever by a female.
It’s also the hardest piece of rock face ever climbed by anyone of her age – 13 years old.
Ashima Shiraishi, who started scrambling on boulders in Manhattan’s Central Park when she was just seven, on Tuesday conquered Open Your Mind Direct, the notoriously tough climb in north-east Spain, sending records tumbling.
“I’m happy,” she told the Guardian, nonchalantly, in a Skype chat from Spain, estimating that it took her about 10 minutes from bottom to top. Ashima had announced her success on Instagram, with a celebratory “OMG!!!”
“My hands are wrecked,” she said gleefully, holding her chalk-ingrained hands up to show the patches scraped raw in the attempt.
Kitty Calhoun, who was the first woman to climb Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain, and is a senior guide with the Colorado-based women’s rock- and ice-climbing adventure firm Chicks Climbing, hailed Ashima’s record as “outstanding”.
“It just shows the way girls can excel in climbing; they are really catching up and it does such a lot to inspire women and girls,” she told The Guardian from a gym in Salt Lake City, where she is training for an assault on a new Himalayan route this autumn. She put Ashima’s ability down to her superlative strength-to-weight ratio, passion and vision for puzzling out the route.
Shirashi says she now wants to climb more – faster, higher, stronger, until she is not just breaking records for women but breaking records in climbing outright, going to a level more extreme than any human being has ever gone before.
“It’s not just the guys who are pushing the limits now,” she said.
Bragging rights?
Open Your Mind Direct – a typically quirky name in the world of climbing – has been climbed by no more than a handful of the sport’s top men.
Nobody had been up it since one of the fragile holds broke off recently as someone clung to it, increasing its degree of technical difficulty.
The route’s new grading, and therefore Ashima’s record, await consensus in a sport where top bragging rights are jealously guarded, closely scrutinised and often aggressively challenged, and routes’ grades of difficulty have an element of subjectivity.
But there seems little doubt that Open Your Mind Direct is now regarded as a 9a+ climb in European grading language, 5.15a in American grading language.
No female climber, woman or girl, has ever climbed a 9a+ / 5.15a climb. There are only two recognised grades of difficulty above this, at the very pinnacle of rock climbing.
In 2005, a Spanish woman, Josune Bereziartu, had climbed a rock face called Bimbaluna in Switzerland that is graded between 9a and 9a+ – but no female had ever climbed a solid 9a+ until last week.
Ashima’s belay partner was her father, Hisatoshi Shiraishi, who moved from Japan to New York with his wife in 1978.
‘Making your soul quiet and strong’
Ashima prepared for the climb with a ritual her father taught her, which she said does not translate well from Japanese but “is something like making your mind and your soul quiet and strong”.
Though Ashima completed Tuesday’s climb in 10 minutes, she had worked on the climb for four days, she said, falling off over and over again in dozens of attempts as she gradually worked her way up, figuring out the sequence of tough moves.
“The first day I missed clipping in at one point, towards the bottom, and fell 10 feet to the ground, messing up my wrist, so it didn’t start off too well,”she said.
Sport climbing, as it is known, means bolts have already been drilled into the rock for climbers to clip their rope to using carabiners, giving a high level of safety that leaves them free to battle wafer-thin holds, miniscule cracks – and gravity.
In the first attempt on her fourth day of trying, she climbed the rock in one go, moving fast in order to prevent her arm muscles burning out, which was when she reckoned she took around 10 minutes.
Ashima described one of the hardest sections, which required both power and endurance, and the agility needed to grip an overhanging section of rock with the few millimeters at the top of her fingers.
The young climber attributed her success to her combined skills at bouldering – a sport for which she was becoming well-known before reaching the age of 10 and which requires gymnastics and delicate sequencing – and sport climbing, which calls for technique and stamina. She also says she simply fell in love with the physical and mental challenge of propelling herself up vertical rock.
During last Tuesday’s ground-breaking climb, she was reaching her feet over her head at times, hanging upside down as she hauled herself ever upwards.
‘She’s the future’
“She is wildly talented. She’s like spiderwoman. She’s just crazy good,” said Garrett Koeppicus , a climb designer at the Brooklyn Boulders climbing gym in New York City where Ashima trains and often brings the place to a standstill as she darts up the walls.
Open Your Mind Direct is “at the edge of what is humanly possible”, said Nick Chambers, a spokesman for gear-maker Petzl, one of Ashima’s sponsors.
“It’s believed to be technically the hardest thing a woman has ever climbed. And she is the youngest person, male or female, to climb at this difficulty,” Chambers said.
He praised her intuitive “climbing IQ” and courage and compared her strength and dynamism to an Olympic gymnast.
“She’s the future,” he said.
Ashima herself said she is looking forward to “climbing more and traveling the world”.
And how did she celebrate what is expected to be confirmed in the climbing world in due course as a world record?
“Ice cream!” she said, her eyes lighting up.
She’s still only 13, after all, and after another week’s climbing, she’s heading back to school in New York.
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