BURSTKatie Lamb just announced that she climbed The Rookery V14 (8B+) in Yosemite, California. Open by Carlo Traversi at the end of 2023, the line was repeated by Aiden Roberts in 2024. Lamb send the problem at the end of 2024. Upon his first ascent, Traversi called the problem “one of the best boulders [he’s] ever climbed.”
“I was sure I would do this boulder last season,” said Lamb after her ascent on Instagram. “But I didn’t, and had to come back at the end of 2024. The first move was hard for me (and easy for others). I’m in a similar place now to where I was last year with The Rookery – still in Yosemite, only a different bloc. Despite feeling over it with my current project, I do think that good scaling is done slowly – it’s not a convenient, packaged experience. It’s cold and wet and tedious and often lonely. It’s at odds with its very hype online representation. So yeah, The Rookery took me many sessions and was harder for me than the grade reflects. You don’t always need to rook by the book yall.”
Lamb is one of the best boulderers in the world. She had an incredible 2023, starting the year with the first female ascent of The Buttermilks ultra-classic Spectre, giving the line a personal grade of V14. Her highlight of the year came in July, when she made the first female ascent of Box Therapy V15/16. In September, she repeated Deadlift V14 in Squamish, following that up with a send of Decided V14 in Mizugaki, Japan in October.
In May last year, she made the first ascent of 24 Karat, a stunning V11 highball in Yosemite. In August, she topped Equanimity V15, a line Jimmy Webb described as a “contender for the hardest technical boulder in the world.” Later in the year she made first female ascents of David Fitzgerald’s Echo Chamber V14 and Webb’s Fallen Angel V15, both located in Tahoe.
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