Sibylle Hechtel and Me at Tuolumne Meadows
The morning we were getting ready to go do the Matthes Crest Traverse, this lady came over to our campsite to see if someone had a phone with a signal so she could call her climbing partner, who had failed to show up the previous night. I did a double-take when she started talking, and was about 99% sure that I knew who she was. Turned out I was right. How cool! One great thing about the sport of climbing is the relative obscurity that legends of the sport can operate in. Bumping into Sybille in the Tuolumne Meadows campground is sort of like bumping into Michelle Kwan at your local ice rink. Pretty neat. And she was nice enough to let me get a photo with her.
In 1973, Sibylle, with Bev Johnson, made the first all-female ascent of El Capitan. The account of the climb was published in the AAJ. You can read "Walls without Balls" here though it ran as "Untitled." You can see Sibylle in the excellent documentary "Vertical Frontiers", one of my favorite climbing films.
Sibylle Hechtel and Me at Tuolumne Meadows
The morning we were getting ready to go do the Matthes Crest Traverse, this lady came over to our campsite to see if someone had a phone with a signal so she could call her climbing partner, who had failed to show up the previous night. I did a double-take when she started talking, and was about 99% sure that I knew who she was. Turned out I was right. How cool! One great thing about the sport of climbing is the relative obscurity that legends of the sport can operate in. Bumping into Sybille in the Tuolumne Meadows campground is sort of like bumping into Michelle Kwan at your local ice rink. Pretty neat. And she was nice enough to let me get a photo with her.
In 1973, Sibylle, with Bev Johnson, made the first all-female ascent of El Capitan. The account of the climb was published in the AAJ. You can read "Walls without Balls" here though it ran as "Untitled." You can see Sibylle in the excellent documentary "Vertical Frontiers", one of my favorite climbing films.