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Braving New Worlds: Steph Davis

Alpinist

Release Date: 02/02/2023

Kai Lightner: The Last Six Years show art Kai Lightner: The Last Six Years

Alpinist

Kai Lightner is no stranger to the spotlight—or to this magazine. He’s been climbing since he was six, when he joined the climbing team at a gym in North Carolina. Four years later Lightner won his first national title, and the wins just kept coming.  In 2016, while still in high school, Lightner wrote an essay for Alpinist 55 about learning how to trad climb from Doug Robinson. A few years later, as a sophomore in college, he appeared on this podcast, in conversation with Paula LaRochelle. He had recently taken a step back from climbing and would soon found the nonprofit organization...

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Alpinist

Last year, Babsi Zangerl did something no one has ever done before—she flashed a route on El Capitan. Thousands of feet of hard climbing with no falls. Her partner, Jacopo Larcher, came really close, taking just one fall during their ascent of Freerider.  Zangerl has been a climber for over two decades, since she was a teenager at a climbing gym in Austria. But what, and how, she climbs has evolved over that time—she spent her early years as a professional boulderer.  Zangerl first visited Yosemite fifteen years ago with her friend Hansjörg Auer. She was getting more serious...

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Alpinist

Rick Accomazzo came of age in the climbing world as part of the Stonemasters—a name adopted by a group of friends largely climbing in Yosemite, Tahquitz and Suicide Rocks in the 1970s. To become a Stonemaster, you had to send a 5.11 called Valhalla. Tobin Sorenson was a Stonemaster too. He was also, Accomazzo believes, the best all-around climber in the world at the time.  Throughout the 70s, the Stonemasters branched out from rock to ice, and from California to the Canadian Rockies and Europe. Sorenson, Accomazzo recalled, took to alpine climbing just as well as he had to rock. It was...

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Other Everests: Hidden Histories & Contemporary Challenges show art Other Everests: Hidden Histories & Contemporary Challenges

Alpinist

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Alpinist

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Alpinist

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Alpinist

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Alpinist

Lauren Delaunay Miller is an award-winning author, journalist and audio producer based in Bishop, California. Her first book, Valley of Giants: Stories from Women at the Heart of Yosemite Climbing, was published in the spring of 2022 by Mountaineers Books, and won the Banff Mountain Book Competition for Climbing Literature.  Growing up on the East Coast, Miller says she wasn’t initially an outdoorsy person. But she was inspired to start climbing while at college in North Carolina—after seeing a photo of Alex Honnold climbing Yosemite’s Half Dome on the cover of National Geographic....

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Training for the New Anything with Steve House show art Training for the New Anything with Steve House

Alpinist

Steve House began venturing into the high mountains as a teenager, and has since built a career on climbing, guiding and coaching. By the time he published his book Beyond the Mountain in 2009, Reinhold Messner said House was “at the top of mountaineering.”  House’s life in climbing has taken him all over the world. His most famous ascent may be the Central Pillar of Nanga Parbat’s Rupal Face, a climb he completed with Vince Anderson. But he has compiled an impressive list of first ascents and new routes in Alaska, the Canadian Rockies, the Alps and the Karakoram. Steve has been a...

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Alpinist

Sarah Pickman is an encyclopedia of expedition history, in particular the gear early explorers relied on. She recently earned a PhD in history from Yale University. She’s an independent scholar, editor, writer and content producer based just outside New York City.  Sarah is also a contributor to Alpinist. She’s written articles on expedition first aid kits and sun protection for the Tool Users section of the magazine. As it turns out, burnt cork is no substitute for sunscreen.   Through her research and writing, Sarah looks at the gear explorers carried with them on their...

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Steph Davis has been a professional climber since 1991. But simply calling the Moab, Utah local a climber seems inadequate.

From three years old, Davis was trained in the Suzuki Method on the piano. She practiced everyday, sometimes for hours a day, until she discovered a passion for climbing. The piano fell silent as climbing became her primary focus.

In 2004, Davis became only the second woman to free climb El Capitan in one day. The following year she freed the formation’s Salathe Wallthe first woman ever to do so. She’s logged climbing achievements all over the world, and has confronted fear while free soloing walls such as the Diamond on Longs Peak. 

For Davis, climbing is about when to hold on, and when to let go. We talk about her evolution as an athletehow she went from focusing exclusively on climbing to adding base jumping and wingsuit flying to her repertoire. She describes the sense of euphoria gained from free soloing, and why it can’t be replicated.

This episode is brought to you by The North Face.

Alpinist Magazine

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Host: Abbey Collins

Guest: Steph Davis

Producer + Engineer: Mike Horn