No other summit in the Boulder area appears more improbable for climbers to conquer. So says the climbing guide for a rock formation near the Flatirons known as the Maiden. Naturally, that’s the rock local legend Lynn Hill chose when she and Sasha DiGiulian decided to establish a new route together. The route, completed last fall after over a year of work, is the first in Boulder to be established by women.
“I think it’s quite serendipitous that our line climbs the Maiden feature,” said Digiulian.
Depending on the viewing angle, the Maiden can look either forgiving or foreboding. From directly east, you may see it as a piano key tucked neatly into a vertical forest. But from the south, it becomes a sharply angled troll finger pointing west, out of a fist waiting to crunch its next victim.
One of the many lures of Boulder is the abundance of incredible rock climbing opportunities in town. People move here from all over to smash their toes into our famous sandstone, which has been opened up to possibility by generations of first ascents. Hill and DiGiulian, who happen to be two of the strongest and most well-known women in the business, appropriately named their route the Queen Line.
Their effort was documented as part of a film about DiGiulian overcoming major physical struggles over the last four years. The documentary, titled Here To Climb, premiered in Denver last Friday and will begin streaming on HBO Max on June 18.
DiGiulian, 32 and Hill, 63, came together two years ago to work on a big project together. After deciding on a location, defining a line, seeking a permit through the Flatirons Climbing Council to bolt it, and facing a brutal knee injury when trying to send it, the route was finally posted to Mountain Project this February.
“There aren’t that many routes of that caliber and difficulty in this area that people haven’t done,” said Hill, who has established routes from Cuba to Madagascar. “It’s a more pristine experience. You just feel like you’re out there.”
Digiulian managed to fit in the project amid a flurry of other professional endeavors, including starting a new business, writing a memoir and advocating for the outdoors industry in D.C.
The two climbers come from very different backgrounds in the sport, but their dedication to achieving the impossible brought them together.
“I met Sasha in Lander [Wyoming]. I knew her as the young phenom doing the hardest routes around,” said Hill, who remains a classic icon in rock climbing for achieving the first free ascent of the Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite in 1993. Hill broke the gender barrier with that ascent by achieving what no male had yet been able to.
While DiGiullian is a top-tier climber, she comes from a gym and sport climbing background, which requires fewer ad-hoc tricks than the traditional style Hill and her peers helped bring into the modern era. According to Hill, DiGiulian has more to learn about traditional climbing, but working with her childhood hero on a hard route caught her up quickly.
“The last pitch goes sideways on an overhanging wall. So we had to get creative. It was a big construction project.”
Coming into her third decade of life and second decade of climbing, Digiulian has an incredible breadth of experience establishing new routes.
“I’ve established around a dozen and a half routes around the world — but this is the first in Boulder,” she said.
Nothing good comes easy
One day during the project, when a camera crew was in place, Digiulian gave the route a ground-up attempt, but it didn’t go so well.
On the third and final pitch of the climb, which is almost 45 degrees overhanging, she hooked a heel onto a hold to leverage herself up and crested herself over a ledge, but a ligament in her knee blew.
“I heard a really loud pop and this really intense surge of pain traveled through my body and my body felt like it ejected from the wall. I was all of a sudden hanging out in space [because the wall is really overhung] with this wobbling, extreme pain in my knee,” she recalled.
Floating in space under the overhang, she managed to improvise a way back to the wall to finish the final moves before getting back to Hill and belaying her to the top.
“I didn’t realize exactly how bad my knee was until we rappelled down to the ground and tried to stand,” said DiGiulian.
Grabbing two sticks as crutches, she painfully made her way down three miles of trail to the car and drove straight to her surgeon’s house for an evaluation. Between 2020 and 2021, DiGiulian had five surgeries to fix chronic hip pain and had to relearn how to walk three times.
Pushing through sexism and rejection
Part of the process of putting up a new route in the Flatirons is getting a permit. This involves submitting a packet of information to the Flatirons Climbing Council, including a map of the route, a detailed description, the amount of fixed gear that will be installed, nearby routes, approach and descent details, and the staging location and condition.
To receive approval for new Flatiron routes, a public meeting is held to present the plan. At the meeting, the public audience members get one total vote and the Flatirons Climbing Council committee gets three. If it passes, Boulder’s Open Space & Mountain Parks gives final approval.
In other words, you have to really want it, because while that sounds like a lot, permitting is the easy part. However, the Queen Line wasn’t a given. Hill and DiGiulian initially got rejected after some community opposition apparently questioned their feminist flair and use of bolts in some spots.
“When we first applied, our name suggestion was Vamos Las Chicas,” Hill said. “Someone [in an online forum] said he was tired of the women’s liberation movement, and he started criticizing that there would be a new route crossing the old route that no one does. The public application on the Flatirons Climbing Council website shows a heated debate over the issue of whether their line would interfere with the one it crosses over.
Hill said she assured them with her background as a traditional climber she would respect those values and not add unnecessary bolts where they didn’t belong. But the application was denied after a public meeting. She pushed back on the idea that their use of bolts would be overdone. “It wasn’t an argument I’m going to agree with. Bolts are important for climbing in this area. We spraypaint them black so you can’t see them.”
But you can’t tell these two women to sit down. They tried again.
“Ultimately more people were interested in what we were doing than not, so we applied again with more information, said Hill. That time, “everybody raised their hands and said yes.”
That was in April 2022, a full year and a half before the route was complete. The time and effort put into such a project is something only a passionate climber can pursue.
“I’ve been up there about 25 times over the year and it’s over an hour hike in,” said Hill.
Currently, there’s one other new route on the Maiden up for review with the climbing council. Applications are anonymous, but DiGiulian hopes to see more women developing routes in the area.
“Hopefully our development encourages more women to get out there and put up some more lines.”
So has it actually been led and completed?