Katie Lamb makes history (again) repeating The Dark Side (Font 8C+/V16)
- Friday 2nd May 2025
Top American boulder Katie Lamb has taken the top standard of women’s bouldering to Font 8C+/V16 with the fourth ascent of The Dark Side in Yosemite.
Two years ago Katie Lamb made the first female ascent of Box Therapy – then Font 8C+/V16 - in Rocky Mountain National Park. Shortly afterwards, Brooke and Shawn Raboutou also repeated the problem and proposed a downgrade to Font 8C/V15. That was subsequently accepted by Daniel Woods and Drew Ruana both of whom were amongst the climbers who had repeated Box Therapy.
Now however, Katie Lamb is back again pushing women’s bouldering standards with her ascent – the fourth overall and the first ascent by a women –of the classic Carlo Travesi Yosemite boulder, The Dark Side.
Originally climbed by Carlo Traversi in December 2023, The Dark Side has been the scene of considerable interest and activity this year. Starting the year with the second ascent back in January was Aidan Roberts. The third ascent by Keenan Takahashi followed and then Katie Lamb has completed the trio of repeats of the technical master-piece within the space of a few months.
Talking about here ascent online Katie Lamb described the climbing in some detail:
‘It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating friction on this boulder like passive resistance - a force that each scaler is at the whim of. But I learned to reshape this narrative: friction is something to sit with, to actively attend to, and to ask for help in understanding.
Despite everything in this world that is built to minimize friction, there are moments of stickiness for a scaler. And in these high stakes times, when it becomes clear all the ways we could have been more ready, the most important thing is to just show up to the session.’
Responding to her ascent of The Dark Side, some of the world’s bouldering cognoscenti have been quick to offer their congratulations to Katie.
This time, it seems that Katie has achieved the breakthrough of pushing women’s climbing up a grade to Font 8C+ and with that closing the gap to the men’s top standard of Font 9A/V17 to just a single grade. Last month Brooke Raboutou’s third ascent of Excalibur F9b+ in Arco – click here for that report – similarly pushed the top standard of women’s sport climbing to within a grade of the top standard achieved by men – ie F9c. American women seems to be dominating the outside game at the moment!
In a video recently released by Patagonia, Aidan describes in detail the technicalities of The Dark Side which is considered the current hardest bloc in Yosemite. Watch the video below.