This is us

This is us: Jill Sompel and Patti Nickerson, brought together by the American climbing dream.

For a long time, I wanted to climb with women who were as psyched on climbing as I was. I wanted a female climbing partner, I wanted to go on a road trip with a female. I had never been on a climbing road trip with a girl friend... not girlfriend tee hee. In the South, the only people I had really ever climbed with were men, be it boyfriends, married men, men that wanted to get with me, or just straight-up climbing partners. But men approach climbing differently than women. I knew this from my time spent climbing in Hueco. I found it to be rare for my male climbing partners to want to sit under one boulder problem all day long with the prospect of not sending for weeks at a time. From my personal experiences and watching other talented climbers over the years, I have found that this is how problems get sent that are at your limit.

In the south, there just aren’t many excited women wanting to go out and try hard with other women. I was psyched but just got stuck in the typical female climber stereotype of the girl that climbs with her boyfriend. My boyfriend was the only one that wanted to go on road trips every weekend, camp out somewhere and spend the whole weekend rock climbing. Where were the girls? I always thought I needed a boyfriend to climb on hard problems. And for a while, that’s what I did. 

Jill was over here wondering the same thing. Her goal of creating a beta series for women proved that it was difficult to find women who had their own climbing objectives. She had this goal of producing a series of videos to help other female climbers send boulder problems with beta that was relevant to them.  Most of the climbing videos out there are of men using beta that we could never use! She knew that these videos would get other ladies psyched to try things they had not thought were ever possible. And this is exactly what happened. 

We both knew motivated girls existed. As I was watching Jill’s Lady Beta videos I was thinking, well here is a gal that is climbing hard boulder problems and totally excited about women in climbing. Meanwhile, she was out there watching the videos of my beta and thinking this girl must be psyched about bouldering, why have I not met her yet? So, here we are: two women, psyched, both watching videos of one another and sending hard problems because of the other’s beta… but we hadn’t yet met in person.

Jill is a mature 24 and I am a young 39. For some reason, this works out, because no matter what, we are both learning from each other regardless of the age difference. It just reiterates the fact that it doesn’t really matter how old you are or what your life experiences are or anything at all really... It all comes down to the fact that we are all excited about the same thing. In essence, we have a passion for climbing and nothing will ever change that. 

So we met, became instant friends, agreed on the necessity of having female climbing partners and the next thing we knew we were at the Moss Man corridor at Little Rock City exchanging beta on the only two problems in the corridor. And what do you know, BAH! Both problems got sent. And this is just the beginning. 

This is our blog, love it or hate it, get psyched to grapple some grips.

Here is our first video. Enjoy!

MossMan from Patti Newell on Vimeo.