Teasing that the new HBO documentary “Here to Climb” ends with rock climber Sasha DiGiulian joining her mentor Lynn Hill to become the first women to create a new route in the Flatirons near Boulder isn’t so much a spoiler as an incentive for anyone who cares about climbing in Colorado to go watch it.
The route, and the view of Boulder and Denver from the top of it, is so spectacular that at any other moment in history it might have been dubbed The King Line, male climbers’ traditional patriarchal way of indicating the most badass way of getting up a rock face.
“The climb is on such an iconic feature of the Flatirons and the fact that it’s called the Maiden is pretty awesome, so we’re calling our line The Queen Line,” DiGiulian says, taking a break between climbs in Boulder Canyon for an interview about the film, which premiers June 18.
“Lynn and I spent over a year really outlining it and developing it and envisioning it and then putting the pieces together to find out if it was possible,” DiGiulian says. “It’s pretty incredible to be the first women to put up a climb in the Flatirons, and to do it with my childhood mentor and inspiration was a really cool aspect of the project, just getting to build our friendship together and spend so many big days chatting about life and climbing and learning from each other.”
The Queen Line — three pitches for a total rise of 230 feet and rated 5.13c/d using the Yosemite Decimal System — represented a moment of personal reflection for both climbers.
DiGiulian, now 32, was turning 30 as filming for “Here to Climb” got underway, getting ready to get married, recovering from a major hip injury that required five surgeries and that she’d previously worried might be career-ending, and, for the first time in her life, contemplating a future that might be about something beyond climbing.
Hill, now 63, is coming up on 50 years of her active climbing career in 2025 and thinking deeply about the legacy she’d like to leave.
“I was really fortunate to start climbing when I did, in 1975,” Hill says. “It was a very different sport then. We didn’t really even call it a sport, it was just an activity we did, in the outdoors. People weren’t looking at the most blank, overhanging faces to do routes. People didn’t know that they were just beginning to face the real climbing challenges that people were capable of.”
Lynn Hill: Climbing’s poster girl for women’s empowerment
Like a lot of women in climbing from her generation, DiGiulian grew up with a poster of Hill tacked to her wall: It’s a shot of Hill making the first free ascent of The Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in 1994, emblazoned with Hill’s most famous quote, “It goes, boys.” Before deciding on “The Queen Line” name for their route, DiGiulian and Hill submitted a permit application calling their route “Vamos Las Chicas” (translation: “Let’s go, girls!”).
Hill says DiGiulian mentioning the power of that poster in an interview in the movie reminds her of her own mentors, including climbing pioneers Mariah Cranor, Beverly Johnson and Mari Gingery. When Hill thinks about how far climbing has come since, and especially of the women she’s mentored herself — including DiGiulian, Beth Rodden, Katie Brown, and the countless kids she’s coached in Boulder over the past few decades — she says she’s grateful, but not surprised, to have lived to see women have so much success in the sport, in many ways pulling up even with or surpassing men in the sport.
“There’s a strength-to-weight ratio that matters, and the rest is about your mind and how you interpret the rock features and challenges in front of you,” Hill says. “I knew early on that girls and women were capable of a lot more than they were given credit for in climbing, so it’s not at all surprising to me that there’s a lot of really strong girls and women in the sport now. Oftentimes, I’ll be at a climbing area and there are more women there than men, or all the women are better climbers than the men. So it’s changed a lot.”
Hill says helping lead the way to that shift in the sport has been one of her life’s great joys: “Any time I ever encountered a man trying to say that I wouldn’t be capable of what they are capable of, I just would prove them wrong, whenever possible, and I’ve actually enjoyed that quite a bit!”
DiGiulian, a World Champion and three-time U.S. National Champion, has climbed multiple first ascents around the world, including a first female ascent on the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland. Still, she says, working out the particulars of The Queen Line with Hill was humbling in a way she hadn’t expected.
“Lynn is an incredible climber, which isn’t something that was new to me, but just seeing her movement on the wall and unlocking sequences was really incredible,” DiGiulian says. “The whole experience helped me see that I could have a lot of great climbing days ahead of me.”
For both women, The Queen Line project was a way of giving back to the Boulder climbing community they call home. Hill’s been living in Boulder since 1996; DiGiuilian since 2016. They mentor and coach younger climbers in the region, and wanted to do something big to inspire the next generation. Hill says the route up the Maiden and everything that went into completing it also served as reminders of one of the fundamental things she’s always loved about climbing and hopes to share with others: It’s hard!
Mike Sofranko, writing for Mountain Project (a popular online climbing community with user-submitted route guides), describes the Maiden as “shaped like a dolphin leaping up the wave of the foothills” with an “imposing overhang on its west side,” and notes that, “Like Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower and Utah’s Ancient Art, the Maiden appears to be of other-worldly construction.”
“This was a really beautiful wall on the Maiden, which is a nice pillar, one of the most visually stunning features in Colorado or anywhere,” Hill says. “What made it challenging was that when you’re bolting a new route, it’s nice to be able to drop a rope down over it and be able to put the bolts in, but this climb traverses and angles off to the side, so it was really tricky to get the rope in place. Plus it was overhanging, so in order to stay on the rock, you’d have to put some gear in, but since it was a face, there really wasn’t much in the way of protection that you could put into the rock to pull you in. I guess the takeaway would be, ‘If at first, you don’t succeed, you try, try again.’ And that’s kind of the way climbing is. You can’t get discouraged by the challenge. The challenge is what makes it exciting and satisfying when you finally do it.”
Just keep climbing
Challenge is the recurring theme of “Here to Climb,” with DiGiulian getting personal and vulnerable on topics including injury recovery, disordered eating and body-image issues that affected her career when she was younger.
“I feel really confident in who I am now and I didn’t always have that confidence,” she says of her willingness to go to all those personal places during filming for the documentary. “I found a lot of it through climbing, but also through the people in my life that I find inspiring and I connect with and I trust. And I just hope that through my story and really being vulnerable and sharing the hardships that I’ve gone through, and celebrating that strength and vulnerability and femininity don’t need to be mutually exclusive, I can encourage others to find that self empowerment as well.”
The film also addresses her history of handling internet haters and controversy and criticism, which has at times turned belligerent, around some of her greatest accomplishments.
“I’m no stranger to criticism,” DiGiulian says. “I’ve faced it since I was young, and I’ve grown up having even my successes questioned, just because someone thinks it’s hard to believe that a woman could achieve them. I would say ‘Stay grounded in your principles’ is the No. 1 thing that I’ve learned. Showing up and doing my best and knowing that there will always be haters if I’m pushing and doing something cool. I’ve learned how to have quite callous skin through my sport, pun intended! And acknowledging it and owning it has given me a lot of strength.”
DiGiulian says she’s hoping to help share that strength with women everywhere. In addition to her work with younger climbers in Boulder, she serves on the boards at Women’s Sports Foundation, Up2Us Sports, and Ascend Athletics, all organizations aiming to increase opportunity and access in sport.
“I think that climbing is really cool because what women are capable of achieving is at par with what men are capable of achieving,” DiGiulian says. “That makes climbing a really exciting and empowering sport.”
As the film begins to reach a broader audience, following its premiere screening in Denver in May, DiGiulian hopes it reaches an audience of climbers, nonclimbers and future climbers.
“I’m excited for people to see ‘Here to Climb’ because women are reaching such incredible heights, both in climbing and in sports in general,” she said, “and I hope that this film, regardless of if you climb, serves as a source of inspiration and a source of encouragement to overcome whatever obstacles you’re facing in life.”