Heidi Almighty

Heidi Wirtz and the balancing act of being a pro climber

SUMMER 2006: Heidi Wirtz scanned the south face of the Ogre’s Thumb, searching for unclimbed lines up the 3,000-foot granite wall above. She stood awestruck on Pakistan’s Biafo Glacier, surrounded by the wild peaks of the Karakoram, imagining each pitch …till a scream shattered the stillness.

It was Lizzy Scully, her close friend and climbing partner. Wirtz ran back to find Scully sprawled face down beneath her 70-pound pack, blood from facial cuts staining the glacier crimson. Scully had slipped off a small ice tower, breaking a rib. She could walk, but couldn’t climb, and while Scully recovered in basecamp over the next week, five splitter days slipped by. Over the following six weeks, the pair managed two solid new-route attempts, both unsuccessful. With 10 days left and a terrible weather forecast, Abbas, their cook, invited the women to his village nearby. They accepted.

“Heidi Almighty,” 38, a professional climber since 2002 (her sponsors include The North Face, La Sportiva, Petzl, Julbo, Clif Bar, Pacific Outdoor, and Adventure Medical), has a reputation for strength, talent, and bull-headedness on all terrain: rock, ice, and alpine. It’s been said that Wirtz can onsight 5.11 anywhere. “She can pull on gear, free-climb hard, throw in ice tools,” the late Micah Dash once explained. “She can climb up whatever terrain is in front of her, no matter what skills it requires. She always takes her leads and gets ‘em done.”

Having cut her teeth in the trad bastion of the Gunnison Valley, Colorado, Wirtz is not your typical 5-whatever rock jock. In fact, she’s never climbed 5.13. But she’s undeniably hardcore: when Wirtz first moved from California to Colorado, she lived in a tent outside Crested Butte (elevation 8,885 feet) — for three years. “I remember being cold sometimes, like when it was -30 F,” she says, “but I never got frostbite or anything.”

In her 19 years climbing, Wirtz has established new routes in Patagonia, Jordan, Morocco, and Siberia, as well as numerous first ascents in Wyoming and Colorado (see the “Heidi Almighty Ticklist,” p.60). She and Vera Schulte-Pelkum hold the female speed records on three iconic Yosemite walls: the Nose, Half Dome, and Leaning Tower, all established in just one week in June, 2004. (Wirtz, however, says she’s “not proud of that” because her goal that summer was to link Half Dome and El Cap in a day. And Wirtz felt they could have climbed “way faster” than they did.) Today, Wirtz is perhaps the only pro female climber who uses climbing as a vehicle for philanthropy, educating girls in Pakistan, Nepal, and Liberia.