The Current - Meet the woman who climbed this enormous sheer cliff and made history

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Sasha DiGiulian spent nine days trapped on a ledge in a storm before becoming the first female climber to make up the famously difficult Platinum route on El Capitán.

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Watch free on CBC Gem. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Picture an almost sheer rock face, 3,000 feet high, twice the height of the Empire State Building, three times the height of the Eiffel Tower. This rock face is called El Capitan. It is in Yosemite National Park in California. It's a beast. Now imagine yourself clinging to the side of that rock face, nothing but rope tied around you to keep you from falling to your death.

Sasha de Julian did that for weeks while making her way to the top. And as she approached the summit, she had to ride out a storm while perched on a ledge in a tent for nine days. After all of that, she can say she's the first woman to make it up, the ultra-challenging platinum route up El Capitan. She joins us from Colorado. Sasha, good morning. Hey, Matt. How's it going? For people who have never seen El Capitan.

I mean, this is like the mecca of climbing in many ways. Describe what it looks like when you're standing at the bottom and you look up. Absolutely. Al-Cabotan is probably one of, if not the most iconic rock formations in the world. And what's really neat about it is you can stand in the meadow, which is often heavily populated by tourists, and look up at this just towering, sheer granite monolith. And it's intimidating. It's impressive. and it's sheer. When you were getting ready to go up, I mean, what was the feeling in the pit of your stomach?

Were you excited? Were you nervous? Were you terrified? Were you a mix of all these things? I was very nervous. I was prepared for the unknown. I had worked on this climb for the last three years of my career. And I didn't know how it was going to go.

I had tried about 25% of the route in practice, but there's about 75% of terrain I hadn't actually been on, and I knew that the route was also very sustained, which in rock climbing terms means that there's a lot of very difficult climbing throughout the entirety of the route. It really has a little easy terrain. So I knew every portion of it was going to be a challenge. But that's why you wanted to do it, right? Yeah, exactly. I think as climbers and as humans in general, we like to find out where we can push our limits

and challenges are engaging and they bring on those feelings of nerves and excitement and that joy when you achieve them. So describe, I want to come back to that, but describe what it's like to do this. I've seen videos of you doing the climb. You have a helmet on, you have a safety rope, but you're using your feet and your bare fingers to get up this cliff. And somebody said, every pitch is like a knife fight. Describe what it's like when you're hanging off the side of this rock face.

Yeah, L-CAP is known for being very, I guess it's very technical terrain. And so for the first about 22 pitches of this route, it's what's called slab climbing. So you're solely relying on the equivalent of like spoons that are very, arduous to climb and hard to find protrusions in the wall. And so you're really using core strength and stepping on at best, like credit card size protrusions coming out of the wall. And a lot of just tension across your body. You have a rope and gear for if you fall. So free climbing to be differentiated from free soloing is through the use of only your hands and feet. but in the case of falling, which I do a lot, you're not falling to your death.

However, there's a lot of exposure. You're often looking down at this just blankness of like thousands of feet below you and clinging on to hardly anything at all. Then after the first initial kind of skirt of L cap, the wall kicks back and is quite steep. and so you're all of a sudden using some bigger muscles and also, you know, you're higher up on the wall. And so the exposure is gained. You are just fighting. Yeah, every pitch. It's you're using your hands and your feet and your abs in order to be able to make these sequences to solve this overall jigsaw puzzle. Is that what it's like? I mean, there's parts of it where you're almost

upside down it looks like. The pitch is such that it feels like you're just going to fall. But is that what it's like that you're trying to solve bits of a puzzle? It is. So there are pitches on this climb where you are upside down. And what's crazy is you're 200 feet up looking at the meadow, which we talked about tourists standing in the meadow, looking up at El Cap. And those people are like little ants but when I'm climbing I'm so tubularly focused on what's right in front of me and I try and think of every single pitch as its own unique challenge and so as I was progressing I wasn't thinking about the ground nor I was thinking about the summit I was thinking about get through this next challenge and the knife fight comes from you're using just your raw hands which are getting a beating

time and time again through just the abrasive nature of the rock and often my fingertips would have just these splits coming out of them so they're kind of bleeding throughout the entire climb and there were some points where I mean they're bleeding so much that you couldn't go specific ways right that you had to figure out kind of an alternate route because your hands were bleeding so much yeah that that happened I had a sequence in mind And then my hand was honestly like just gushing too much to use a specific hold. So I had to kind of figure out a way to use a more left hand dominant hold because my right hand was the one that was gushing out the most.

You must be crazy strong. You know, I think that I'm an athlete, so I work towards that. But the answer I think it sounds like yes. I do a lot of alternative training as well, which is like hand strengthening for my grip and then, you know, obviously high volume climbing as well as the quote unquote under the hood work, like lifting and cardio for stamina and power. Do you ever sneak a look down? I mean, I know that you're focused on the moment, but do you ever end of the corner of your eye?

Wow, I'm really, because there's a point in one of the videos where it, it, it's, pulls back and you just look like a little dot on the face of this rock yeah i i look down all the time because that's just your day um every day you're dealing with you know exposure and you're outside of your comfort zone and i think that your comfort zone gets expanded through the initial charting through of the fear that I do feel when I get started on a climb, but it becomes a new reality. And so I'm looking everywhere. I'm also sleeping suspended thousands of feet up.

So when I wake up, I look down. What is that like? I was going to ask you, when you're sleeping on the side of the, how does that work for people who've never seen this before? So you're suspended in what's called a portal edge, which is a four foot by six foot. elevated tent, which was great for everything but the storm, though it held up, but you have

what's called a rain shelter. You have it fixed on a master point, which is above you. Normally, you have like two to three master points, which are hung by rated equipment so that it can handle your body and an additional force that's put onto it. What does it like to wake up in the middle of the night suspended from the side of a rock face? It's not my first rodeo, so to speak. So I'm pretty used to it, though the views never get old. You get some of the most incredible sunrises and sunsets, and you're on this little tiny island. Like, it's a tiny space, and everything has consequences.

You can't drop things. you're always going to be sleeping in a harness. You have limited, you know, resources. You're not getting running water up there. We use wag bags to go to the bathroom, essentially, and everything is very calculated. We were surviving off of freeze-dried food, as well as bars.

I happen to have a nutrition bar company called SendBars. And so that was great to do some real live product testing. And then we've got Jet Boyle. So that essentially is what heats the water and then we pour it in to rehydrate our food. So very, back to basics. If you want to hear daily news that doesn't hurt your soul and might even be good for your soul, check out as it happens. I'm Chris Howdy.

And I'm Neil Kokesal. Every day we reach people at the center of the most extraordinary stories, like the doctor who restored a patient's eyesight with a tooth. Or a musician in an orchestra that plays instruments made out of vegetables. Take the scenic route through the day's news with As It Happens, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. So the plot twist, and you hinted at this, was you'd hope to be up there maybe for a couple of weeks. This took 23 days because of this storm. And it wasn't just a passing storm.

I mean, the storm stuck around for days and days and days. There's snow. There's freezing rain. Tell me about what it was like as you sit on the cliff trying to ride out a storm. The storm was certainly the plot. That storm wasn't actually on the forecast when we left the ground. And by our day 10, that's when the storm hit. And initially, it was two or three days of rain. Then the snow came. Then our portal edge was encased in ice. And then there was really bad thunder and lightning where it felt very, very close, which was a bit frightening. The winds were high, which was probably my least favorite aspect of that. it got cold. We didn't know how long we would be in the storm because it kept extending out. So we didn't know if we could get, we didn't know when we could get a resupply and we were

getting to the end of our food, which thankfully by the time the storm cleared, we could get a resupply. And so that was the biggest calculation, was just figuring out, are we safe? Can we stay dry? I spent a lot of the time in the storm trying to stay as dry as possible because half of my portal edge was getting very wet. I would take my clothes and mop up the wetness and then wrap my clothes around like my bare leg, for instance, so that my body heat could absorb that wetness. There's just not a lot of reprieve around getting warmer. So once you get wet in a kind of high stakes environment, that'd be quite consequential. Honestly, it was pretty grueling because it was so long and you don't have a lot of space like stretch out or you're not just like sitting on your phone because I had one

external phone battery pack, which was solar charged and there was no sun. So I was sometimes like toggling off airplane mode when I got like to the peak of boredom. So there is a lot of, you know, sitting there waiting, just trying to get through. Did you think about quitting? You know, it's interesting as I was surrounded by my climbing partner was looking at windows where we could bail. And I didn't really ever contemplate that I would want to quit because this was something that I had tried for three years at this point.

and, like, really been working on. And we were at the 32nd of 39 pitches, 400 feet from the summit. And I just knew that in relativity, persevering through nine horrible days would, and this is my math in my mind, would be less time than having to come back and wait another year to get back out there and try it. And I was so proud of how I was climbing. and the achievements that we had made thus far on the wall. And I knew that if we could stay safe

and if we could weather the storm, then I could hold fast and just wanted the opportunity to try. There was so much uncertainty during the storm because the rock gets wet. And when it gets so wet, there was actually, for this season, it was the most rain since 1973 in Yosemite. and I didn't know the state of the climbing terrain for after the storm, but I really just wanted to see.

And so I didn't want to quit. I was never in this mindset of like this is so bad. I'm just going to go down. I think that I just wanted the opportunity to keep fighting. Was it also, I mean, you wrote about this after, about people who had trolls who'd been attacking you over the course of your career

people who would question you they would question your technique they would comment on your body they would as you say undercut your achievements was part of it to put you know the sword to those people to say listen I'm going to do this and I'm not going to give you any oxygen

for the things the terrible things you're saying about me I would say that I did it for myself like not for the trolls I think that haters on the internet can always be some fuel to keep your fire alive and staying focused on yourself and what you can achieve. But I certainly wanted to do this climb more for the positive people in my life, like everyone who had been a part of my preparation for it from like even down to my family and my friends had been there to support me to my coaches, you know,

and people that I really respect. I think that as a female athlete and probably as male as well, usually criticism from people who never know you and often want to throw swords where they may not have the grounds to fight. And it's difficult and challenging because the words can be very hurtful. and what I've really been working on is focusing on just the belief circle and respect around me and believing in my own climbs and showing up for more of the positive side than than doing it for the haters, so to speak.

So the storm passes, you get out back on the rock and you get to the top. I can't say what you said when you got to the top because we're a family radio program, but it's we effing did it. describe that moment when you when you stood on the top I crested over the top peak of the 3,000 foot climb and I had these like tears kind of well up in my eyes and through the last 23 days I had really worked to suppress any emotion because you want to stay really tubulately focused on what you're doing and not let any emotion kind of creep in And then I took one step on the summit and they started laughing because I hadn't walked in 23 days.

And I just thought about like what an odyssey, like what an epic adventure that was formative and challenging. And there was this dream that I had had to do this route that never felt like a reality. and all of a sudden it was complete. And I didn't know what to think. I was like, this is bizarre, honestly. I was going to ask you why you would do this, given how hard it was and the beating that your body took and what you went through.

But you sort of answer it in, you posted up some reflections after you were done. And one of the things you said was, I'm here for the next little girl, the one who's told she doesn't look the part, who's dismissed as a fraud, but keeps moving toward the life she dreams of. Tell me about that and what that means to you.

People will look at you and that next little girl will say, she did it. I can do it. You know, in my career, I've been consistently told I don't look like a climber and gone through some really tough, dark times. And I've gone through massive injuries as well. And what I've always felt about that phrase is what does that even mean? you know, because here I am with the accolades that I have in my competition after a climbing career. And I am that part. And when I started climbing, I didn't have many women that I looked up to and I said, given her path, that's the path that I want to follow. And that also goes back to

taking climbing more into a mainstream audience and getting criticized for signing corporate sponsorship deals and making a living out of this sport, embracing being on social media and being vulnerable in a sport that is often kind of this, like, sport where you're not vulnerable at all. And I just hope that this story serves as this example of you don't know what you're capable of until you go out there and you try. and even if your dreams make you anxious and feel unnerved or you don't feel like you can actually achieve that dream, I felt that about this route and I went out there and I tried and I was able to do it and I hope that that serves as some sort of inspiration for the next young

girl who's like me who doesn't know what she's capable of but feels fired up to get out there and to give it her best. That's awesome. Have you thought about what you want to do next? I right now am home. I am actually just giving myself the space for the next couple weeks to enjoy the holidays and think about it because something that I've learned through my career in climbing, and I've been climbing for 26 years at this point, is if I don't give myself the space to reflect and to really process everything that I go through on specific expeditions, and I just hop back on the saddle, then I don't get as many lessons from it as if I really take the time and think about what it is that I'm most passionate about next. But I am back in the

driver's seat in my office of my company. So I've got a bit of work to do in the meantime to catch up there. Somebody I was reading about you and somebody called you a legend, which is pretty fitting, giving what you have pulled off. It's really quite something. And what you went through in the way that you describe it is wild. Congratulations. And thanks for telling us this story. Well, I super appreciate you telling this story. So thank you for the time this morning. Sasha, take care. Bye-bye. You too. Sasha DeJulian is a history-making rock climber. You can see some of those videos we were talking about on her Instagram feed.

You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.