Katie Lamb: Becoming the First Woman to Do V16—Twice

In March 2025, the Bay Area–based climber Katie Lamb snagged the fourth ascent of Yosemite's most difficult boulder problem, The Dark Side, an unrelenting V16 on small crimps and dire slopers on the Thriller Boulder in Camp 4. In so doing, she became the first woman to climb the grade, but there's a catch: Back in summer 2023, Lamb had already done a V16, a problem called Box Therapy in Colorado—it's just that it was later downgraded to V15. In a complex and nuanced discussion on the state of the art in bouldering—and the evolution of the grading scales we use to classify these ascents—host Jim Aikman talks with Lamb about the passion, hard work, and tactics that went into her ticks. And he interviews The Dark Side's first ascensionist Carlo Traversi, a driving force behind modern Yosemite bouldering, as well as American Climbing Journal Editor Matt Samet, who worked with Lamb on her feature in the upcoming journal, "A Walk on the Dark Side."