The Yosemite-based climber Katie Lambert adds another classic to her tick list, sending the notoriously stout Romantic Warrior (5.12b) during her first trip to the Needles of California.

“The Needles has been on my list ever since Jim Thornburg's photos of the place glossed the pages of the climbing mags in the 1990s,” she wrote in an e-mail exchange with Rock and Ice. “Of all the routes there, Romantic Warrior just seemed like a must-do.”

Lambert has been climbing hard in the Sierras, having sent Peace (5.13d), and Golden Rose (5.13c) making a first female ascent of the latter. Both routes are located on Medlicott Dome in Tuolumne Meadows and were established by Ron Kauk.  

During her 10-day trip to the Needles, a trad area, Lambert scaled area classics such as Atlantis (5.11 +) and the Don Juan Wall (5.11b) before racking up to climb Romantic Warrior on the last day.

She and her partner, longtime hard climber and photographer Ben Ditto, left the campground at 6 a.m. to hike the 3-mile approach half in the dark. She says, “We aimed to climb the crux pitches before the sun baked us and the rock. Our timing was perfect and we only climbed the last half of the last pitch in the blaze of the September sun.”

Lambert onsighted eight of the route’s nine pitches, falling once on the 5.12a fourth pitch before sending it second go.  

Lambert, 31, calls the Sierras home though she is originally from Louisiana.

“I hail from the mud bogs and cane fields of south Louisiana,” she tells us. “There ain't much to climb down there aside from muddy levees.”  

Lambert discovered climbing when she was 15 while summering at a youth camp in Boone, N.C.

“That summer I learned how to tie a Swiss seat, smear on granite, jam my hands into cracks and pull on edges," she says. "I fell in love and vowed to continue to make a rock climber of myself.”  

Now Lambert spends her days climbing full time and gives equal time to sending hard trad lines as well as bolted tespieces and boulder problems.
“I love climbing cracks and placing gear. There is something very calculated and fulfilling about it,” she says.  “But I love face climbing and clipping bolts - it's a bit more free form somehow.”

For more about Lambert check out her blog here.

[Katie Lambert on Romantic Warrior. Photo by Ben Ditto.]

See Jim Thornburg's climbing photography here.