On a 1961 expedition to Makulu, Edmund Hillary forbade Irene Beardsley to step foot on the mountain, despite her impressive mountaineering resume, including ascents in the Tetons and Peru. But Irene was hungry for summits, regardless of being relegated to the “wives camp.” She knew a woman’s place was on top. This hunger would drive her to be part of the first American, and all-women’s, expedition to summit Annapurna I.

Bouldering World Champion Natalia Grossman is one of this year's winners of the Robert Hicks Bates Award, an award we celebrate at our upcoming Annual Benefit Gala. We decided to sit down with Natalia and talk competition, community, and trying hard, to get more of a picture of how she thinks as a competitor that has immense potential to keep taking the climbing world by storm.

Adrien Costa never imagined he would be looking up at El Cap, ready to put in his own attempt on the wall, with one leg of flesh and bone and the other made of metal and hydraulics. In this episode, the AAC interviews Adrien about his journey from pro cyclist to daring adaptive climber with a taste for soloing, and digs into the details of his proud rope solo ascent of El Cap funded by an AAC Catalyst grant.

Graham Zimmerman is an alpinist and climate advocate–scaling the highest mountains in the world and energizing climbers around taking action to fight climate change. Jill Pelto is a climate artist whose aesthetic tactics of combining climate data with artistic expression is striking and thought-provoking. In this discussion, the AAC dives in with Graham and Jill about communicating the intricacies of climate change, climate impacts they’ve personally witnessed in the mountains, what motivates them to advocate, and why it matters to climbers so damn much.