Amity Warme Climbing Yosemite 5.13d Trad
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Photo by: Connor Warme
On Nov. 22, merely a week after freeing her fourth El Cap route – El Niño 5.13c — Amity Warme ticked the 45-metre 5.13d Book of Hate in Yosemite’s Elephant’s Graveyard. The route in the Lower Merced Canyon, located across from the Cookie Cliff and bolted by Rolland Arsons and Randy Leavitt, is an ever-steepening desperate stemming corner protected by bolts down low and a string of micro cams up high. Amity placed a ballnut at the crux, saying, “I ended up whipping on that once pretty good, but it held, so I used it on the send go also.”
“I’ve done a couple of hard stem corners in the last year, and this definitely feels like a test piece in terms of hard stemming. It’s just beautiful. It doesn’t get climbed a whole lot, but it’s such an incredible climb.”
Leavitt freed the route in 1999, which has seen only a handful of ascents in the 25 years since its gone up. Amity, who texted with the first ascensionist after her send, told me Leavitt named the route after his intense weight training regimen that he practiced in college. Beth Rodden ticked the first female ascent, and it’s since become a testpiece for the world’s best climbers, including, to name a few, Hazel Findley, Alex Honnold, and Adam Ondra.
“You’re not really memorizing sequences,” Amity says, “because there’s no real holds, you know, it’s just like, kind of trusting this intuition of how much pressure you need on each hand or foot at a time.”
Amity, from Loveland, Colorado, but who lives on the road in her van with husband Connor, is no stranger to hard single-pitch trad, with sends of 5.13d Stingray in Joshua Tree, 5.13b Cosmic Debris in Yosemite, and 5.13 Optimator in Indian Creek.
What sets Book of Hate apart from splitter cracks like Stingray is that it’s not beta-specific. You can’t merely memorize a sequence since it’s all about desperate stemming, palming, and all the while fiddling in the smallest cams on the market. “It definitely didn’t feel like I had it dialed. It’s one of those things you could climb differently every time, and probably one way will be slightly easier than another, but they might all work, you know?”
And it’s an endless battle of mental and physical endurance. “I think I was on the redpoint go for like 45 minutes,” she says, adding that since she couldn’t lower at the end due to the enormous rope stretcher at the anchor, she hoped on an old fixed line and used that to get down.
“You’re trying to milk every little rest that you get cause your calves and shoulders and everything get so pumped.”
“You start with this arching underling finger crack, and just smeary small foot edges, and then you move left with this hard-face boulder problem. Then you get into the corner and get a good rest there before starting any of the stemming. The stemming just gradually increases in difficulty the higher you go because of that arching feature. So by the time you get to the top, it’s really steep. You do a stem move up and a stem move out backward. Yeah, it’s really wild.”
Will Sharp, who recently sent the route, suggested Warme use the ballnut, which she found crucial. As for other protection on the route, Amity says, “It’s mostly bolted down low, and then the whole crux up high is on gear for the last 25 feet or something. I placed a 0.1, then a ball nut, and another 0.1. Then, there is a 0.1/0.2 offset and an offset RP. The whole crack up at the top is on gear.”
What makes Amity’s ascent even more impressive, particularly as she gave it “125 per cent effort; I was fully desperate maxed out stemming at the top,” was a plaguing finger injury that occurred at the end of October, just before her trip to Yosemite. She erred while stabbing frozen veggies with a knife and cut the tendon sheath on her finger. The injury impacted her ascent of El Niño, which required intensive crimping. But, in typical fashion, she didn’t rest after the wall, continuing with bouldering in Camp 4, then ticking the 5.12 endurance fest Crimson Cringe at Cascade Falls. After two days of work, she ticked Book of Hate.
The following day, she hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at the Cascade Falls picnic area, where everyone from pro climbers Babsi Zangerl, Siebe Vanhee, and Connor Herson to random tourists showed up. The next day, she hightailed it to Loveland to get an MRI done on her damaged finger.
“It’s still swollen and sore and hasn’t fully healed yet. So we’re moving into a bit more intensive treatment now.” We’re wishing Amity a swift recovery. Coming up, she’s traveling to Spain for sport climbing. “So, hopefully, that still works out,” she says.
Book of Hate 5.13d
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