In Sequence: Katie Lamb and the Craft of Hard Bouldering

Quietly radical in how normal it lets its subject be, and that is the highest praise I have for an athlete film. Katie Lamb climbs the hardest boulders of any woman in history while holding down a full-time engineering job, and Patagonia's film refuses to treat that as a contradiction. The center is Box Therapy, the V16 sit start at roughly 10,500 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park that she topped on September 6, 2023, the first woman to climb the grade.

This is for climbers who care about process: sequences rehearsed like choreography, the tension between profession and obsession, and the Bay Area community that shaped her. It is also for anyone tired of films that make a life around climbing look like a vow of poverty. Skip it if you want the send as a climax. The film treats Box Therapy as one point in a long pattern, and it is right to.

What works is the craft argument. Daniel Woods's problem rewards rehearsed precision over improvisation, and the film shows why a two-hour approach at altitude turns each session into an investment. Lamb skipped V15 entirely, and the film explains how that is possible without making it mystical. What it gets wrong is that thirty-one minutes of a careful person being careful can feel careful itself.

ANTIGRAV Presents: Friends in High Places is Lamb in the same range with her crew, no narration, thirty-three minutes of movement. Watch that to see her climb. Watch this to see how she thinks, and I think the thinking is the rarer thing to have on film.