The Wall Dancer -- The New Yorker -- January 9, 2016

If you have time for only one "fun" article to read this afternoon while waiting for the NFL games you could hardly do better than this one in The New Yorker in "Sporting Scene," a human interest story with the title "The Wall Dancer."

It's about a Japanese teenager, born to immigrant parents living in a rent-controlled loft in downtown Manhattan, who has become "by the age of fourteen, possibly the best female rock climber ever -- a Gretzky of the granite." It's a short article -- six pages -- by The New Yorker's standards so one might even be able to read it during the 2-minute time-out commercial breaks in today's NFL wildcard games.

Here's the link. You may need a subscription. I don't know. I have a subscription to The New Yorker, one of the few weeklies -- I guess the the only weekly now that my introductory BloombergBusinessweek subscription has expired -- I still read. At least on real paper.

The link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/the-wall-dancer. The story makes up for the incredibly awful global warming essay that led off "The Talk of the Town." Amy had to search high and low to come up with that essay.

I take our 18-month-old granddaughter to the local park almost every day. There just happens to be a rock-climbing wall for toddlers at the park. Her older sisters climb fairly regularly at the local rock-climbing gym in town (Grapevine, TX). Yesterday, for the first time, I started working with the 18-month-old on the rock climbing wall. She loved it. She was a little confused about the pitons -- just kidding, no pitons. Unfortunately, no one else was with us, so I was unable to get a photograph. But I will think of a way. Maybe I will find a 5-year-old at the park to take the photograph. I will just look for a 5-year-old carrying an iPad.

Back to Ashima Shiraishi. From the article:

Sport and traditional climbs are given a degree of difficulty , according to the Yosemite Decimal System: 1 is a walk on flat land, and 5 is a vertical climb, or close to it. So actual climbs are rated 5.0 through 5.15, wth additional subcategories of "a" through "d." The hardest routes at the moment are 5.15c -- there are just two. (The system is open-ended, so it's only a matter of time before someone pioneers a 5.16a.)

In northeast Spain, last March,when Ashima was thirteen, she became the first woman, and the youngest person of either sex, ever to "send" (complete) a 5.15. It is a route called Open Your Mind Direct, which was recently upgraded from a 5.14d to a 5.15a, owing to a handhold's having broken off.

She spent just four days "projecting" the route - that is, studying and solving all the problems on it by trial and error. The men who had done it before had spent weeks, if not months.

Ashima is not allowed to compete against adults in sanctioned competitions until she turns eighteen, but when she has competed against them in other contests she has beaten them. In Arco, Italy, she was the only climber, of any age, to top out (i.e., reach the top) on the four bouldering problems -- three of them on the first try.

And, yes, it's on YouTube:


If I get the opportunity to babysit our 18-month-old granddaughter this afternoon, we're going to study Ashima's rock climb. As long as Sophia has some Chex munchies, she will be interested.