North American Cup Series: Salt Lake City 2025 - Women

Women's Lead Qualifiers, Semifinals, and Finals - August 22-24, 2025

Zoe Yi - Women's Lead Finals

This project was made possible and exists entirely because of USA climbing and their willingness to gift me with a media pass to this event. Beyond that, my mission was exclusively to capture the effort and mental state of the climbers on the wall. Sometimes that meant sacrificing the direct ability to see a face so that the positioning of the climber's body told the story, and other times the action and effort on the climber's face was the main objective. The women's side of this competition was extremely special to me for the number of amazing people I had the privilege of meeting. Among these people were Karson Hilgert (pictured left), Natalia Grossman (Olympian and eventual winner, pictured below), and Annie Sanders (not competing, but supporting Natalia and others). The women were also the first people I got to see climb, and I truly was blown away be the level of skill and execution they demonstrated from the start. These were also ideas that stuck in the back of my head and inspired my efforts for the rest of the competition.

There were also a few big lessons specifically from the women's side. Mainly, I needed to take a lot more photos in landscape, I for sure got too involved in how easy something would be to post and less involved in the actual art I was creating. That being said, there are a lot of portrait photos I took that I have genuine pride in from the women's competition.