Dyslexic Climber Scales 2,000-Foot Rock Face

After climbing for eight days, Ellie Hawkins pulled herself over the top of a 2,000-foot rock face in Yosemite on Sunday afternoon and named the new route “Dyslexia” after her learning disability. Her husband, Bruce, had hiked in to meet her at the finish.

“It ended up being a very difficult climb,” Hawkins, of Bear Valley, said from Yosemite, where she was resting this week. “I just took my time, took things slowly.”

Hawkins, 35, has become one of the top female climbers in the world despite a severe case of dyslexia, which can make it tricky for her to tie knots and to manipulate the hardware required for a major ascent. In 15 years of climbing, she has developed methods for overcoming perceptual difficulties. (Her efforts were detailed in last Thursday’s View section.)

Those methods were tested on this solo first ascent, which Hawkins made in part to increase public awareness of dyslexia. Hawkins graded the climb at 8.4, saying that there were many spots where the splintery rock was barely sufficient to support her body weight (an 8.5 climb is the most difficult).

During the last two days of the climb, fatigue aggravated Hawkins’ dyslexia. She said she began to see in mirror images, and her shoelaces and her rope momentarily disappeared from her field of vision.

Hawkins said she worked in such deep concentration to combat the dyslexia that at one point she wasn’t aware that it had been raining for several hours. Hawkins said it will be a while before she is able to relax her mental hold on the route. Two days after she crested the rock wall, she said: “I still have my mind clenched on that mountain.”