Yes, Girl Climber has an oversimplified title. But it’s also the complex, vulnerable, and deeply inspiring story that adventure-obsessed audiences deserve.
Directed by Jon Glassberg, this 83-minute documentary describes how Emily Harrington’s life and two-decade-long climbing career culminated in one audacious goal: to become the (5.13b) on El Capitan in a day. Stymied by exhaustion, hailstorms, rope burns, mental fortitude, and sometimes one single move, Harrington persists through four attempts on the route in 2019 and 2020.
Glassberg, owner of the production company and the man behind dozens of shorter climbing documentaries, says that he didn’t want his first feature-length film to feel like a beta video. With nearly ten years of footage, Glassberg is able to expand beyond the one or two side plots that typically decorate shorter adventure documentaries.
“This is a holistic look at an incredible woman’s life in the adventure world,” he says, “from the top of Mount Everest to crazy expeditions in Myanmar and ultimately climbing Golden Gate in a day.”
Harrington’s Dream Team
Braided within Harrington’s narrative are three pivotal, developing relationships: her mentor-mentee relationship with , who passed away in 2022; her friendship with ; and her relationship with her husband, high-altitude mountain guide . All three support her during her attempts on Golden Gate through constant belays (Honnold), gentle pep talks (Ballinger), or healthy debriefs (Nelson).
It’s through these close relationships that we learn so much more about Harrington than we would through just climbing footage and interviews. When Harrington falls on the Freeblast in November 2019, we experience it through Honnold, whose normal expression breaks into wide-eyed alarm.
Something we haven’t seen in other feature-length climbing films is the consistency of a female mentorship like the one Nelson extended toward Harrington. After every one of Harrington’s self-described failures, their text conversations fade into the screen. It’s almost like we’re living Harrington’s recollection through what she shares with Nelson.
The most powerful moment in the film comes when Harrington falls on her fourth attempt, smashes her un-helmeted head against the granite, and all but gives up. She sobs openly, looking up at the summit, and gathers her grief into one brave statement: “Someday, I’ll do it.” Ballinger, however, is unfazed. He corrects her gently: “You’re going to do it today.”
A Unique Addition to the El Cap Canon
With references to , a cameo from , and, of course, Honnold, Girl Climber adds Harrington’s story to the existing El Cap cinematic universe for mainstream audiences, which primarily consists of Valley Uprising, The Dawn Wall, and Free Solo. The film’s goal of building upon this oeuvre echoes Harrington’s: to join the elite group of heroes who have sent Golden Gate in a day. At the time, that list only included Honnold, Caldwell, and the late Brad Gobright.
On each attempt, Glassberg captures Harrington’s failures, and the resurrection of her self-confidence, with unbelievable clarity. One of the most inspiring parts of the film, however, is rather mundane: watching Harrington’s discussions with Honnold about gear and supplies. Despite Honnold’s good-natured sandbagging, Harrington confidently prioritizes her own needs and comfort on the wall.
“I think it would be tough to make this more comfortable,” he jokes before her final go, looking at everything she planned to haul up the wall.
“Yup, that’s the whole point,” she replies, unbothered.
In another scene, she insists on bringing her extra chalk and breakable ice packs, even though Honnold thinks it’s too much. She’s sitting across from the most famous climber in the world, and instead of trying to impress him or apologizing for needing extra gear, she’s reminding him to bring up her extra things. Her goals and comfort matter so much more than his assumptions. And that’s something every female climber truly needs to see.
Girl Climber does have some misses. For example, the movie’s title suggests an arc about sexism that the plot doesn’t necessarily deliver. But ultimately, the authentic and vivid storytelling in Girl Climber creates several layers of inspiration for both a climbing and mainstream audience.
The Emotional Tension Stays High
From the start, Girl Climber does an incredible job building the stakes. Five minutes in, a montage of Harrington winning five National Championships and climbing Everest condenses into one powerful belief: “I’m really proud of my career so far, but if you want to call yourself a successful all-around climber, you’ve got to be up on El Cap.”
As a film, Girl Climber skillfully avoids several common climbing film pitfalls. While the plot inherently involves Honnold, Glassberg avoids overly relying on him for narration. Instead, the film deftly lets him provide side-character comic relief as Harrington bangs her head against the wall—sometimes, literally—as she rehearses the route. Girl Climber also does not shy away from vulnerability; Harrington grieves her failures openly and carries no air of defensiveness or overconfidence. And even though we know she eventually sends, the climbing scenes are full of thick, unpredictable tension. At each sequence, we’re still looking for clues to whether she’s going to send right now. If she holds on through a crux sequence, the music crescendoes; if she falls, the music halts, like a dream popped.
A Closer Look at the Title
While Girl Climber captures mainstream audiences with a plain and to-the-point description, its title hints at an insult that is never actually delivered. Harrington alludes to the mansplaining she experienced during her project, but doesn’t elaborate much beyond slightly condescending comments. Nor does this theme rise to the fore. Glassberg had good intentions and sharp marketing instincts, but having Girl Climber as the title overexaggerates the role of sexism in the film.
One could argue that tiles are always reductive, especially short ones. But when a brief label embodies the heart of the story, such as Free Solo, The Dawn Wall, and The Alpinist, the glory of the accomplishment casts itself back onto the subject. Honnold’s free solo of Free Rider, Caldwell’s Dawn Wall, and Marc-André Leclerc’s bold alpinism each defined their legacies; their movies are appropriately named. But Girl Climber doesn’t add anything to Harrington’s legacy besides the most straightforward biographical info. It’s trivializing; it might as well be about a five-year-old in the gym instead of a world-class professional athlete in her thirties.
The movie’s title and its asterisked subtitle, “Stronger Than Stereotypes,” remind us that female climbers face stereotypes. However, the film’s only example of this is the media’s treatment of Harrington as a “damsel in distress” after her viral accident in 2019. The portrayal in the media of Harrington as reckless and lucky to be saved by Honnold is most definitely a combination of sexism and the post-Free Solo deification of Honnold. But it also represents a misunderstanding outside the climbing world of just how risky Harrington’s attempt really was. Overall, the flash of sexism in Girl Climber fades in comparison to the film’s real, persistent antagonists: Harrington’s own expectations, gravity, slippery granite, and time.
For her part, Harrington says that she did not choose the title. “I actually really hated it at first, and kind of laid into Jon about it when he told me,” she says. “I was like, ‘What is this? It’s diminishing. I don’t like it at all.’” But after talking it out, Glassberg convinced her that the movie would turn the demeaning phrase “girl climber” into something that means strength.
“The movie was pitched many, many times as flipping the script on the male-dominated climbing scene,” says Glassberg. “We really wanted to draw attention to the fact that Emily’s doing this remarkable achievement that very, very few people are capable of doing, and that she has this extra layer of stuff that she has to face because she’s a woman.” To Glassberg, the extra burdens Harrington faces include her ticking biological clock and the additional scrutiny she faces as a woman on El Cap. “We just kind of saw it from the way the media latched onto things, with the ‘damsel in distress’ idea,” he says.
I don’t doubt that Harrington, like all female climbers, has faced misogyny and stereotypes in climbing. However, as a female climber, I still cringe to see such an accomplished athlete’s life story summed up in this reductive phrase, especially a hypothetical one. If anyone has ever lobbed “girl climber” as an insult at her, the film does not show it.
Harrington confirms that I’m not alone in feeling this way. “I asked a lot of climbers what they thought of the title, and they had the same reaction as I did,” she says. “Again, this is the mainstream versus the core. I asked a lot of people who didn’t climb, and they were just like, “Oh my god, that title’s amazing, I love it so much.”
For that reason alone, even if a core audience of female climbers dislikes the name, calling the film Girl Climber was a smart business decision, and one that’s likely to pay off with millions of eyes on Harrington’s plot. In the long run, if an unlikeable movie name to a niche audience is the trade-off for much bigger audiences to experience the story and know that women, too, climb El Cap, I understand why Glassberg would take it.
Want to catch a screening of Girl Climber? The film is screening at the ԹϺ Festival in Denver, Colorado, May 31–June 1, followed by a Q&A with Emily Harrington and Jon Glassberg. Tickets available .
Catching Up with Harrington
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Climbing: What’s it like to watch this movie four and a half years after freeing Golden Gate in a day?
Emily Harrington: I didn’t anticipate it would take this long to create the film. I’ve learned a lot in the process about how hard it is to create a documentary film, and honestly, it was really scary. I was pretty nervous to watch it. You’re your biggest critic, and I can barely listen to my voice message machine because I don’t like the sound of my voice. It was really stressful, actually, to watch it and see the story unfold. As human beings, we evolve and we change so much. In the last five years. I’ve had a child and been through that transition, so it’s just an interesting experience to see who you were and what you cared about.
Climbing: When you announced the movie on Instagram, you wrote that your quiet moments of struggle, fear, and self-doubt gave way to stories of heroism and sensationalism that only the mainstream media could drum up, and none of it felt like your true experience. What aspects of your story do you feel were twisted into heroism and sensationalism?
Harrington: It was just the sensationalism of climbing up on El Cap. People think it’s this crazy, death-defying, adrenaline-fueled endeavor, and it’s just not that for me. I don’t think it’s like that for most climbers. It was putting someone on this superhero-level pedestal and making them seem like they’re not a human, and it made me feel a little bit sensitive about it all. It happens with any achievement, when you have the greatest, the hardest, the first—all of these things.
Climbing: When Girl Climber was in production, did you have any other movies in mind that you hoped it would be similar to?
Harrington: I hoped it would be more of a female story on El Capitan, a little bit similar to The Dawn Wall, because they’re both free climbing. They’re both the kind of niche achievements that the mainstream doesn’t totally understand, but I thought that The Dawn Wall did a really good job of explaining what it was that those guys did, and how much effort and commitment it took. I just wanted it to be an inspiring female story on El Cap, because women also climb up there. And we don’t have that many female climbing stories, honestly.
Climbing: Jon told us that he saw a renewed psych in you during COVID. How did your thinking about Golden Gate change throughout early 2020?
Harrington: There were multiple reasons. I had this bad fall, and I knew immediately that I could go back. I remember Jon being like, “No pressure, you could be done with this project.” And I was like, “No, I know that I made a mistake.” It wasn’t this random occurrence that I can’t control. I felt really grateful that I was okay and I walked away from it. It took a while to mentally recover, but I immediately knew that I could go back and I could be better. Then COVID was helpful, because a lot of us during COVID felt a little bit aimless. This was this thing that I could hold onto and be like, “When Yosemite opens back up again, I’m gonna go back.” Right now, I have nothing better to do than really think about how to prepare for it and how to train for it. Thankfully, climbing is such a complicated sport. You can really creatively train for rock climbing in your house.
Climbing: What kind of advice or support does the sports therapist give you? And do you talk with them through every major project, or was this specific to Golden Gate?
Harrington: I work with a sports therapist, like a mental health coach, and I have since 2019. It’s been wildly helpful for me. It wasn’t just for that project; I still talk to her probably twice a month. It’s really about leading into your feelings, validating your feelings, and understanding that body-mind connection. A lot of athletes can neglect that mental side. In the past few years, I’ve really learned how important it is to train that side of things. It’s work. It’s training, and you have to think about it like that. It is something that we have to train, like a muscle, and it is very intimately connected to our physical bodies and our performance, as well as, our well-being and happiness. So, that’s another reason why I think it’s super important. But a lot of what we do is about how I’m feeling—fear, anxiety, failure, and motivation. It’s just a lot of letting those things come up and not judging them, but being really aware of them, and of how to work through them and move forward.
Climbing: What advice do you have for people who want to free climb El Cap in a day?
Watch the video below for Harrington’s response.
Climbing: What’s your current focus in climbing right now?
Harrington: All of it. I trained really hard this year, probably harder than I have since Golden Gate. I wanted to climb 14c, and I went to Spain with that specific objective. I fell short of my goal, but it’s okay. I ended up climbing a 14a that I was really excited about and really proud of. It was kind of my first big thing away, with Adrian gone, and bringing our son with us, and having the chaos of single parenting and trying to do a big trip. I succeeded in that, and it made me more motivated and excited to keep going and see what else I can do. Now that I have a kid, I’m a little more deliberate and focused. I actually think that’s helped me a lot in my climbing, so I’d love to climb harder sport routes. I’d love to climb my hardest grade. I think that’d be really cool.