There’s forty feet of ice towering above Catalina Shirley.
The Lafayette resident is moments away from racing her opponent to the top of the crystalized vertical wall in a thrilling display of speed and strength. The winner will be decided in the following seconds in this high-octane competition with little room for error and enough tension to melt a glacier.
She’s in the gold medal match at the first stop of the 2025 Ice Climbing World Tour in Cheongsong, South Korea, an annual series of competitions in different cities, called World Cups, that test elite ice climbers’ endurance, agility, power and nerves in two disciplines: lead and speed.
One slip-up in this speed contest could cost Shirley, 22, one of the biggest races in her career. Looking back on the moment in January, Shirley was as cool as the frosted face ahead of her.
“I was just trying to center myself and focus on climbing the best I could without worrying about the other person,” she said. “And just trusting that would be enough.”
Shirley’s win was her first at a World Cup and only the second for a U.S. athlete. She’s continued to terrorize the podiums since as she’s finished in the top five in every World Cup competition so far — a rare accomplishment that’s turning heads in international competitive ice climbing.
Shirley will aim to continue her success when Longmont’s own Longmont Climbing Collective (LCC) hosts the event Feb. 22-23, marking the first time in six years the World Cup will be in the U.S. Usually dominated by athletes from other countries in international cities, Shirley’s rise coinciding with Longmont hosting has folks eager to grow the sport domestically, like LCC owner Bryan Hylenski, excited for ice climbing’s future.
“Our hope is that we are one of the five or six World Cups hosted every year,” he said, “and the U.S. will now have one permanently.”
Climbing with sharp things
The Ice Climbing World Tour is made up of a series of five World Cups over three months. This year’s stops are in South Korea, Switzerland, France, U.S. and Canada. It’s a relatively new sport: the Tour in its current format organized by the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA) started in the early 2000s.
Athletes compete on specially designed routes with ice axes and crampons. Speed walls are sheer ice walls 40 to 50 feet tall. The fastest time wins. Lead climbing is performed on technical artificial routes with features like volumes or overhanging sections that require a high level of strategy and skill. Competitors climb as high as they can within an allotted time. While there are winners of individual events, points are also accumulated throughout the Tour to determine an overall champion.
Only one other American has done what Shirley did: Kendra Stritch, who was the first U.S. competitor to top the podium at the Ice Climbing World Tour, a full decade before Shirley.
Stritch, who started climbing in 2012, has watched the sport grow over the years, helping create an official USA Ice Climbing Team in 2016 and watching more athletes and spectators gravitate toward it. Since rock climbing made its Olympic debut in 2020, the UIAA and others have been trying to get ice climbing in the 2030 Winter Games as a full Olympic sport for the first time.
Stritch said it’s rewarding to be part of that evolution.
“It’s just validating to me that we have a really cool sport,” said Stritch, who will also be competing in Longmont. “[Competitive ice climbing] is a unique movement from any other form of climbing. It's generally fun to watch too, right, like there’s overhanging features, swinging and jumping and stuff. Always with sharp things in your hands and on your feet.”
LCC’s Hylenski lived in South Korea for nine years and competed in some of the first World Cups. While he agreed it is growing domestically, he said the popularity of competitive ice climbing in the U.S. lags behind other countries in part because other governments help build their competition facilities and pay for travel.
“The U.S. hasn’t been able to compete because nobody can afford the cost to put on an event of this size,” he said, explaining that’s why LCC elected to host a World Cup for the next five years.
That means athletes from other countries like South Korea, Switzerland and Mongolia consistently dominate the field. But now that Longmont plans to host World Cups for the foreseeable future, Hylenski thinks ice climbing will build even more popularity and continue attracting more successful athletes and fans.
Shirley is drawn to ice climbing because of the required problem solving and route reading. The physical requirements of the sport are a given, she said, but the mental component sets people apart.
“Great competitors are strong in the body and in the mind and can overcome challenges a little bit better,” she said. “And they kind of realize where their strength comes from and climb no matter the circumstances.”
Shirley’s trained her mental game since she was a kid hanging around the Ouray Ice Park, not far from where she grew up in Durango. Now she goes into every competition “not expecting anything” — something that’s helped her focus on climbing for herself and having fun.
It’s been paying off. In 2024, she became the first American to podium in a World Cup lead competition, then she did it again this year with a bronze lead medal in France. Along with her gold speed medal in Korea, she also won a silver speed medal in Switzerland this year.
With two World Cups yet to go, Stritch said Shirley’s already having a standout season.
“She doesn't just get a medal: She's consistently getting onto the podium in two disciplines in each of the World Cups,” said Stritch, explaining that it’s more common for athletes to specialize in one of the two. “It's a really impressive accomplishment to consistently perform like that, multiple weeks in a row; not just physically, but also mentally.”
Since Shirley graduated from college in December, this is the first time she has time to compete in all stops of the World Tour. If she keeps up her perpetual podium pace, she could accumulate enough points between World Cups to have a chance at winning the overall World Tour — something no American has done.
‘A ballet on the wall’
She might live in Boulder County and train in local gyms, but Shirley didn’t expect a homecoming in her backyard.
“I was honestly pretty shocked at first that it was going to be here,” she said. “I’ve never gotten to sleep in my own bed at home before a World Cup.”
It was always Hylenski’s plan to support dry tooling and ice climbing by opening the LCC.
“I just want so much for Longmont,” said Hylenski, who said he built the facility to host a World Cup. “I love this city, and I think it would be great to make this event something we do for a long time.”
The Longmont World Cup will be different from most in that it’s based in a growing city along a sprawling metropolitan area — other competitions are mostly in rural, harder-to-reach towns. When it comes to what spectators can expect to see, Hylenski described movements of ice climbing as “a ballet on the wall.”
“Athletes will place their axes on holds, then they’ll leave the wall and go out on fully suspended, free hanging blocks and shapes that they’ll have to navigate to the top of the climb,” he said. “The difficulty portion — that’s the beautiful part to watch.”
Meanwhile, the world is watching Shirley redefine what it means to be a competitive ice climber in the U.S. But she’ll keep her gaze where it counts — between her and the wall in front of her.
“One competition is not who you are as a climber, and instead it’s just important to try your best and have fun,” Shirley said. “So I’m not too nervous. I’m really just excited.”