5280 Magazine

Rock Stars

One sunny day not long ago, Maria Fernanda Rodriguez Galvan exhaled audibly, braced her left leg against the rock wall she was perched on, and stretched her left arm to grasp a knobby hold. She clipped into an anchor—and screamed. The primal sound echoed through the canyons of Mexico’s El Salto climbing area as she pounded the cliff with her palm and then let go, howling as she swayed in midair in her harness. She’d just “sent”—or successfully completed without falling, in climber-speak—a route that had been thwarting her for a week. The moment was about more than an athletic achievement, though. It was the Mexican climber’s triumphant return to the rock after a multiyear hiatus, and it had all been captured on camera.

Rodriguez Galvan’s jubilation would not have been memorialized for the world to see had documentary filmmakers shooting the climbing movie , due out next

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