Best known for tackling and establishing particularly difficult and spicy offwidth climbs, Pamela Shanti Pack added yet another one to the list.

In this week’s Friday Flick Pick, we join her as she achieves the first ascent of The Kill Artist (5.13, 5 pitches) in Moab, Utah—a 5-year project of hers that involves a frightening second crux pitch known as the Mental Block.

This section begins with a mantle into a 20-plus foot chimney created by a massive, 100,000-pound block seemingly levitating in the air. After the chimney, a highly committing move involving “a foot-over-the-head offwidth invert to layback off a knee-lock” leads to an exit of the chimney, back onto the face. Thereafter, the rest of pitch requires 40 feet of runout crack climbing.

Sound terrifying? That’s because it most definitely is.

I knew it would be technically really challenging, and that it would just scare the shit out of me … I mean, how couldn’t it?



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