FIFTY YEARS AGO, a Pacific Northwest rock climber had a certain look: an unshowered hippie type hitchhiking on Highway 2. Famous mountain man Fred Beckey—whose life was chronicled in the documentary Dirtbag—once posed with his thumb out an a sign that read “Will belay for food.” Today, rock climbing is an Olympic sport and the people who take part aren’t necessarily dirtbags at all. Take Audrey Sniezek, who looks very unlike that old stereotype; on a single day she might climb at the World Walls near North Bend, then sit down to lead a team meeting for Microsoft.
When Sniezek started climbing as a college student in the early 1990s, there were no nearby climbing gyms—a rocky
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