Katie McKinstry Stylos Just Broke the Glass Ceiling for Women in Drytooling

There are a few reasons you may never have heard the name Katie McKinstry Stylos. For one thing, she’s relatively new to climbing, period; she didn’t touch rock until 2015 and didn’t start projecting hard routes until 2021. For another, her discipline of choice, sport drytooling, is incredibly niche. But within that niche—an incredibly powerful, gymnastic, and male-dominated sub-discipline of mixed climbing—she’s quickly become a tour de force, flying through the grades faster (and further) than any woman has before.