Self Reflection: Colette Mcinerney
Four limbs kicked dirt in a fast six-step while Daft Punk’s “Lose Yourself to Dance” echoed off the limestone walls of the Winchester Cave in the crusher’s paradise of Rifle, Colorado. Thirty-two-year-old Colette McInerney crescendoed her break-dancing routine by spinning and lifting into a handstand. Suddenly, she snapped to her feet, freezing with her hand forward while a cloud of dust rose around her petite 5’5” frame. It was the summer of 2013, and between sending 5.13 sport routes, photographing ultra runners, globetrotting from crag to crag, and producing climbing videos, Colette’s life was characterized by one thing: constant motion.
Colette hanging out at Roca De Misa in Cornudella Spain
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, to British parents, Colette lived with her mother and older sister while her musician father toured throughout the states and Europe with various folk singers. “We had a great relationship considering he was away a lot, and I didn’t live with him,” Colette said. “My parents divorced when I was very young, but they always had a friendly relationship and have always been supportive and caring.” Spending a lot of time in daycare and at friends’ houses while her mom worked in the restaurant industry, Colette recalls having a lot of freedom. “I did whatever I wanted,” she said. She learned to be independent from a young age, and her desire for freedom only intensified when she traveled as a kid, spending three months outside of London while her mom took care of her grandmother.
“When she got a car, I don’t think I ever saw her,” Colette’s mother Mary Orcutt said. “She would just drive and drive and drive. Seeing the itinerant life of her father, Colette felt restless in Nashville, so at 18, she moved to New York City to attend Fordham University, where she received a degree in communications with a focus on journalism. “I always loved reading and came from a family of book lovers, so somewhere in there I think always wanted to be a writer. But I never had a good foundation for it,” said Colette. She worked at a student news channel and WFUV, a public radio station, producing news stories. “I never thought I had an artistic bone in my body until I started dabbling with photos almost five years later.”
Colette working Powis (V6) at the Happy Boulders in Bishop, Ca
Having climbed a little in the local Nashville gym, Colette’s first outdoor climbing experience happened during the summer break of her freshman year when she was home from college. Her mom had recently remarried, and her new husband, Tom, and his daughter, Lindsay, climbed occasionally. The foursome went climbing at nearby Foster Falls, and Lindsay, the rope gun, hung a toprope on a 5.7.
“I was completely amazed,” Colette said of Lindsay’s climbing ability. “I totally looked up to her.” Although she had done yoga and hiked, climbing seemed different. “That sort of recreating was not a part of my life,” Colette said. Mary had climbed a few times with Tom, and seeing educated and stand-up people participate in climbing, a sport that had negative connotations of slackers and rebels, helped Mary accept Colette’s lifestyle change to focusing her efforts on climbing. Back at school, Colette would climb at the Gunks and do short multi-pitch routes with various male mentors. When she tired of the drama of men confusing climbing together for dating, she bought a crashpad and shifted toward bouldering by herself. Eventually she met climber Jackie Chiddo, another Fordham student and climber, and the pair began going on climbing trips.
“At that time there were not a lot of girls traveling and climbing together,” said Aly Dorey, a climber who met the girls when they traveled to Boulder, Colorado, on a road trip. A year later, Aly, Jackie, Colette, and Jody Hansen made the 24-hour drive from Boulder to Squamish to climb. “We made up a dumb song that we sang all the time,” said Dorey of the girl’s trip. “For the most part it was a lot of goofing around.” Despite the silliness, Colette sent a number of moderate boulder problems in the Canadian forest, including sending Golden Boy (V7) and flashing Swank Stretch (V5).
“It was before I had years of only being on trips with my boyfriend and other guys,” Colette said of her first big women’s climbing trip. “I was fresh out of college where I had lots of girlfriends, and Jackie was one of my main climbing partners, so I thought having a girl crew was pretty normal.”
Colette on The Beast (5.13a) in Rifle, Colorado
During her senior year at Fordham in 2004, Colette met Joe Kinder, an aspiring professional climber four years her senior, at a climbing competition at Earth Treks gym in Maryland. The pair connected and took off on a seemingly endless road trip, traveling all over the United States in Joe’s maroon Astrovan with a lift. Colette funded her life on the road by working odd jobs as a caterer, a waitress, and an assistant at a modeling agency in Vail, and as a caterer. The pair took the van to remote sport crags around southern Utah in the winter, spent summers in Rifle, and traveled to Europe to climb in France and Spain.
In 2005 Colette sent Heretic Wisdom (5.12a) at the Wailing Wall in St. George, Utah. A year later, she jumped a number grade when she sent Minus Five, a 5.13a also in St. George. “I was mainly a boulderer and had made a definitive switch to sport climbing, but I was a total wuss and way out my comfort zone on a rope,” she said. “I remember sending Minus Five not very long after my first 5.12a’s—before I had done a 12b or 12c.” When another climber commented on her send by saying the route was just a boulder problem and that she should do a real route, she said, “The comment definitely stuck with me, so I spent the next few years building a big base of 12b, 12c, and 12d and learning how to redpoint routes and climb like a sport climber.” By 2011, she had climbed Fluff Boy (5.13c) in Rifle and Vigor (5.13c) in Gorges du Loop in France.
Road life was far from constant sending and living the dream. “It was fucking epic,” said Colette of trying Apocalypse 05, a 5.13c at Rifle’s Project Wall. She began the project in early summer 2010, working on a program of painkillers, Red Bull, and three days on. “I remember getting so angry, I threw my shoe and my iPod down the road,” she said after developing tendonitis from too much climbing and a lighthearted women’s arm wrestling competition.
Colette finished the route later that season, and her obsession only intensified. On a February 2013 trip to Spain, she focused solely on climbing instead of balancing it with work, as she had done on every other trip. It paid off when she sent Marroncita, a 5.13d in Oliana that marked a new grade for her. She kept the momentum rolling and sent her first 5.14a a couple of months later at the same cliff.
“China Crisis was not a mental battle,” Colette said. She had been climbing a lot and consistently in Oliana. “For the grade and for my situation, it went pretty fast. I kind of surprised myself.”
Colette rocking her signature jorts fashion in Rifle
“I’m not using my degree. Is this what I want to do?” Colette asked herself in 2005 after a series of short-term jobs. “Should I be doing something more serious?” Joe’s focus as a professional climber meant the pair traveled to the hardest sport crags in America and Europe to produce media about the climbs and the travel. Colette became the one behind the camera, recording and editing video and inadvertently stumbling into a new career path. With Joe, she made dozens of skill tutorials, product videos, and road trip dispatches for his sponsors.
“I actually hated shooting video at the time. I enjoyed taking photos a lot more, and mainly lifestyle/travel photos not necessarily climbing,” Colette said, “but Joe was stoked on editing and it was a cool contribution to his sponsorship at the time.” At the time she wasn’t interested in being the visionary behind the videos, but she knew loved taking part in the shoots because she thought they were so cool. “The early production work was a real eye opener to a new kind of work I never knew about,” she said. “I wanted to be a producer or assistant director of photography or really anything that had to do with shoots.”
“When I think back to what inspired me as a climber, it’s always been images of women,” said Colette. “I want to create images and media about badass women doing rad stuff.” For years, Colette worked extensively with Joe producing films about their travels, but then she branched out to focus on what had always inspired her, filming climbing shorts Daila Ojeda, Melissa Le Neve, Alizee Dufraisse, Olivia Hsu, Caroline Treadway, and Hazel Findlay. She had finally created a career path that married her climbing and traveling lifestyle, female inspiration, and a newfound love for photography and video work.
“When I got really psyched on photos, Joe would always ask me to take pictures of him,” Colette said, “and at the time his career was supporting us.” It was a way for her to contribute financially to the partnership, but she hated not having images of herself, so she decided to do something about it. A broken mirror on a side street in Cornudella, Spain, a subway window in Tokyo, Japan, and a pair of sunglasses in Ceuse, France—in each self-reflection, one can see a pair of strong eyebrows above a camera. “I started taking photos in reflections initially just to remember I was there,” Colette said. “I take tons of them all the time that nobody sees and I just keep for myself like little diaries.”
“There’s always more to it than just a person, than just a picture of her,” said Aly of Colette’s infamous selfies that gained recognition in the climbing community when Emily Harrington, Olivia Hsu, and other pro climbers began #coletteing, or taking selfies in reflective surfaces. Even Colette’s mom did some #coletteing to inspire herself before running the Boston Marathon.
While many find simple entertainment in the photos, for some, the pictures are more significant, offering a break from the traditionally dominant “male gaze.”
“It’s this idea that visual media, the way it presents women, is from a male perspective. Movies are all about men and the person behind the camera is a man too,” said Dorey, speaking about the feminist concept from Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Colette took control by presenting herself as the photographer and the subject, ignoring the male perspective altogether and portraying a more realistic image of a woman. The disheveled hair, the squinting eyes, the dirty mirror, it offers a level of authenticity that disregards mainstream perceptions of beauty. Over the years, the selfies moved beyond seeing herself and remembering the events. The clarity sharpened. The woman in the reflection became more defined.
Through her videos, selfies, and other photography work, Colette shows strong female characters, women who are capable of adventuring, climbing, and living totally independent of men. She’s not trying to make a point; she’s trying to get her work and perspective out there into the climbing world. “I don’t know if my ‘women climbing films’ break from other videos, but I like telling stories about people,” she said. “Not just the routes they do, but why and how they do them. I try to convey a deeper story.”
Last year in Spain, Colette hiked half an hour up the steep Mont Sant trail with a too-small backpack, a tripod, and her rope bag jumbling on her body to capture a time lapse of the setting sun for her personal archives. Months later, she had the opposite problem.
“In China, she had the largest bag and everything in it,” said Caroline of their photo work in Asia in summer 2015. “I’m like, ‘Oh my god, you’re gonna kill yourself by carrying all this stuff.’ She was like a pack horse.”
“I have had a couple of photographers say they would hire a burly younger dude over a smaller girl,” Colette said, “because photo assistants are for lugging gear and rigging.” At 5’5”, Colette normally carries an extra 30 pounds of photo equipment on top of normal climbing gear.
The evolving bag size is the symbol of a life in motion. In March 2016, Colette was in southern Utah, doing the interview for this story on the drive to the Salt Lake City Airport on her way to Australia for three weeks of climbing in Australia with her boyfriend.
“I could say I’ve been living in Tokyo for the last year. My boyfriend [Mikko Makela] has a year-long job there so I’ve been based in the area,” Colette said. “Before then I say that I lived in Nashville but I’m super-transient.” After Australia, she would return to the U.S. to climb in Vegas, Bishop, around Los Angeles, then she would drive to Nashville to deal with her storage unit. “You could say I live in my car, but I stay in people’s houses or I rent seasonally. If you look at the calendar and go backwards every two or three months it looks different.” The summer would be Switzerland and Ceuse, and fall would be spent back in the states. Half of the traveling would be for climbing, and half for film work. For Colette, there isn’t a place to be, but a time to be there.
First published in Climbing 345
