Progression: Keenan Takahashi
In September 2011, the California boulderer Keenan Takahashi grabbed a crimp with his left hand. He wrapped the fingers of his right hand around another crimp on the 30-foot Kush Boulder, below Yosemite’s Lost Brother formation. His moustache, a thick broom of brown wire, formed a wide line on his upper lip, which quivered with exertion. He steadied himself and then swung his left foot hard to launch across the wall, double-clutching a sloper, maxing out the plus-six-inch wingspan on his thin 5’8” frame. Takahashi finished the first ascent of the highball V11 with El Capitan as a backdrop. The problem, with its wild, dynamic movement, marked a progression not only in Yosemite’s modern bouldering style but in Takahashi’s climbing as well.
When it came time to name the line, he took inspiration from a great horned owl feather he’d found at the base of the climb, shed by a bird that had been hooting nearby. “One of my favorite animals is the owl,” Takahashi says, and in fact a three-inch tattoo of an owl adorns his left ankle. Takahashi received his only piece of body art during the summer before his senior year in high school. He’d traveled to France that summer on an exchange program, a trip that introduced him to climbing. And so the climb became Winged Tiger, named after the airborne predator.
Winged Tiger is just one climb in the El Portal, California–based 26-year-old’s rapidly expanding résumé. Beyond his occasional roped exploits, where’s he’s made ascents of the traditional routes Broken Arrow (5.13c) and the second ascent of Top Gun (5.13d), both in Tuolumne Meadows, Takahashi has established over a dozen double-digit boulder problems across the western United States and in Rocklands, with an emphasis on highballs. These include the 30-foot Zephyr (V12) in Yosemite, the 35-foot Terminus (V12) in Bishop, California, the 30-foot Hokusai’s Wave (V12) in Roy, New Mexico, and the 35-foot Ubuntu (V13) in Rocklands. As of press time, all were unrepeated.
“They’re big and beautiful and pure,” Takahashi says of the climbs. Despite his predilection for tall climbs, he denies an attraction to commitment and danger, saying, “I only climb tall things because I think they’re pretty and inspiring.” However, with his background as a talented skater who was unafraid of big drops, big tricks, and big air, you can’t help but wonder if he likes the risk and the exposure.
At the beginning of the nine-minute YouTube video Jamboree, one of a dozen skate videos that Takahashi and his friend Jonas Mueller filmed and starred in, a teenage Takahashi climbs into a tree in his hometown of Davis, California. A few seconds before the Arcade Fire song “Power Out” kicks in, Takahashi drops five feet from the tree into a cement ditch on his skateboard. He sticks the landing and skates off. Takahashi, born September 1991, grew up in the central California town, the only child of Barb and Eugene Takahashi, a Sierra Club employee and a state epidemiologist, respectively. At nine years old, Takahashi asked his parents for a skateboard after riding around on Mueller’s cheapo $35 board. Over the next eight years, Takahashi skateboarded daily at the courtyard of the local junior high and in the flat suburbs around Davis. As he progressed, he and Mueller started filming his tricks; at the end of Jamboree, after kick-flipping into extended manuals, grinding handrails, and ollying over open-house signs, Takahashi sticks his best trick, a 360 flip off a six-foot-high series of ledges. “I skated so much,” Takahashi says. Though he stuck kick flips and other basic tricks early in his skating career, pushing further required practice and obsession. He estimates he spent 10,000 attempts over three years to stick the 360 flip. “That really plays into my love of bouldering where I just obsess over little things,” Takahashi says.
To engage in skateboarder antics, Takahashi would often climb onto roofs and into trees. In high school, when he traveled to France, he found himself climbing onto the façades of the old buildings in Paris. “You should go to the climbing gym,” another Davis exchange student told him. In summer 2008, when Takahashi was 17, he went to Rocknasium, the Davis climbing gym built in 1992. The next day, he returned. Soon he was spending six days a week there. Shortly after starting climbing, he went to the Nut Tree Boulders in Vacaville, 30 minutes southwest of Davis, climbing black basalt eggs on a hillside in 105-degree heat with just a half-liter of water. After leaving, going to the grocery store, and pounding two liters of Gatorade, Takahashi realized, “Outdoor climbing is where it’s at—this is what I want to focus on.”
“The switch just flipped,” says Takahashi’s friend Teddy Renthal of their first few trips to the Eastern Sierra bouldering mecca of Bishop. Renthal met Takahashi in third grade when they played soccer together at Thomas Willett Elementary School in Davis, and later got into climbing himself on a local youth team. Soon the pair began climbing together extensively. The heights did little to scare Takahashi. “I don’t think I’ve taken any falls in climbing that bruised me the way skating did,” Takahashi says. “That’s kind of why I like taller things—because they still haven’t felt as scary as the skating stuff.” Takahashi would know: The three-minute Vimeo video The Greatest Moments in the Life of Keenan Takahashi, another collaboration with Mueller, features teenage Takahashi falling off his skateboard in slow motion 15 times, twisting his ankles, getting nailed in the head by his skateboard, and writhing in pain on the ground. When he started falling on crashpads and gym mats, climbing felt so much safer. Even highballs felt benign.
With Renthal, Takahashi watched the 1999 Big Up Productions film Rampage, and began climbing in the same places—Castle Rock, Lake Tahoe, Lost Rocks, and Squamish. In 2010, Renthal and Takahashi released Rampage 2, a homemade, two-part, 29-minute video of themselves and their friends bouldering in many of the same destinations, as well as Joe’s Valley and Hueco.
“He would just go super-hard. He didn’t know any better,” Renthal says. “He would try super- hard problems even though he wasn’t anywhere close.” Renthal recalls Takahashi pulling onto the holds of the Buttermilks classic The Mandala (V11) right after he’d climbed his first V5. After bouldering all day, “He’d make eight packs of ramen, pound them, and then go to sleep,” Renthal said of Takahashi’s dinner fare he’d make in the Pit, the Tablelands campground north of Bishop.
After graduating high school in 2009, Takahashi headed to the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). After the fall quarter, the rainy winters and distinct lack of climbing nearby forced him away from academia. He returned to Davis and began route setting at Rocknasium, and took community-college classes. For two years, he climbed four days a week, spending weekends in Tahoe and Bishop. Though his climbing moved forward, his life had stalled out. In autumn 2011, he returned to UCSC to study earth science, but with no car to access the rock he struggled to climb. “It was the least improvement I felt in my climbing,” Takahashi says of that period. Then, in September of 2013, he took an internship in Yosemite studying talus morphology with park geologist Greg Stock. The position allowed Takahashi to walk through the limitless boulders of Yosemite. “I got really psyched and realized this was the best bouldering in the country,” says Takahashi.
Seeing the possibilities in Yosemite motivated Takahashi. “I’m gonna see if I can improve when I really start to focus on outdoor climbing,” Takahashi thought. When he graduated from UCSC in spring 2014, he returned to the Valley and Tuolumne. That summer, he traveled to Rocklands for seven weeks for his first extended climbing trip. He began eating better, lost 15 pounds of beer-and-burrito student weight, and got into sending shape. He returned to Yosemite and began crushing old projects and establishing new lines. He also took a three-month volunteer position working with Stock. The position transitioned into another long-term opportunity, and in May 2015, Takahashi took a seasonal job in Yosemite monitoring air and water quality for the National Park Service.
These days, Takahashi clocks in at 9 a.m., and then at 5 p.m., he’s running through the boulders, scrubbing new problems, or bouldering. “Working here poses its own challenges,” says Yosemite Climbing Ranger Eric Bissel. Bissel climbed with Takahashi on the first ascents, in 2014, of Dreamsnatcher (V10), Delta V (V10), and the Uncertainty Principle (V10), all at the modern Happy Isles Boulders. Ironically, even with all that granite around, the lack of a gym and steep rock in the Valley can make it difficult to stay strong while working and living there. Only in the past five years have Yosemite boulderers pushed grades into V13, a concerted effort that means a willingness to rap, scrub, and work new problems. But Takahashi is young, able, and psyched. In the past three years, he’s established a dozen new double-digit boulder problems in Yosemite, showing the wealth of hard problems still available.
“Early on, I had to let go of the first ascent and be OK with a team first ascent,” says Bissel, who also climbed with Takahashi in Roy and the Ortega Mountains in New Mexico. In 2014, on the Ripple Wall (V9), a 22-foot line Bissel had been trying for three years in the Ortega Mountains, Bissel ripped off an enormous chickenhead after pulling the finishing lip. He launched 18 feet and decided he was good not sending. The lack of a true FA nagged at him, though, and he returned in April of 2015 to work it with Takahashi, who dispatched the route on his first day. Before Takahashi returned to the base, Bissel topped out his project. But Bissel turned the tables in 2017. On July 4, he sent Top Gun, a steep corner on Stately Pleasure Dome in Tuolumne that was a 1980s Kurt Smith project and that both Bissel and Takahashi had both been working. Two months later, Takahashi climbed through the three-bolt V9 crux beginning, stuck the jug, and thought, “Holy shit, I have to trad climb.” After placing a few pieces and cranking through a 5.12 crack section, Takahashi nabbed the second ascent.
“It’s the most scared I’ve ever been,” Takahashi says of his 2015 first ascent of Zephyr (V12) at The Crumbles, a collection of boulders below Yosemite’s Cookie Cliff. The crux on Zephyr comes low, but then there’s the slopey V7 move with “faith-based feet” 25 above the ground. Takahashi was toproping the end crux successfully only one time in four. “Normally, when I’m doing a highball like that, I wanna be doing it every single try,” Takahashi says. However, when he stuck the bottom crux, he continued upward, bolstered by the 15 pads and the crew that had shown up. Earlier that winter, to gain the mental confidence needed, Takahashi had climbed the 60-foot Evilution (V11) in Bishop, citing it as much less frightening.
In February 2016, Takahashi climbed a 35-foot overhanging arête atop the Pollen Grains boulders above Bishop, naming the problem Terminus. Two years earlier, a friend had showed Takahashi the problem, pointing him to the bolts on the top. “I totally freaked,” recalls Takahashi of the golden rock. “It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of rock I’ve seen anywhere.” Takahashi worked the highball on a rope but failed to piece together its 14 beastly moves of power crimping. “I wasn’t ready,” he says, “physically or mentally.” So he began to train rigorously, using an Excel spreadsheet to outline and monitor his progress. When he got to Bishop in January of 2016, he did The Mystery, a long, crimpy V12 on Grandma Peabody. He did it three times in a row the first day. Then four times in a row the next day. Then five times, building the crimp fitness and power-endurance for Terminus. When Terminus finally went down, Takahashi’s ascent was controlled, precise, and fluid (you can watch it on Vimeo), his heels and toes locking onto the holds as he slapped up the glassy edge. Two months after Terminus, Takahashi went to Roy and established the 30-foot Hokusai’s Wave (V12; see no. 357), a sandstone wave with a compression crux at the crest. Later in the year, he established another new highball, in South Africa.
“He was always into going and looking for these crazy first ascents,” Renthal recalls of his and Takahashi’s first trip to Rocklands in 2014. Takahashi became notorious for telling his friends about amazing potential problems that were 35 feet tall and had, like, two holds. “You’re, like, ‘What are we doing here?’” Renthal recalls. One day in 2014, they went to Field of Joys where Takahashi found an impressive 30-foot prow. “It’s some of the craziest rock I’ve seen in Rocklands,” Takahashi says. The problem begins on a pseudo limestone tufa and follows toe hooks and heel hooks to an arête, a funky slap sequence, a high foot, and a bad meat wrap. “It’s hard and physical and kind of scary. You don’t want to fall, but you’re probably not going to fall if you get through it,” Takahashi says of his hardest highball FA to date, the V13 Ubuntu, which went down in June 2017. “It’s my favorite style.”
As the grades have gotten bigger, Takahashi has become less manic in his approach, or perhaps it’s his more studied methodology—coupled with travel and teaming up with other strong boulderers—that’s allowed him to excel. Says Renthal, “He’s better at being methodical. When I go climbing with him now and he’s trying these hard problems, it’s one attempt, eat a banana, rest for 20 minutes, stretch. It’s not the same thrash on stuff until you do it.”
“Holy hell. I’m always psyched, and I didn’t think I could even keep up,” professional climber Jimmy Webb recalls of meeting Takahashi in late 2016. Over the next six months with Kevin Smith, Hannah Donnelly, and his now-girlfriend, Parker Yamasaki, Takahashi climbed in Font, Switzerland, and South Africa. The trip provided him access to V14s and V15s, something that his home boulders of Yosemite lack. 2017 proved the fruits of Takahashi’s obsession. He completed 17 V13s in Red Rock, Fontainebleau, Magic Wood, Rocklands, Squamish, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Mount Evans, and two V14s: The Island in Fontainebleau and Speed of Sound in Rocklands.
“He knew how to climb on the rock even though he’d never been there,” Webb says of Takahashi’s savoir-faire at the notoriously technical Fontainebleau. Perhaps this was due to Takahashi’s climbing style. “He’s always thinking, ‘What if I do this, what if I do that, what if I move my foot an inch to the right, twist the knee this way or move the hip a quarter inch to the right?’” says Webb. “He’ll get everything to a T perfectly, and then when he does it, it looks perfect.” That precise style of execution has helped Takahashi deal with climbing high off the ground.
These days in his apartment in El Portal, Takahashi follows an Excel spreadsheet of different exercises, to stay motivated during the short, cold winter days. He logs ascents of any problems, and at nights has been practicing fingertip pushups to strengthen his fingers for the mantel-style triple bump of The Nest, a V15 in Las Vegas he hopes to send. He plans on escaping Yosemite during the winter months when weather shuts down the Valley. Or, if the good weather lasts in Yosemite, he’ll be pushing new, hard terrain, using those fingertip-mantel skills to press up on virgin granite blocks, continuing to raise bouldering standards in the Ditch. Regardless, he’ll be trying hard. As he says, “I’m obsessed with personal progression.”
First published in Climbing 359
