She nearly died in a climbing fall. Anna Parsons on her return to Yosemite

Anna Parsons returned to Yosemite at the end of last year, 18 months after her near-fatal accident there.

Anna Parsons nearly died and eventually had her foot amputated after falling 24m in Yosemite National Park in the US. Now with a prosthetic foot and lower leg, she’s not only rock climbing again, but also surfing and mountain biking. She talks to Derek Cheng, also an avid climber, about what really happened - and what should be done to make climbing safer.

“I just want to be able to surf two-foot waves on a log. It doesn’t matter, you know, as long as I can stand up. I don’t need to turn or anything. Just give me this one little thing, please.”

This was Anna Parsons’ plea to the powers-that-be as the Otago University student lay in a Californian hospital bed, having broken most of the bones in her body and punctured her lung in a 24m rock-climbing fall.

It was August 2022, and she was on a granite monolith in Yosemite Valley, California, one of the meccas of the climbing world.

A simple foot slip doesn’t always have such severe consequences while rock climbing, but the route she and her climbing partner Jack Evans were on - called Snake Dike - is well-known for having sections with no gear to protect a climber if they fall.

Lying in a hospital bed a year and a half ago, she knew she was going to survive - a fate that was in doubt when rescuers first made it to her side after the fall.

But with an amputated foot and a series of other injuries, including to her spine, she contemplated what her new life would look like, and whether she’d still be able to pursue her love of the outdoors with the same vigour - or at all.

This summer, or winter in the northern hemisphere, the 23-year-old returned to North America - and to Yosemite - to see what she was still capable of doing.

Watch Anna’s story and other great Attitude Pictures documentaries on their website. Made with the help of NZ on Air.

‘It was kinda slow-mo’

Parsons’ travels took her to Canada for her marine ecology studies - she won a scholarship to the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, in British Columbia - before she went climbing in Squamish, on Canada’s west coast, returned to Yosemite, and then spent a month seeking our surf breaks in Mexico.

It was the first time she’d returned to the place where she’d nearly died.

She and Evans had spent months in 2022 training for their time in Yosemite and were conservatively planning to climb well below the limits of their abilities. Snake Dike, their chosen route on the iconic formation Half Dome, is not difficult but is notoriously “run-out”, climbing parlance for long sections where there is no protection for a climber to clip their rope into as they ascend. This is reflected in its “R” rating, meaning you could hurt yourself if you fall in the run-out sections.

It’s graded 5.7 (or about grade 14/15 in the New Zealand system), but this doesn’t necessarily make it comparable in difficulty to climbs of the same grade in New Zealand.

“In the gym, 5.7 probably means low-angled and big holds, but outside on glacier-polished granite 5.7 can be a different beast,” long-time YOSAR (Yosemite Search and Rescue) member Jim Reynolds told the Weekend Herald.

“There are so many factors that go into making Snake Dike a substantial challenge. You find yourself in a sea of granite, unsure which way to go. The sun is beating down. The bolts are so far apart you can’t see the next one, so there is mental fatigue from being in that headspace of ultra caution, but you don’t have the time or energy to double-check every foot placement.”

He said it was easy to miss small things that could make a huge difference, such as “a subtle change in rock texture or an important navigational decision”.

“It’s worth remembering too that these routes were established in an era when 5.9 was meant to be the hardest grade possible. So 5.7 was just a couple of grades below maximum possible difficulty.”

Much of the climbing style on Snake Dike is blank “friction slab”, a tenuous type of climbing with no holds to grab, which has been likened to walking uphill on glass. All your weight is on your feet, and it’s the friction between the soles of your climbing shoes and the rock that keeps you on the wall.

Elements in the friction equation include the temperature of the rock - cooler generally means more friction - and the angle of your feet to the rock. Relaxing the tension in your core is enough to cause a foot to slip. And all of these elements can change suddenly as you lift a foot and try to step higher, momentarily leaving almost all your weight on a singular point.

“I quite like that style of climbing, that delicate movement,” Parsons says. “It’s not about being super strong, but kind of like graceful dancing.”

Parsons told the Weekend Herald that some of the reporting on her accident had been wrong. She did not down-climb, but she did go the wrong way. There is a section of Snake Dike from where three routes diverge. The right-most route is called Snake Dance, which also has a dike feature. Parsons saw this and climbed towards it, thinking it was part of Snake Dike.

“I got to it and I started going up that dike, and it’s way thinner but you’ve got holds and I felt quite good about it. And then I saw it getting thinner. I looked up and I was like, ‘This feels harder than 5.7.’”

She was now on Snake Dance - graded 5.9, or the New Zealand equivalent of about grade 17. Then she saw another dike feature to her left and thought, correctly, that this was part of Snake Dike.

The section of rock between them crossed another route, called Eye in the Sky, which is graded even harder (5.10b, or about NZ grade 18/19), though this particular section was no harder than Snake Dike.

“I was aware I was run-out [high above a protection bolt that her rope was clipped to] but I wasn’t, like, ‘You can’t fall, you can’t fall.’ There wasn’t panic in my mind. What I can remember of it, I was quite calm.”

Parsons decided to climb the friction slab across Eye in the Sky to Snake Dike - and succeeded.

“I was like ‘yeeeeow’ when I made it to the dike, stoked that I made it, and he [Evans] remembers me doing that,” she recalls.

“Maybe even that little lapse of concentration, you know, because you’re super tense doing that friction slab across the two different routes. I don’t know if there was water collected on the site, or just the change from granite to quartz, because when I weighted that left foot [on a quartz part of the dike], I did the same thing that I had done across the whole friction slab to get there.

“It stayed for a second and then it must have just caught something. It was kinda slow-mo, but you can’t do anything as soon as that foot’s off the wall.”

Anna Parsons recovers in hospital after breaking nearly every bone in her body.

She doesn’t remember much about the long tumble down the rock face beyond her ankle rolling, followed by tremendous impacts on her bum and back. The rope eventually came tight to arrest her fall, though she’s unsure how much the rope caught her, and how much was caught by the ledge she slammed into. Evans couldn’t see her because a prow obstructed his view, but he could hear that she was in an immense amount of pain.

Parsons broke her neck, spine, pelvis, ribs and feet in the 24m fall.

The talus bone in her left ankle was ripped out. She later chose to have it amputated rather than fused, which would have been more limiting on her future mobility. Her right foot was able to be saved via reconstructive surgery, but is severely arthritic.

Evans managed to call YOSAR, which reached her and lowered her off the rock face to a place where she could be taken by helicopter to hospital.

She spent more than six weeks in US hospitals and rehab facilities - racking up $1.5 million in healthcare bills - before flying back to New Zealand, where she went to Burwood Hospital to learn how to walk again.

‘I get really hard on myself’

With a prosthetic left foot and lower leg, the following months were spent testing her new limits.

“I was climbing again [six months after the accident] but I was definitely limited surfing-wise, and I could still bike - but not hectic downhill mountain biking.”

She remembers pleading with the powers-that-be to let her surf two-foot waves, which she has been able to do.

“Now I’m like, ‘Okay, I want to do that consistently, I want to be able to turn, I want to be able to surf my short board.’ As soon as you get one thing, you want the next,” she says.

“Surfing can be super frustrating. You have the leg to place, but then you don’t have the foot to grip the board, so I’ve slipped. And sometimes if it’s just a bad session, I get really hard on myself. I’m still working on not comparing myself to the old self.”

Anna Parsons now has a prosthetic leg and foot and has returned to surfing, though finds it hard not to compare her ability to how she used to surf.

She’s also had some dramatic experiences with her new leg.

“Even in the water, the leg isn’t buoyant. I’ve had the leg come off in the water in a 4m swell and just being terrified, holding on to it and my board and being like, ‘I’m gonna drown.’ It was in Mexico. It was really scary. It was the biggest surf I’d been in.”

Thankfully she could angle herself to a place “where the shore-break wouldn’t destroy me”, where a kind stranger helped her out of the water.

“We left that spot and went somewhere more mellow, which was good.”

She sometimes has back pain where a metal box has replaced compressed vertebrae, and she has a series of rods and pins along her thoracic spine. Despite what spinal surgeons told her, her back remains flexible.

“I knew that the mind was stronger than anything. People who are paraplegic can walk again because their minds are so strong, but that’s not always the case, of course,” she says.

“Often pain is also a mind-thing, especially the arthritis because I know it’s not a functional pain. Sometimes I can push it away and move on.

“I’ve never really been, like, ‘I wish that never happened’. Because you can’t do that.”

Return to Yosemite

The next time Parsons saw Half Dome, at the end of last year, it was glowing pink with the sunset and had a quiff of winter snow.

She tried to do some lead climbing in Yosemite, where the length of a potential fall depends on the distance from the lead climber to their last piece of protection. This is different to following a lead climber, also called seconding or top-roping, because the rope is already running through protection at the top of the route. This means that if the top-roper falls, they only drop down as far as the rope stretches - typically a very short distance.

“It was hard to climb there again,” Parsons says.

“I tried to lead something and got halfway up, and I was like, ‘I really can’t, I can’t do this move because I just didn’t want to have any ounce of doubt.’ It was really good that he [her boyfriend Reuben] was there because he could lead a lot of things, and I could just top-rope to get back on the wall.

“I feel like it’s my mental game that holds me back from climbing more than anything else. That’s also related to the leg because it’s hard to trust it completely.”

Anna Parsons, pictured here climbing in Canada, had her left foot amputated following a climbing fall in 2022, but she has returned to climbing with a prosthetic foot and lower leg.

They also hiked up to Half Dome, not to climb Snake Dike, but to have a look.

“It’s still a gorgeous, beautiful piece of rock, and I almost have more respect for it. This thing we do is super dangerous. It’s not any place’s fault,” she says.

“It’s still a beautiful area, and it was really cool to go there in winter as well because it’s a different vibe.”

Parsons thankfully no longer has an enormous medical bill hanging over her (she was insured and her cover included rock climbing, but her bills far exceeded her cover).

Some of the bills shrunk to a fraction of what her family was expecting, thanks to the generosity of providers in the US who gave her huge discounts. The Givealittle page her mum set up - and which collected $380,000 - took care of what was left.

For now, Parsons is waiting for a new leg and foot. The current one doesn’t fit her so well anymore because the socket has slowly worn down. It’s only held on by an elastic sleeve, and she’s looking forward to having a new one that can be locked in with a vacuum and pin system, which would enable more movement and stability.

“It’s very awesome technology, and you can still have a really active and similar life as an amputee. But I’m impatient for new technology. I just want to go do things now. The new surf foot - I can’t get it because they haven’t made a model of it.”

Is she in a good place, 18 months after almost losing her life? Has she made peace with what happened?

It’s still a work in progress, she says, mainly because her coping mechanism when talking about her accident is to stay at emotional arm’s length.

“It’s very factual, right? It’s all black and white so that I don’t have that hurt, you know, when I talk about it,” she says.

“I’d like to do some more work on it. I’ve asked ACC for some trauma counselling. Jack [Evans] did it, and recommended me to do it as well.

“People need to talk about things, to go in-depth.”

Anna Parsons, 23, is a marine ecology student at Otago University

Why not make Snake Dike safer?

Climbing is an inherently risky activity, and part of the appeal for some is in knowing - and accepting - that risk. Parsons and Evans certainly knew what they were walking into when they chose Snake Dike.

Her accident sent shock waves through the climbing world, with articles and discussions in all the major climbing media outlets. One of the main focuses was whether more bolts should be added to make the route less run-out.

It might seem like a no-brainer, but there is a generally accepted climbing ethic that the arbiter of whether a route should be changed is whoever did the first ascent.

After Parsons’ accident, Eric Beck, who was part of Snake Dike’s first ascent team, told climbing.com that the route should have more bolts.

When he, Jim Bridwell and Chris Fredericks climbed the route in 1965, they conserved their meagre supply of 12 bolts because they thought they’d need them higher up when they expected the climbing to get harder. The number of bolts they ended up using, he said, was “totally inappropriate for a moderate route, which we could already see would be popular as it was so pretty”.

At his insistence, more bolts were added on the route’s second ascent, and he has since advocated for even more to be added.

“It may look like I want to defang the Snake Dike and bring it down to the lowest common denominator, but the Snake Dike is not a test piece. It has no fangs. It is a lovely route on one of the great monoliths of our planet. Had we had more time and more bolts, we would have done it ourselves [during the first ascent],” Beck said.

Others disagree, including Alex Honnold, star of the Oscar-winning movie Free Solo and probably the most famous climber in the world.

“I’m not really into that,” he said on his podcast Climbing Gold about adding more bolts to Snake Dike.

“Certain things, it’s worth preserving their character. If somebody wants to hand-drill the 300 bolts that it would take to make Snake Dike safe, just do it 50 feet to the right and it’d be the same freaking thing. The whole wall is like this giant slabby thing. Why destroy this classic route that people have climbed for multiple generations? Just put up a different one next to it.”

This is despite Honnold badly spraining his ankle after falling on a section of friction slab - which he has described as “like walking on glass” - on a 900m-high route in Yosemite that he eventually climbed ropeless.

Alex Honnold, pictured here climbing ropeless in Yosemite, doesn't think Snake Dike should have more protection bolts added to it.

Preservation of character is a common defence for not adding more protection to established classics. It means that the experience of the climb remains as close as possible to what it was for the first ascent team. Certain routes are famous - or infamous - because of their run-out sections, and the boldness required to do them. Adding a bolt every two metres in those sections would completely change the character of the climb.

Would it be worth it, though, if it prevented just one death or one serious accident?

Parsons agrees with the rule of leaving it up to the first ascensionists but believes the route deserves an “X” rating rather than an “R”, meaning a climber could die if they fell in the wrong place.

“I should have died with all the injuries I had. The feedback from the YOSAR team, they weren’t sure I’d make it. Even the climbing community that visited me in hospital, they were talking about other accidents that’d happened on Snake Dike.”

An “X” rating is something that other famous climbers support.

“A remedy that would likely be accepted by most would be to add enough bolts to keep people on route - [perhaps] in addition to a skull-and-crossbones-type warning in the guidebook or [digital guidebook site] Mountain Project,” legendary Yosemite climber Peter Croft told climbing.com.

The whole experience has, unsurprisingly, had an impact on how Parsons looks at risk: “I try and avoid any run-out routes now.”

Would she try Snake Dike again?

“I’d be scared doing it, and I think that’d be silly. It’s still run-out.”

Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery and is a former deputy political editor. He is also an avid climber who has taken unexpected falls on friction slab in Yosemite, and had his own brush with death in a climbing accident.