Kimber Cross is an adaptive ice climber and mountaineer who has spent the last decade tackling some of the most demanding ice routes in North America. Born without one hand, she climbs with a custom prosthetic featuring an ice axe that extends from her right forearm. In 2026, Kimber made the first adaptive female ascent of Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, Colorado, one of the country's most challenging ice climbs.
Kimber Cross is an adaptive ice climber and mountaineer who has spent the last decade tackling some of the most demanding ice routes in North America. Born without one hand, she climbs with a custom prosthetic featuring an ice axe that extends from her right forearm. In 2026, Kimber made the first adaptive female ascent of Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, Colorado, one of the country's most challenging ice climbs.
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Kimber Cross:
I just revere ice so much and I respect it so much. And the sounds, I think my favorite when I'm climbing up a pillar or ice on a face when you can hear the flowing water inside of it, it's just such a beautiful sound. So to be on the ice, I'm hanging on my prosthetic and I just pull up my camera and I'm like, I just want to film this flowing water and the sounds. And I know I'm hanging on five inches of ice that's separating me from the flow of water, but it's beautiful and it can be meditative.
Shelby Stanger:
For alpinist Kimber Cross, ice evokes a lot of different feelings. There's the tranquility of being in the mountains, the adrenaline of scaling a glacier or a frozen waterfall, and the satisfaction that her body is capable of anything. Kimber is a record-setting ice climber and mountaineer who is born without one hand. When she climbs, she uses a custom prosthetic with an ice axe that extends from her right forearm. Over the last 10 years, Kimber has broken new ground and become a sponsored athlete with Mountain Hardwear. In 2026, Kimber made the first adaptive female ascent of one of the hardest ice climbing routes in the country, Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, Colorado. I'm Shelby Stanger and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard.
Kimber Cross, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I'm excited to chat with you. So you're a mountain climber, an alpinist, an ice climber, and you're a kindergarten teacher?
Kimber Cross:
That is facts. I have been a teacher for just about 20 years. The last 13 have been in kindergarten with the five-year-olds and the last 10 I've been climbing and it's just been such an interesting world to blend. At the beginning, it was just so fun to teach kids about mountains. And I'm from Washington State. We're surrounded by incredible volcanoes and incredible mountain ranges. The outdoor beauty out here is magnetic. And every Monday we talk about what we do for the weekend or over break, what do we do? And for a teacher to get to show, oh, I climbed Rainier or I did this rock climb.
Shelby Stanger:
Or you ice climbed up a waterfall.
Kimber Cross:
Hey, you know the movie Frozen? I climbed those frozen waterfalls. Those are climbable. And it's so fascinating to watch the littles become so enticed with the fact of like, "Oh, you're climbing and you have these pointy things," and we talk about gear. We talk about my prosthetic and adaptive gear. By the time they finish kindergarten, they know what a prosthetic is. They know about adaptive climbing. They know that it doesn't matter your disability or your identity, you have a space in the mountains and what does that look like? And so that's been a really fun part of blending the two worlds together.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, you must be the coolest teacher. How amazing. I would be so stoked to have you as my kindergarten teacher. Let's go backwards. How did you get into extreme sports? You grew up in Washington. Were you always outdoorsy?
Kimber Cross:
Yeah. I mean, I was born with one hand and I grew up with a very athletic dad. He had the football, the track, and my mom, not so much. And so as I got older and the '90s started happening and I'm getting into sports naturally because something my dad loved... Jim Abbott is really the only person that they could have pointed me to at that time that was in major sports. He pitched for the California Angels and the New York Yankees and he was born with one hand. He would hold his glove under his armpit and he would pitch and then put his glove on. And so consequentially I was like, "All right, well if that's the sport one-handed people are doing, sign me up." And I pitched for nine years all through junior high and high school.
Shelby Stanger:
Hold on. Did you play softball or baseball?
Kimber Cross:
Softball, softball. So as a pitcher, it was really seeing Jim Abbott and I was like, "Okay, that's the sport I'm going to participate in and be successful because he is great."
Shelby Stanger:
It sounds like you were just always a badass from a young age, like right out of the womb, you're ready to go and you were always really athletic.
Kimber Cross:
Yeah. I loved movement. So outside was almost my everyday life, but we never hiked or camped or climbed. And in my early 20s after college, I went to Kansas City because I thought, forget this PNW drizzle and the clouds. I'm going to go somewhere where it's warm and then extremely cold in the winter. I don't know. And I remember when I moved back, mostly because tornadoes and hailstorms were terrifying, I moved back and I just looked up at Rainier and I was like, "This has been here the whole time? Oh my goodness."
Shelby Stanger:
After moving back from Kansas City, a friend invited Kimber to climb Mount Rainier. This would be a huge undertaking. Kimber had zero mountaineering experience and Rainier is one of the most glaciated peaks in the United States. Experienced alpinist even use it as a training ground for Everest. But Kimber was up for the challenge. She had recently gone through a breakup and the adventure sounded like the perfect way to move forward. Plus she was interested in trying a new sport that would test what she was physically capable of. The first step was to sign up for an introductory alpine course.
Kimber Cross:
In this course, the first day we kind of sit there and we get our syllabus and the course leader at that time, I remember him saying, "You have one hand and the committee has never had a person with a disability take this course and we're not 100% sure you should be involved, but I've seen people do incredible things after losing limbs. So you're not going to have any excuses. You're not going to get a free pass. You're going to show us how you can do everything safely, what your method is, and we're going to learn." I wasn't offended. I was more like, "Oh, if I'm the first, that means the exposure hasn't happened to see what's possible. Okay, so I will just learn myself and kind of teach others." And safety is so important. I would never want people to be afraid to wonder or question because your lives are tied to each other. When you're belaying someone, when you're on a glacier roped up, but it's helping change the dialogue of not like, "Can you do this?" It's, "How do you do this?"
Shelby Stanger:
Kimber felt comfortable in her first few mountaineering courses, but when it came time to learn about ice climbing, she started to doubt whether she could do it. She would need to use two ice tools at the same time, which presents an obvious challenge if you only have one hand. Then her instructor showed her a picture of adaptive climber, Maureen Beck, scaling ice with a prosthetic. Kimber had never worn a prosthetic before, but seeing that picture gave her the confidence to try one for the first time.
You'd never used a prosthetic in your life at this point?
Kimber Cross:
No. Yeah, my parents definitely tried. I have a very vague memory about six being in a sterile room with a bunch of other kids that were missing limbs just like me. And a lot of us were congenital, just born that way. And they took us in this back huge, looks like a PT room, and they're kind of giving you different things. They can cut this material and melt it into a shape and strap it around your hand and they're like, "Oh, you can use this to play the piano." And I'm holding it and trying to tap it, but I just can't feel the keys. And so I'm just like, "Uh-uh." And I just didn't want any accommodation. I had a good 10 to 15 years of hiding this so well, as athletic as I was and doing all the sports, it was in my jacket pocket. It was under a binder.
My best friend in 10th grade, I remember her turning around in AP English three months into our friendship and she goes, "You have one hand?" I'm telling you, Shelby, that's how good I was at hiding my hand. And so I didn't want anything. I didn't want the plastic hand because I could tell it was plastic and I'm like, "No, people could still tell. It's not moving. Why would I want it?" So to think how much I hated it as a kid and my identity and my self-worth was tied to this being negative to adulthood where I was like, "Oh, I need a prosthetic or I'm not going to be in this sport at all. How bad do I want to participate in ice climbing in the world of alpinism?" A prosthetic is pretty necessary. So to think that I had to go back into this world of acknowledging I have a disability, acknowledging I need to go to the doctor and get a prosthetic, it was a big step in, I think now I look back the right direction, not just career-wise being an alpinist, but confidence-wise and believing in myself.
Mountaineering had been so confidence-giving as a woman, as a strong female, accepting my beauty, accepting my power, accepting my independence. Now I had to accept my disability and love it in the way I grew to love myself and grow in character in the mountains. Now I had to do it in a new way and my hand was the catalyst for that.
Shelby Stanger:
First of all, thank you for sharing this. I think it's so interesting. I love that the mountains gave you enough confidence that slowly you're like, "Well, if I'm going to ice climb, I literally have to show my disability." So tell me about that process. Yo had to get an ice pick that fit to your hand.
Kimber Cross:
Yeah. Yeah. Thankfully I had found a doctor who owned a prosthetics company out here and got to chat with him and he was like, "Okay, I think I could do something like this, but I don't really know what ice climbing is." So I went over to his office and pulled up a video of Will Gadd on YouTube ice climbing, the godfather of ice climbing. I'm like, "Listen to how he describes how you swing a tool, how you use your feet," kind of teaching this prosthetic doctor the basic techniques of form and safety because I'm like, "As you design it, I want you to think about all those elements that go into it."
Shelby Stanger:
It took a couple of years for Kimber and her doctor to dial in the perfect design for her prosthetic, and they destroyed a lot of perfectly good ice axes in the process. In the end, they settled on a piece made from carbon fiber and titanium that safely holds Kimber's weight, fits her perfectly, and can be taken off quickly in case of emergency. In 2017, Kimber was able to use this prosthetic for the first time at an adaptive ice climbing clinic.
Kimber Cross:
I go with my dad to a Paradox Sports event in Ouray, and once a year they'll do an ice clinic for adaptive athletes or disabled athletes. It would take the long drive out there and being able to climb with people that have different versions of lower limb prosthetics or blind climbers or deaf climbers, you're just with everyone who is also kind of starting to learn, but then you're with pros.
Shelby Stanger:
You have a lot of rock climbing experience before that or no?
Kimber Cross:
Yeah, because we'd kind of gone through the course, the glacier rock. I lead on rock. So exposure and heights and risk, my risk tolerance had already been growing, comfortable with ropes, tying in. It was just like, how do I do all of that now with this tool that sticks with me, this prosthetic ice tool that sticks with me way more than just person with two tools? When you have an ice tool in your hand, you'll hear instructors talk about that wrist flick. You're really taking the momentum of the head of the ice tool, swinging into the ice and getting that nice thweck right in there. And you're not really over gripping and banging it in like a hammer or just with all my might, you really want that movement, that flow because if you're on a long route, efficiency and endurance, it's kind of like this dance of I'm going to flick it versus muscle my way through it.
And so I'm learning like, okay, well, normal on left hand, I'm learning all those things, but on the right, I don't have a wrist flick, so what's that going to be like? And Andres Marin, he's been on the North Face team for a long time and just legend of a climber, sees me swinging, sees the angle of my pick, and he's like, "Come down," and takes a file and just starts sharpening it at a different angle. He goes, "The way you cut into the ice because of your body and the lack of being able to wrist flick, we're going to compensate by changing the angle of your pick." And it was just so amazing to be in the presence of professionals and they're wanting to help and they're seeing the possibility and it's not just like, "Oh, that doesn't look safe or that's probably too hard or too difficult." It was really amazing to go like, "I can't believe this. This is working. Season one, it's working."
Shelby Stanger:
The first time getting up a feature, what was that like for you?
Kimber Cross:
My first time getting up, I remember looking down, it's this feeling of like, "Did that just really happen?" It went from, "I can't do it, here's a picture, this whole process for a year and a half, and now here I am doing it and it's still the prototype, but just the fact that on the prototype, I climbed the ice and I didn't just fall or it didn't just come off my body, come off my arm." It was such an amazing feeling because as a teacher, part of our science curriculum, it's all about experimenting and coming up with a hypothesis and testing that hypothesis. And if it doesn't go well, that doesn't mean you're a failure, just go back to the drawing board. And I had been teaching this at a kindergarten level for so long, the process of experimenting and building and inventing. And I felt like I had this real life science experiment go right where I'm like, "With the help of a doctor, I invented a thing."
Shelby Stanger:
In the 10 years since Kimber first tried ice climbing, she's gone far beyond that first frozen cliff. She's summited Mount Rainier six times and now spends much of her climbing time in Alaska where her team is working toward a first descent and a remote mountain range. Ice climbing has taken Kimber to some incredible places and she loves the otherworldly feeling of hanging from a frozen waterfall. Personally, I think it sounds terrifying.
What's the scariest part of ice climbing?
Kimber Cross:
There are times where ice is really good and then there's a section of maybe ice is not so good and you're just kind of like, "Whew, I'm a little scared here." But really the biggest thing that scares me is overhead hazards. And I've been in areas where there have been close calls, a big pillar of ice has fallen close to a team I was with. And you just learn these things like you don't want to stand under daggers hanging above you, or if you're going to climb a route, how can you clean the route while you're climbing to mitigate hazards? And where and how do you place your belayer? Where's the belay stance going to be? Because as I'm swinging and kicking, ice falls, and if you think a cell phone size of ice, falling down on someone's hand or shoulder or head, it messes you up.
There's a lot of physical risk in it and you're always mitigating it, but I think overhead hazards and the way that they have taken out people that I've known, it really changes your risk tolerance. You're just kind of always on edge knowing things could go wrong. I've been in really, really, really cold temperatures and ice has fallen. I've been in warming temperatures and ice has fallen and we've had to back off routes. And I think if you can have your own risk assessment that's willing to back off something that is telling you, maybe the ice is making some noises that you know are kind of red flags, if you can back off and live another day, being a wise climber I think is really important in ice climbing.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm also curious what it sounds like, what it looks like, what it feels like.
Kimber Cross:
I think my favorite when I'm climbing up a pillar or ice on a face, when you can hear the flowing water inside of it, there's some ice that will form and it'll still be so clear that you can see inside. And it's thick enough to place a screw, but there's flowing water in the background. And so you just hear, we go get massages and we go turn on spa music at that massage or in our house and you hear flowing water. We go to sleep sometimes with flowing water. It's just such a beautiful sound. So to be on the ice in such an element where fear is dancing around you and you're taking some risks and you're mitigating risks and you're keeping your cool, you're calm, you're listening to the sounds of nature, that flowing water. And it's so fun and so fun to see.
And I'm always tempted to, I'm hanging on my prosthetic and I placed a screw, I clipped if I'm on lead and I just pull up my camera, I'm like, I just want to film this flowing water and the sounds. And I know I'm hanging on five inches of ice that's separating me from the flow of water, but it's beautiful and it can be meditative.
Shelby Stanger:
This year Kimber became the first female climber with an upper limb difference to climb Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, Colorado. When it's frozen, the waterfall almost looks like a weeping cedar tree, a dense column of ice with turquoise icicles branching out from the center. The route is widely considered to be one of the most difficult and dangerous ice lines in the country.
For people who haven't seen Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, take me there. How big is it? What's it look like?
Kimber Cross:
Yeah. So you have an approach, kind of a long hiking, you start in the dark and you start looking up at this route that is 300 plus feet, I think 365 feet is how long this huge route is. And you can't access it by car, you have to walk there. And so you're kind of at the base and you just see where the water has trickled, but as it spreads out, it creates kind of these ledges and these daggers of ice and these walls of ice. And the way it tends to freeze out there, some waterfalls are kind of like a curtain. If you think about the curtain of your window, just smooth across, nice, clean. And out here, it's just this very, very vertical canyon wall and the way the water flows over it, almost like layers on a 2D birthday cake, just these layers where you could stand on this ledge and you're like, "Oh, this is quite roomy," but it literally is just an ice blob.
And then above you are daggers or maybe another roof. And so you have to be so strategic about where you belay from, where you climb from. Water is still flowing at certain times over it, but then freezing instantly. We did one pitch and after my buddy got through it, I follow and I'm just covered in ice and it's frozen and you have to move kind of swiftly. The carabiners are freezing over, the slings are freezing, the screw in the ice is freezing. Suddenly I am a human popsicle. And as crazy as it sounds, it's so fun because you're climbing against the elements and against time. And my partner who took me up this route, we climbed together, Elias, he's like, "Watch how your body moves in this way and here's how you can make it more efficient even though you have the limitation of the angle." And I remember the first roof I had to get over, it's like a huge pull and he's like, "Take a big long swing with your left tool. It's nice in there. Okay. Okay. I got you now."
And so I'm literally doing the splits with this ice bulge ledge that he's standing on and belaying me from. And he's two feet away from me telling me, he's like, "Tighten your abs, tighten your abs." And I get over that first mega bulge to the top of the first pitch and it's blowing my mind that my prosthetic is working and the angles I have to move. I'm like, "It's just these minor adjustments that I have to make being an adaptive climber with this tool, but I'm doing it." And to complete the entire route, just standing at the top, he looked at me and he's like, "How does this feel?" And I was like, "I just am grateful to be in that long line of athletes with disabilities that are doing what two-handed people or normal people. We're normal too. We are now in this collective group of we can do things too."
And if six-year-old Kimber saw me, maybe I would've gotten to climbing sooner. I'm so grateful that I saw Jim Abbott, that I was able to do nine years of pitching because I remember in the fall, I'm working on a short film about my journey and I had cleaned my parents' house, kind of gone through and helped them get rid of things. And I found this file that I'd never seen before and I open it up, and this is back in November, and I open it up and I immediately see all these newspaper clippings and these articles from the '80s and the early '90s. And I was like, "They're all about limb difference kids and people and Jim Abbott." And I closed it and I was like, "I'm going to save this for when my producer's filming." And in my kitchen, we open it up and I start looking through the articles while we're filming and I grab this one that was about Jim.
And he was saying, "At first I was annoyed because every article, every radio, everything is always about your hand, you're a one-handed person that's in baseball. How do you feel? Oh my gosh, one hand, one hand." And he's like, "There's other things I want to talk about." He goes, "But if this article gets to a little boy or," and he said in 1986, "a little boy or a little girl that maybe has one hand and they believe in themselves a little bit more because of me talking about it again, it's worth it." And I look back and I'm crying during this scene because I was like, "I'm that little girl that he talked about." And I'm just like, "What a full circle moment. Would my life be like that? Would I be that level of representation?"
And so Bridal Veil Falls was so amazing to step into the history books of adaptive climbing and pushing grades and challenging perceptions. But I'm like, "Maybe my story is what's going to influence a kid or a mom or a dad, give them hope that their kid can go do something just like this. That's where it's at."
Shelby Stanger:
If you want to keep up with Kimber, find her on Instagram @kimberbelle, that's K-I-M-B-E-R-B-E-L-L-E. You can watch her short film now. It's called Membership in the Mountains. We'll link to it in our show notes. In addition to the film, Kimber is also writing a children's book series called Summit Kids that teaches kids about social emotional learning and how to be a good human.
Kimber Cross:
Book number one that I'm in the middle of writing is loosely based off of Bridal Veil Falls and my time climbing there. And it will feature diverse characters that really represent kids I've had in my classroom or people I've climbed with from all over the world.
Shelby Stanger:
If you liked this episode, check out our interview with Maureen Beck, the adaptive climber whose photo inspired Kimber to develop her own ice climbing prosthetic. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. I want to give a shout out to all the adaptive runners I saw last weekend at the Mammoth Trail Fest in Mammoth Lakes, California. I got to meet a few of you in person and I heard the race was just incredible.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce-Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Thank you again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard. As always, we love when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.