Progression

How Keenan Takahashi is pushing the highball envelope.

- James Lucas

IN SEPTEMBER 2014, the Californian Keenan Takahashi grabbed a crimp with his left hand. He curled his right hand around another crimp on the 30-foot Kush Boulder, below Yosemite’s Lost Brother formation. His moustache formed a thick broom on his upper lip, which quivered with exertion. He steadied himself and then swung his left foot hard across the wall, double-clutching a sloper, maxing out his plus-six-inch wingspan. Takahashi finished the first ascent of the highball V11 with El Cap as a backdrop. The problem, with its wild 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, 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 the summer before his senior year in high school. He’d traveled to France on an exchange program, a trip that introduced him to climbing. And so the problem became Winged Tiger, named after the airborne predator.

Winged Tiger is just one climb in the El Portal, California–based 26-year-old’s expanding résumé. Beyond his occasional roped exploits, where’s he’s climbed the trad routes Broken Arrow (5.13c) and Top Gun (5.13d), both in Tuolumne, Takahashi has established over a dozen double-digit boulder problems across the western US 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, South Africa.