Michaela Kiersch

Michaela Kiersch (born 1994) is an American female rock climber and competition climber from Chicago, Illinois who is known for being both one of the strongest female sport climbers in the world, and also one of the strongest female boulder climbers in the world.

Kiersch continued to take part in competitions on natural surfaces, and won the female category in the international outdoor bouldering competition, the Hueco Rock Rodeo, in 2019 and in 2024.

Rock climbing Kiersch came to national attention by making the first female free ascent (FFFA) of notable American sport-climbing routes, including The Golden Ticket (2016) and Necessary Evil (2018), both at , and Super Tweak (2021), America's first . In September 2021, Kiersch came to international prominence by making the second female ascent of Dreamcatcher, a famous graded sport-climb in Squamish, British Columbia, and her first ascent at the grade.

During 2022, after completing her doctorate in occupational therapy, Kiersch toured Europe where she showed her bouldering skills by completing internationally notable boulder problems including New Base Line, her first , followed by Tigris SDS, also at that grade. She was noted at the time as being the only female climber that had completed both a graded sport-climbing route and a graded boulder problem in the last twelve months.

By 2024, she became the first woman in history to have climbed both a graded sport-climbing route (which she did in 2023 with La Rambla in Spain), and a graded bouldering problem (which she did with Dreamtime in Switzerland, which was also the FFFA). In 2025, she became the first American female climber to complete the first free ascent (FFA) of a graded sport-climbing route with her ascent of Mad Lib at Lone Rock Point in Vermont.