Katie makes the business pages

Katie's star seems to be rising even outside the climbing world. She's in the business section! ... That is, Katie Brown's Rock Talk blog here on YourClimbing.com got a mention this week in the Wall Street Journal, in Keith Huang's Blog Watch column.

I'd point you to the article but it's behind a "subscription wall" at WSJ.com. So I'll excerpt Keith's item here:

Professional climber Katie Brown, 26, has been scaling rock faces since she was a teenager, making an early name for herself by winning titles in the U.S. and in Europe. She says her blog helps readers "get an idea of who I am as a person, rather than just an image."

Along those lines, she discussed a recent vacation from climbing, writing that "realistically, climbing for a living, and all that comes with it, in addition to everything else that goes on in life, can be tiring, and I think it's okay to want to get away from it for a bit, even something as fun as climbing."

In addition to her writing, she posts video clips, perhaps the most notable a nail-biter in which she falls about 40 feet before an anchored rope stops her. In another post, she accentuates the positives despite failing to reach the summit of El Capitan, a famous 3,000-foot vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park: "When I got to the ground I had the immense pleasure of telling, essentially, the whole world about our lack of success." Ms. Brown led the ascent most of the way, "something which, a year ago, I would have been far too intimidated to do," she writes, adding: "best of all, I got to sleep on a wall." Other entries by Ms. Brown include accounts of climbing trips to Chile and Greece.