The 28-year-old German topped out on Dave MacLeod's E11 at Dumbarton Rock on 7 October, twenty years after the first ascent. A few hours later her climbing partner Nemuel Feurle followed her to the top.

In the twenty years since Dave MacLeod put up the world's first E11 on Dumbarton Rock near Glasgow, no woman had climbed Rhapsody. On 7 October Lara Neumeier changed that. According to Climbing magazine, hers was the tenth ascent of the route. Nemuel Feurle, who had been working the line with her all along, sent it a few hours later as the eleventh. Buster Martin had done it the week before, so in a matter of days Rhapsody went from eight ascents to eleven. We covered Feurle's ascent in a separate story.

The 35-metre line starts with an easy slab and a 7c+ hand crack. The last gear is a cluster of small nuts, and from there Neumeier counted 25 moves to the top with nothing in between. The crux, an 8A boulder problem, comes right at the end. She first came over in April for a week, sorted out the moves and the placements on top rope and had a few lead goes. At the end of September she was back for another nine days.

In spring she took the big fall three or four times. This autumn it was "maybe 20 or 30 times", she told Climbing. What kept spitting her off were the tiny footholds on the headwall. "It always felt like I was going to slip, and sometimes I did." After two rest days she linked the whole headwall from the rest to the top on lead. The next day she almost came off in the lower crack, which was unexpectedly wet, but held on and kept going. "Grabbing the top hold and mantling over the lip was a crazy feeling," she said afterwards.

That makes Neumeier the fifth woman to climb a 5.14c trad route, after Beth Rodden, Barbara Zangerl, Hazel Findlay and Emma Twyford, and the first to climb E11. She thinks 8c+ is about right for the climbing. MacLeod was delighted. "It was lovely to hear Rhapsody got a first female ascent from Lara and that people have been keen for that route in general," he told Climbing. The celebration was properly Scottish, with pizza round the corner, then whisky and darts in the pub.

Neumeier grew up in Füssen in the Allgäu and started climbing at two. This summer she became the second woman to complete the Alpine Trilogy of Silbergeier, Des Kaisers neue Kleider and End of Silence. The idea for Rhapsody came after Psychogramm, a trad route on micro-gear at the Bürser Platte that she climbed in spring 2025.

Sources: Climbing, PlanetMountain, Gripped

Photo: Dumbarton Rock North West Face, Mike Bean, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons