For the past five years, Hannah Morris has been moving through the world one pitch at a time, chasing lines of stone, quiet mornings, and that familiar ache that comes from giving yourself fully to the day. Climbing wasn’t just something she did; it was how she measured time, how she understood herself, how the mountains spoke back.

Then gravity had its say.

A fall. A hard stop. A severe fracture to her right leg. Overnight, the rhythm changed.

“Climbing always involves risk,” Hannah says. “But when that risk becomes real, you’re left staring straight at the question of why you’re out there in the first place.”

What followed wasn’t about grades or summits or ticking boxes. It was about waiting. Learning to sit still. Learning to listen. Recovery became its own long route, hospital rooms, surgeries, rehab days that stretched on like empty roads, each one asking for patience instead of power.

Stepping away from climbing as she knew it cracked something open. With distance came perspective, and with perspective, a deeper appreciation for the thing she’d built her life around, not as performance, but as practice. As a presence.

“This experience has changed how I see climbing,” Hannah says. “But it also reminded me why I fell in love with it in the first place.”

Less about the send. More about the why.

The Story