AMANDA FOX

“Although my favorite color is green, much of what I own is blue. Including my eyes,” says Amanda Fox, 23, originally of Lake Norman, North Carolina. A swimmer in high school, Fox abandoned the butterfly stroke when she went to college at Appalachian State, located fortuitously in the Southeastern climbing hotspot known as Boone. There she picked up a nasty climbing habit. (“I already had the biceps for it, and I’m not afraid of heights,” she says. “ . . . And I wanted to show the boys up.”) Fox’s favorite crags include the Red River Gorge (the New River Gorge is great too, she adds, “except that the snakes are out to get you.”), Horse Pens 40, and Rocktown. Today, like seemingly every other climber in America, Fox lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she interns at UC (see her 411 piece on climbing in the computer age, p. 28) and slings brews to the depraved climbers at the Southern Sun Pub and Brewery. When asked which she’d forsake given the choice of climbing, writing, or beer, she chose beer (to “avoid the gut,” she says), adding she’d give up writing under the circumstances that she “got paid to drink beer and climb rocks.” So would we, Amanda, so would we. . . .