Kai Lightner: The Last Six Years

Kai Lightner is no stranger to the spotlight—or to this magazine. He's been climbing since he was six, when he joined the climbing team at a gym in North Carolina. Four years later Lightner won his first national title, and the wins just kept coming. In 2016, while still in high school, Lightner wrote an essay for Alpinist 55 about learning how to trad climb from Doug Robinson. A few years later,…