Black Diamond Presents: Onsight

Photographer: Janelle Dransfield Athlete: Seneida Biendarra Location: Utah

Black Diamond Presents: Onsight

Featuring blind athlete and BD Product Developer Seneida Biendarra on her emotional journey to gold at the 2023 Paraclimbing World Cup in Salt Lake City.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 2024

When her vision began to deteriorate, Seneida found solace in climbing. But it wasn't until she found climbers that she finally learned to open up and accept her disability. This film by Janelle Dransfield and Rachel Ross features blind athlete and Black Diamond Product Developer Seneida Biendarra, as she finds herself embracing her journey on a worldwide competition stage.

Black Diamond Presents: Onsight

Film: Janelle Dransfield and Rachel Ross

Approaching the crag sets the bar for the day—traversing the rocks, trees and drops of a trail isn’t just a challenge, it also provides feedback for how well my vision will cooperate. Each step is carefully selected based on a tiny tunnel of vision that is an often-unreliable navigator. As my eyes scan back and forth to expand my range of sight, I collect information through a small golf-ball-sized periscope that displays 5° of the world at a time. What I can see is clear on a good day, sometimes veiled by flashing dots or static, but useful enough to see the width of the trail and find footing in steep terrain. Sometimes, my optic nerve swells, and the tunnel of sight constricts and dims. On these days there’s no opportunities to look out at the vistas, 100 percent of my attention is dedicated to glimpsing the next spot to place my foot. Search, step, balance, repeat—until it’s time to climb.

If it seems like that process would be frustrating, it is. I remember how much easier hiking used to be and mourn the loss of the sighted life I once lived. Climbing is different because it’s always been hard. It wasn’t until after I started to lose my sight that I tied in for the first time at the base of an ice pillar in Wisconsin. When crossing the street was still scary, climbing ice felt like flying. When the snow melted out, I found rock shoes and a sport where I didn’t feel different. If I had the patience and endurance to hang out until I could spy the next hold, I could climb just as hard as my friends. Climbing provided a space where movement was controlled and deliberate, and fear served a purpose. Often, navigating the steep talus trail up to the crag would prove more frustrating than the climbing, where I felt like I was back in control on the vertical plane. Blindness is extraordinarily humbling. Having a space to feel powerful and capable allowed me to rebuild my confidence from zero.

I’ve always struggled to understand the adaptive part of myself; as a partially sighted person, I spend a lot of effort trying to blend in. When the public perception of blindness is binary, concealing my “invisible disability” felt natural. And without the obvious markers of sight loss (e.g. cane or guide dog), it felt dishonest to identify as a blind person. Me? I was a climber, an engineer. Maybe it’s because of the competent sense of self I had built up before my diagnosis, but I feel guilty burdening those around me with the reality of my struggle.

For a while, I wasn’t sure if I’d meet other climbers like me. I had wanted to; I just didn’t know how. It took a mentor pushing me to attend the Adaptive Climber’s Festival at the Red River Gorge for me to finally start accepting my disability through the lens of a sport that had previously helped me escape it. At ACF, I was surrounded by the only people I’d ever met who were challenged in the same way I was, who had their own stories of loss or feeling isolated by their disability. In this community, I reveled in the freedom that came with “saying the quiet part out loud.” Those honest conversations broke through eight years of walls I had built up, and I finally found the words to tell my story.

—Seneida Biendarra