YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. – Whatever part inside Tommy Caldwell that made him attempt the seemingly impossible – a free climb of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall – might have been born in 2000 when he and three others were kidnapped by militants while climbing in the Pamir-Alai range of Kyrgyzstan. They escaped after six days when Caldwell shoved an armed guard over a cliff.
Or it might have come shortly after, when Caldwell severed his left index finger with a table saw during a home renovation.
As with a concert pianist or a surgeon, the index finger is a useful digit for a world-class rock climber, and some worried that Caldwell’s career was over.
Instead, his biggest climbs have been performed with nine fingers.
But to his parents, Caldwell was hard-wired against giving up from the beginning. He thought he could dig to China.
“He once dug a hole so darn big, we could have used it as a foundation for a small house,” Caldwell’s father, Mike, said from his home in Estes Park, Colorado.
Tommy was 3 when Mike, a climber himself, attached a rope to his son and led him up the 200-foot Twin Owls formation in Rocky Mountain National Park, winning him over with the promise of flying a kite at the top. (They tried, but it was too windy.)
Tommy Caldwell is 36 now. For more than a week, he and his climbing partner, Kevin Jorgeson, have been scaling the Dawn Wall, attempting what some believe is the hardest rock climb in the world. On Tuesday night, Caldwell completed the last of the trickiest sections, Pitch 16, giving him a clear shot toward the top, while Jorgeson continued to struggle to complete the sideways traverse of Pitch 15 and was saddled with battered fingers.
But while this push began on Dec. 27, when the two men last touched the floor of Yosemite Valley, it took root nearly a decade ago. The idea of free climbing the 3,000-foot rock formation – to use nothing but hands and feet to move upward, relying on ropes only to stop falls and pull equipment – was thought to be virtually impossible. But Caldwell thrives on the virtually impossible.
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“I have a very distinct goal all the time that I’m working toward, and I love the way it makes me live,” Caldwell said Sunday from the midcliff camp that he and Jorgeson had, 1,200 feet up El Capitan. “Most of the days of the year I wake up with this on my mind, thinking, ‘What am I going to do today to get one step closer?’ It gets me outside every day in the mountains in beautiful places, pushing myself. It makes me live at a higher level, having this as part of my life.”
When he first considered the Dawn Wall, Caldwell and his wife at the time, professional climber Beth Rodden, rappelled its vertical face, exploring if it could be free-climbed despite its featureless surface.
That he is still working on it 10 years later does not surprise Rodden.
“I’d say, ‘That kind of sounds like Tommy,’” Rodden said Tuesday.
Caldwell had plenty of rocks to climb while growing up in Estes Park, at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, and his parents, Mike and Terry, were supportive of his pursuits.
When Caldwell was 17, he went to watch a national sport-climbing competition in Utah. He entered the amateur contest and won it, earning a spot in the main event the next day. He won that, too. Sponsors called, and he has been a professional climber since.
“He went from diddly squat to red hot in one day,” said Mike, now a retired middle-school teacher working as an outdoors guide. “You tend to enjoy things that you’re good at. Unfortunately, Tommy became good at something that was totally impractical.”
He has built a résumé of first ascents since, including many on El Capitan. He is one of National Geographic’s adventurers of the year for 2014-15, recognized as “arguably the best all-around rock climber on the planet.” In February, he and Alex Honnold conquered the seven razor-edge summits of Patagonia’s Fitz Roy massif in four days.
Caldwell is the understated sort, about 5-foot-9 and 150 pounds, with a big-toothed grin and sneaky sense of humor. He does not stand out in a crowd unless that crowd is full of climbers, who know exactly who he is.
“He’s definitely not this showy, big-ego guy,” Rodden said. “But he’s one of the most influential climbers of our time. He just keeps on pushing the limit in all these different realms.”
Rodden was Caldwell’s girlfriend when the two, along with John Dickey and Jason Smith, were climbing in Kyrgyzstan. Rebels from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan kidnapped them, then spent days shepherding them through the mountains while caught in gunfire-filled chases with the Kyrgyzstan army.
As first detailed in an Outside magazine article by Greg Child, the group did not expect to survive. But when they found themselves hiking with just one armed guard, they saw an opportunity. Caldwell grabbed the soldier by the gun slung over his shoulder and shoved him over a cliff, presumably to his death.
The tale became international news – the group, for a time, declined to name which of them had pushed the guard – and some debated its accuracy. The guard was later found alive, and he confirmed the story.
“It’s still a huge part of him,” Mike Caldwell said. “For the first year after that, Tommy was almost nonverbal, he was so shaken by it. We couldn’t do anything offbeat enough to get his mind off it. Then the information came that the guy survived. That totally changed Tommy, that he didn’t kill somebody.”
Friends close to Caldwell say his ability to endure suffering is legendary, and part of that probably stems from what he and the others had endured in Kyrgyzstan. Obstacles in climbing cannot compare.
“When he’s up on a wall, it’s almost first nature to him,” said Rebecca Caldwell, Caldwell’s wife since 2010. “The first time I was with him on a wall, I was like, ‘You’re almost more natural up here than you are on the ground.’ He is so comfortable in places where most people would be entirely uncomfortable.”
In 2008, the filmmaker Josh Lowell was working on a climbing movie called “Progression.” He asked Caldwell if he had any big ascents in the works.
“He said, ‘There is one thing: I’ve started playing around on the Dawn Wall,’” Lowell recalled. “‘I still don’t know if it’s possible.’”
The film, released in 2009, included a sequence of Caldwell’s quest to eventually free climb the Dawn Wall. Jorgeson, a climber from Santa Rosa, California, saw the film and was struck by the quest. He contacted Caldwell and asked if he wanted a partner.
It has been their undertaking since, devouring much of their time and effort.
A 2010 attempt was aborted because of storms. In 2011, Jorgeson broke his ankle in a fall on the Dawn Wall. Caldwell continued, using others on belay, including his wife and his father, but could not get past Pitch 14, perhaps the hardest section of the climb.
“His third year on it, he said if it doesn’t happen this time, this is it,” Rebecca said. “Then he came down at the end of the season and said, ‘I think I’m going to go back.’”
No one was surprised. The next two autumns, Caldwell and Jorgeson continued scouting the climb, mapping sequences and practicing individual pitches.
In November, Caldwell successfully navigated Pitch 14 for the first time, which meant he had finally managed to practice separately on all the pitches, what climbers call redpointing.
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Energized and optimistic, determined to string all 31 pitches together in one push, the climbers waited for a favorable long-range forecast, a couple of weeks of dry, cool weather. It came in late December. Caldwell left Rebecca and their 20-month-old son, Fitz, and returned to Yosemite.
“I’m a little bit worried what’s going to happen if we do this because it’ll be like the end of a big long relationship, you know?” Caldwell said Sunday.
He laughed. The horizontal world was 1,200 feet below. Another 1,800 feet soared overhead.
“Hopefully I’ll be able to fly high for a few months, and then figure out something,” Caldwell said. “Through climbing I’ve learned to find goals and work toward them. That’s just the way I love to live. This is just an especially big and long one of those goals.”
Source:: National Post
