#498： Lessons in Persistence From Climber Tommy Caldwell
Episode Stats
Summary
On El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, there was a wall that had never been climbed and some said would never be climbed. But in 2015, Tommy Caldwell, along with Kevin Jorgensen, became the first to free climb it. Today, I speak to Tommy about what led up to that historic climb, starting from how he got involved in rock climbing in his childhood, why people often misinterpret what free climbing means, and the harrowing experience of being held hostage by and escaping from rebels in Kyrgyzstan.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:10.860
On El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, there was a wall that had never been climbed and some
00:00:15.660
said would never be climbed. It's called the Dawn Wall. But in 2015, Tommy Caldwell,
00:00:20.560
along with Kevin Jorgensen, became the first to free climb it. Today I speak to Tommy about what
00:00:24.580
led up to that historic climb, starting from how he got involved in rock climbing in his childhood.
00:00:28.760
We begin our conversation discussing the different types of rock climbing and why
00:00:31.980
people often misinterpret what free climbing means. We then dig into Tommy's climbing career,
00:00:36.800
including his early success in sport climbing, and the harrowing experience of being held hostage by
00:00:41.240
and escaping from rebels in Kyrgyzstan. We then discuss how Tommy responded to losing a finger,
00:00:45.980
those are important when you're a rock climber, and also getting divorced shortly thereafter,
00:00:49.700
and why he decided to climb the Dawn Wall. We begin our conversation discussing the years-long
00:00:54.140
process of preparing for the climb and the virtue of what Tommy calls elective suffering.
00:00:58.340
There are a lot of little potent lessons here on how to remain persistent and driven in the face
00:01:02.040
of setbacks that apply beyond rock climbing to every aspect of life. After the show's over,
00:01:06.600
check out our show notes at aom.is slash dawnwall.
00:01:23.060
So you were one of the first ever, along with Kevin Jorgensen, to free climb the Dawn Wall of
00:01:29.620
El Capitan. We'll talk about what it means to free climb, because this is something I learned
00:01:34.100
about rock climbing, reading your book. There's all types of different types of climbing.
00:01:37.480
Before we get to that moment where you did this, let's talk about your backstory. When did you get
00:01:41.680
started with rock climbing, and when did you figure out this was going to be your thing for the rest of
00:01:47.660
Yeah. So, I mean, rock climbing was a family trade. My dad was a mountain guide. I was out
00:01:52.360
roped climbing from age three. So when I was young, it was just kind of like what we did. I was into it,
00:01:57.640
but I wasn't hugely passionate about it. I didn't know that it was going to be like a thing that
00:02:01.460
directed my life in any ways until I was a teenager. And I think part of the reason for that
00:02:08.020
was there was no other young climbers when I was young. I was like the only one. But when I was a
00:02:12.680
teenager, climbing gyms were starting to come around. There was a competition series that
00:02:16.840
started up. And so I suddenly had a community of friends through climbing. And it was something
00:02:24.080
that I was already kind of good at since I'd been doing it since I was three years old.
00:02:29.000
So you mentioned your father. He's been rock climbing back in the 70s and 80s. And I thought
00:02:33.140
this was interesting because in the 70s and 80s, rock climbing really wasn't a thing except for
00:02:39.140
like, you know, sort of fringe folk. What was the sport like back then when your dad was getting
00:02:43.980
started in it? I mean, if you're into the history of climbing, it was certainly a thing. Like there
00:02:48.700
was big, incredible climbs being done and sort of all the techniques were being pioneered. And so he was
00:02:55.660
kind of in with the forefront of that, like realizing that the biggest walls in the world could actually
00:03:02.360
be climbed. But you're right. It was very fringe. It was, you know, it was in an era where most
00:03:08.800
people didn't want to do risky things just in general. So rock climbingers were kind of out
00:03:12.900
there. And so my dad took it up. He loved it. He did it until my sister was born. But back then,
00:03:18.620
it was way more dangerous than it is now. You know, just the protection systems weren't what
00:03:22.800
they are now. And so when my sister was born, he actually quit. He took up bodybuilding instead
00:03:27.160
for a handful of years until climbing got safer again with the invention of sport climbing.
00:03:32.860
Well, yeah, I thought that was really interesting. It seemed like back then when it was first
00:03:36.280
getting started, there was like this sort of very risk-taking ethos. There was like a concern
00:03:41.140
about how you rock climbed, not necessarily if you made it to the top, but if you did it in a
00:03:45.440
certain way, right? Yeah. I mean, climbers were rebels for sure back then. They're counter-cultural.
00:03:50.740
They're kind of shutting mainstream society. And so in a world that told them not to take risks,
00:03:57.480
And so you mentioned, so that sort of started changing with the invention of sport climbing.
00:04:02.620
So walk us through this for people who aren't familiar with the different types of rock
00:04:05.480
climbing. Cause I, I kind of got confused. Uh, you know, I found myself getting confused
00:04:09.720
and had to go back. So like there's sport climbing. It's like, what is sport climbing?
00:04:13.760
How is that different from other types of climbing? And like, what type of climbing do you do?
00:04:17.800
Right. So there's traditional rock climbing, which, you know, back in the fifties meant that you
00:04:24.240
took, took little bits of metal and you hammered them into cracks, much the way a carpenter would
00:04:31.320
pound in a nail and you attach carabiners. Carabiners were invented back then to these
00:04:37.080
bits of metal and then you climbed up. And so the evolution of that is what we now call traditional
00:04:42.660
climbing, which these days essentially means you're, you're mostly placing your own protection
00:04:47.820
in the natural features of the rock. And one of the reasons it was, it was so dangerous back then
00:04:53.120
is because it really was just like stuff that you'd go to the hardware store, go to the like
00:04:57.900
junkyard and scavenge and pound them into cracks. So it wasn't, it was hard to test it. It wasn't
00:05:02.900
all that solid. Nowadays we have all, you know, a whole quiver of really fancy, highly tested,
00:05:08.000
um, tools that we can use to make it a lot safer. But anyways, placing your own gear is
00:05:13.100
traditional rock climbing. Sport climbing is where the first ascensionist comes along and drills a line
00:05:19.940
of bolts up the route that stay there permanently. So what this allows is for falling to be
00:05:27.900
really an option. Like you can kind of fall whenever you want on most sport climbs and
00:05:32.780
you'll just sort of slowly come to a gentle stop at the end of the, of the end of your rope as your,
00:05:37.320
as your belayer is belaying you. And so it allows you to push the difficulty standards
00:05:42.040
really hard. That's yeah. That's sort of the simplistic difference of those two
00:05:47.300
aspects of the sport. Okay. And then like, what's like free climbing?
00:05:51.760
Yeah. So free climbing is a terrible term. First of all, we need,
00:05:54.280
right. We need to get the word free out of the whole scene, but I don't think that's going to
00:05:59.440
happen. But what free climbing means is essentially you are climbing the surface of the rock,
00:06:05.240
you know, grabbing the little edges, twisting your feet in the cracks, and that's how you make
00:06:09.780
forward progress. But you do have the ropes and the equipment there to catch you in case you fall.
00:06:14.400
And it did. And so free climbing is different from aid climbing, where when you're aid climbing,
00:06:18.460
you pound those bits of metal into the rock, or you, you know, these days you use cams or nuts or all the
00:06:22.820
fancy tools. And then you attach basically a series of, of leg loops or a little ladder,
00:06:29.100
nylon ladder to those pieces of gear, and you climb the ladder. So you're not really climbing
00:06:33.780
the surface of the rock. You're just, you're just using this very mechanical method to ascend the wall.
00:06:39.160
And the reason it's confusing is because most people think when they hear free, they think no
00:06:43.540
rope, you fall, you die. So that's free soloing. Okay. Yeah. So that's what confused like the
00:06:49.060
difference between free climbing and free soloing. Cause I, when I, yeah, when I hear free,
00:06:52.060
I'm thinking, Oh, there's no ropes at all, but there are ropes. You're kind of attaching yourself
00:06:56.620
as you make progress up the wall. Correct. Yeah. And free climbing you are, although free soloing
00:07:01.260
is a form of free climbing, but you just don't have the ropes when you're free soloing.
00:07:05.540
Okay. So, uh, you started doing sort of traditional rock climbing with your dad when he was doing it
00:07:10.780
in high school, you got into sport climbing, correct? Yeah. I got into sport climbing and then pretty
00:07:17.160
quickly into competition climbing. Cause it was, it was really the, like the gymnastic form
00:07:22.640
of climbing. It's like, you know, gymnastics is, you know, little, little body types, you know,
00:07:27.800
kind of scrawny, strong people are really good at sport climbing. That's kind of what I was big
00:07:32.000
adventure climbers or more traditional climbers have to have a lot of experience to do it safely.
00:07:36.200
And, you know, when I was, when I was a teenager, I just didn't have tons of experience.
00:07:39.800
All right. So competition climbing, this is another twist here. So like competition climbing,
00:07:43.500
like, what does that look like? Yeah. So competition climbing is essentially sport climbing
00:07:48.420
on an artificially built wall where they can control all the elements. They can make the route
00:07:53.640
harder and harder as you go higher. And so the way that the scoring works is usually the person who
00:07:59.360
makes it the highest is the winner. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. And there's also bouldering by the way.
00:08:05.900
So bouldering is just on small rocks where you're not high enough generally to hurt yourself all that
00:08:10.960
badly when you fall. So you don't use ropes, but you just land on the ground. And there's also
00:08:14.560
bouldering competitions. So you were doing this all throughout high school. After high school,
00:08:19.920
what was life like for you? Did you decide to throw yourself deeper into rock climbing at this point?
00:08:24.520
Yeah. You know, I wasn't a very good student, I would say. And as I progressed through middle school
00:08:31.800
and high school, I found myself going on all these amazing trips at first with my dad. But then at some
00:08:37.380
point in high school, I started going on them alone and I was seeing the world and I was
00:08:40.740
meeting really cool people. And I was learning a lot. The classroom was never a great environment
00:08:46.540
for me to learn, but traveling the world was a really great environment. And so I got totally
00:08:51.420
addicted to it still within high school. I graduated early from my senior year of high school and went
00:08:56.520
to France for a month. And I also would go on big climbing trips like every summer vacation.
00:09:02.160
And so by the time it was time to go to college, I felt like I had found something better that suited
00:09:08.800
me better, you know, like the idea of going to college and which would make it so I had to stop
00:09:13.760
traveling. I had a lot of dread when I had that thought.
00:09:18.120
What did your mom think about this? I mean, I imagine your dad really encouraged this passion
00:09:23.200
of yours, but like, was your mom kind of like, yeah, I don't know about that. Was she like a typical mom?
00:09:27.340
Well, it was interesting. My father was an educator, he's a middle school teacher.
00:09:32.460
And so he kind of had, he could see it from both directions. Like he thought school was very
00:09:36.840
important, but I think both my mother and my father could look at me and see that, you know,
00:09:42.580
I had a chance to do well at this sport of climbing. And they also kind of admired the hand
00:09:48.880
to mouth existence that rock climbing, the full-time rock climbing was, they thought that was good for
00:09:53.840
you to go through. It's almost like going on a pilgrimage or something. Like, so for several
00:09:58.240
years, I lived on like $50 a month and traveled around and climbed. And you learn a lot about the
00:10:03.620
world when you do that. And so they were in support of that. They wanted me to live an impoverished
00:10:08.460
lifestyle for a while. And they, I don't think they ever dreamed that it would have turned into
00:10:12.920
what it is now. I thought they, they figured I'd go and travel around the world and climb for a few
00:10:16.720
years and then go back to college. But I never ended up doing that.
00:10:19.440
That, that didn't happen. Well, you also talk about after college, you know, you did a lot
00:10:23.960
of traveling. One of the places you went was France, right?
00:10:26.940
Yeah. I mean, I go to France almost every year still. So from the time I was in, you know,
00:10:32.920
just out of high school, or even before I graduated from, from high school until now I go to France,
00:10:37.640
So what's going on there in the rock climbing world in France?
00:10:40.320
So when I was younger, it was all about sport climbing. France was the center of the world for
00:10:44.700
sport climbers and the best physically strongest climbers were, were in France. And therefore the,
00:10:50.540
the, the way that the rock forms in France is these big overhanging limestone caves. And that's
00:10:56.060
incredibly gymnastic, fun way to climb. And if you want to become a good climber,
00:11:00.740
it's best to spend a lot of years building those kinds of strengths. So yeah, that's,
00:11:04.980
that's the reason I went to France now. And that's still the reason I go to France or back then.
00:11:09.180
And it's still the reason I go to France now is to kind of, it's like training.
00:11:12.020
Well, another thing you did experimented with while you were traveling Europe and traveling
00:11:16.280
the world after college was alpine. This is another type of climbing here. Alpine,
00:11:20.520
or is that, was it, was that, has that what you call alpinist alpining?
00:11:23.540
Yeah. Alpine climbing is basically climbing and on big mountains and, you know, snowy environments.
00:11:29.320
Okay. So that's when you, you probably see the guys with like the giant ax, the pickaxe thing.
00:11:33.780
Yeah. I mean, generally, I mean, it, it can encompass a lot of things depending on
00:11:38.460
sort of the style of alpine climbing you want to do. Like I generally stay away from the snow,
00:11:45.000
although I do. I, well, I say that with a bit of hesitation. Sometimes dealing with snow and
00:11:49.360
ice climbing is just a must to get to a lot of, to the tops of a lot of the mountains that I want
00:11:53.180
to climb. But generally I try and climb the sheer big rock walls, which means I usually have an ice
00:11:58.900
axe with me, but I'm not using it that much of the time.
00:12:01.520
All right. So in college, you're, you're making a living rock climbing. How do rock climbers
00:12:06.240
make money? Like are there, do they, do you win money at competitions? Is it sponsorships?
00:12:12.760
Yeah. In my college years, that's how it started. I would, since I had been climbing since age three,
00:12:17.980
I could make a little bit of money at competitions. But like I said, that amounted to on average $50 a
00:12:24.300
month. Like I'd usually spend most of my competition winnings going to the next competition.
00:12:28.180
And I was like good at that, but I wasn't that good at that. There was, there was another
00:12:32.320
gentleman, another friend of mine named Chris Sharma, who basically would win every competition
00:12:36.700
he entered back then. So he made a better living than I did. But pretty soon I started to acquire
00:12:44.000
a little bit of sponsorship. One of my first sponsors, 510, you know, the, the, the sponsorship
00:12:51.360
manager had come from, I think the tennis world. And she'd seen sponsorship of really young people
00:12:57.340
go kind of badly oftentimes. And so she was really concerned about making sure that I stayed
00:13:02.400
humble. And, but it really, it was, it was just like, at first it was just like getting
00:13:06.400
three pairs of free shoes a year. And then it's just sort of gotten better and better since
00:13:11.080
then as the sports grown. And yeah, now there's like legitimate climbing celebrities, which really
00:13:19.740
So you've been traveling the world after high school. In 2000, you decided to go climbing in
00:13:24.900
Kyrgyzstan. What, what was going on in Kyrgyzstan that made an attractive place to happen? And then
00:13:31.900
By the time I was like 19 and 20, I was, I was starting sort of to transition out of sport climbing
00:13:38.040
and get into big wall free climbing. So climbing really big walls, you know, traditional climbing,
00:13:43.980
which is way more adventurous. And my favorite place to do that was Yosemite. But you always dream
00:13:49.760
about a place more exotic because Yosemite has some of the best big walls in the world,
00:13:53.840
but you know, it's right in the middle of Yosemite National Park in California. But there
00:13:58.800
was this place in Kyrgyzstan that had rock and walls similar to Yosemite. And it also had good
00:14:06.100
weather because there is big walls all over the world, but some of them are like in Pakistan at
00:14:10.760
their, their really high elevations or in Baffin Island. And you know, you got to go across fjords and
00:14:16.140
just deal with a lot more. Kyrgyzstan had great weather and big walls. And it was, and it was a place
00:14:22.200
that people had been going for probably a decade, but there was still a lot of first ascents to be
00:14:26.240
done. There was tons of terrain to explore. So that's kind of what drew us there, but really it
00:14:32.280
drew the other members of the team there. I was just like the tagalog boyfriend. My, my, my girlfriend
00:14:36.680
at the time, Beth Rodden was sponsored by the North Face and she got an opportunity to go on this trip.
00:14:42.060
And then she kind of convinced the North Face to invite me along as a rigger for, for ropes. So I could
00:14:47.440
put up ropes so the photographers could kind of get around and take photos to advertise the North
00:14:52.520
Face equipment. But then while you were there, you were climbing, you guys got helped, became
00:14:56.340
hostages of some rebels at the area. What was there a war going on? What was happening there?
00:15:00.480
Yeah. I mean, it turned into a war that year. We were, we're, we're climbing our first wall of the
00:15:05.760
trip. So we're climbing this like 2000 foot wall called the yellow wall. And these walls are big
00:15:09.760
enough that they take multiple days. So we're sleeping in our portal edges, which are like our hanging
00:15:13.920
clock cots, a thousand feet up the wall this one morning when a rebel insurgency called the
00:15:19.220
Islamic movement, Uzbekistan moved into the valley. And the political situation is, is a bit complicated,
00:15:24.340
but you know, in some ways it boils down to opium, opium trade. And then sometimes they try and
00:15:29.260
traffic the drugs over these remote high mountain valleys. Cause there's, there's, there's not much
00:15:33.940
in the way of border patrol back there. And, and that part of Kyrgyzstan is, is there's borders
00:15:40.360
everywhere? Like the borders of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were both within like 30 miles of us.
00:15:45.940
And so it just so happened that they came through this valley that we're climbing in and they saw us
00:15:53.440
up on the wall and they came to the base of the wall with their long range assault rifle at first,
00:16:00.100
you know, kind of at dawn and they started shooting up at us and, you know, they're pretty good shots.
00:16:04.560
They were able to get bullets right between our two portal edges, which were about four feet apart.
00:16:13.720
Six very life-changing days that the whole situation elevated drastically. Like once we got
00:16:20.300
down, we were taken hostage. And then just a few hours later, the Kyrgyz military moved in the valley
00:16:26.200
and a full-on war broke out around us. Yeah, it was, it was intense in a way that I couldn't even
00:16:37.000
The short answer is we ended up pushing our one remaining captor off a cliff and running to a
00:16:44.740
Kyrgyz military outpost, which was about six or eight miles down the valley. But obviously a lot of,
00:16:50.040
you know, a lot led up to that over six days. We, we, we, you know, we were starving. When,
00:16:56.560
when the Kyrgyz military showed up, we had to abandon all of our food and warm clothing
00:16:59.740
and run as captors of the Islamic movement in Uzbekistan and hide for those six days. And
00:17:07.080
we progressively got weaker and, you know, we're, we're pretty close to succumbing to hypothermia.
00:17:12.580
And so it got quite desperate and yeah. So, but our, our captors were almost worse off than we
00:17:18.340
were in a way because they had to abandon all their food and warm clothing and we're climbers and
00:17:21.940
this was really steep terrain. So we were kind of comfortable on the terrain in a way that they
00:17:26.540
We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:17:29.740
And now back to the show. And it's, I mean, how did this change your climbing career? This is
00:17:37.580
I mean, it changed it in a lot of ways. Like I said, going on into the trip, I wasn't a well-known
00:17:42.300
climber. I was kind of just like tag alone long boyfriend. We got back from Kyrgyzstan and then Beth,
00:17:49.240
you know, my girlfriend at the time, we, we bonded very heavily. And we also were trying to find a way
00:17:55.520
to kind of cope with the trauma of what we had been through. So we, we climbed together and we
00:18:02.580
were fueled. And I would say me more than her possibly by this sort of like deeper, darker,
00:18:09.340
almost stronger force. Like climbing had been my kind of my safe place. It had been what had brought
00:18:14.580
me joy for my entire life. And so when I was in a place where I was feeling all mixed up in the world,
00:18:20.080
that's where I returned to, I went to El Cap, but sensations like fear and pain had been totally
00:18:25.340
reset. And I pretty quickly realized that if I can go big while climbing and not really have to worry
00:18:30.680
as much about fear and pain, I do way better. And so it went from this kind of devastation to
00:18:37.100
empowerment, to sort of curiosity about the limits of, of my chosen passion, which was,
00:18:44.480
which was big while climbing. And so I really jumpstarted this, this, this, I guess, I don't know,
00:18:49.500
I don't know, a career doesn't seem like the right word, but jumpstarted what my life is today.
00:18:53.880
Well, then what happened a few years later, you, this was devastating. You, you accidentally
00:18:57.260
sawed off your index finger because you were, you guys were building a house together.
00:19:00.940
Yeah. That was, that was only like a year or less than a year after Kyrgyzstan.
00:19:05.140
Yeah. And fingers are really important for a rock climber.
00:19:07.800
Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it was, it was at a time in my life when I, you know, the only,
00:19:13.760
the only real future that I knew was, was rock climbing and I was starting to make a living at
00:19:20.420
it. I was like, this, this is something that I could actually kind of support a lifestyle doing.
00:19:25.480
And then I'd sawed off a finger and just in a home remodeling accident, I was using a table saw and
00:19:29.860
not that experienced with using a table saw and ended up chopping it off. And yeah, like you said,
00:19:34.860
most, I think everybody in my community, except for maybe Beth and maybe my father were like,
00:19:40.180
he's done. Like climbing is so much about finger strength. And if you lose a finger, it's over.
00:19:45.000
But I had this pretty pivotal moment in the hospital. I was in the hospital for two,
00:19:50.700
two weeks. I went through three surgeries and they just didn't work. Like in the end,
00:19:56.180
the doctor came in and he sat down next to me and he said, Tommy, you know, we've tried everything we
00:20:02.400
can. Your finger, your finger is essentially dead. We're going to have to remove it permanently.
00:20:06.320
And you should start thinking out about what else you want to do in your life. Cause you're not going
00:20:11.160
to be able to be a professional climber anymore. The doctor was actually a climber himself.
00:20:16.380
And then he stood up and left. And I remember Beth looking at me and just being like, he has no
00:20:20.900
idea what he's talking about. And that was really, that was really the right thing. And so I don't
00:20:24.960
know. I don't know if it's just inherently built in to me, but when I have these big challenges or
00:20:29.760
these big setbacks, they just, they turn into fuel. And so Kyrgyzstan was that, but my finger in a way
00:20:35.100
was that too, you know, I wanted to prove the doctor wrong in a way. I wanted to prove to myself
00:20:39.340
that I still had it. And so I got way more scientific and serious about the ways that I
00:20:44.780
climbed and almost even more so than Kyrgyzstan. It was the biggest leap in, in sort of how good I
00:20:52.420
became as a climber. And did it take you a long time to get back on the wall? Like it was just like
00:20:57.920
a few weeks after the last surgery or did it take a little bit longer? I mean, I was climbing within
00:21:02.680
a week of the last surgery, but not well, but I think I had very low expectations, but so it was
00:21:09.060
really easy to exceed those expectations. So my first day climbing, I was like, Oh, I'm actually
00:21:13.580
kind of climbing. Okay. And then, you know, a month later I was, you know, getting kind of close to
00:21:20.040
being able to sport climb on as hard of routes as I had with all 10 fingers. And then six months later,
00:21:26.660
I was doing things that were harder than I had ever done. Yeah. It was a pretty powerful time in life.
00:21:31.680
And then a few years later, you had another setback, you know, you married Beth in that
00:21:35.820
time, but then your marriage ended. Did that affect your climbing? Did you kind of go into a
00:21:40.900
funk or was it one of those moments again where that became sort of fuel for your climbing?
00:21:45.080
Well, I mean, at first I certainly went to an, into a funk and all these setbacks went through
00:21:50.060
evolutions, but I think, yeah, I mean, essentially we had bonded really, really heavily through,
00:21:57.360
through Kyrgyzstan. And I think Beth needed to escape that, that very deep bonding. And so
00:22:02.600
she left me in a way that pretty, pretty heavily devastated me, but like I had learned through a
00:22:10.220
lifetime of kind of encountering these setbacks, I just, it just made me double down. It made me look
00:22:15.320
at, at the things that I sort of appreciate and enjoyed the most in the world. And really the main
00:22:22.700
thing that did is it started, it started, it made me try and find like the next big, huge thing that
00:22:31.960
would cause, that would necessitate, that I would have to change as a person to do like a climb that
00:22:38.440
I would have to become so much better and change as a person to do, because I wanted to get lost in
00:22:42.600
that process. And so that, that's, that was the infancy of the Dawn Wall.
00:22:46.740
The Dawn Wall. So tell us about the Dawn Wall. Why hadn't this part of the mountain never been
00:22:51.840
climbed before? So El Capitan for a lot of years was only climbed by aid. And then in the seventies,
00:23:00.720
a few people figured out ways to climb that climate free to build a free climate. And so then when I
00:23:09.080
started getting into climbing out on El Cap, that's what I was doing is I was free climbing all the
00:23:13.720
existing routes, but all the routes at that time went up these pretty obvious crack systems, like to
00:23:18.660
train climbers. I, you could look from afar and imagine that those walls could be climbed, but
00:23:23.620
there was this one aspect that just looked sheer and blank and it didn't look like there was really
00:23:29.800
anything in the way of crack systems. And since I'd spent so much time on the wall, probably more than
00:23:34.960
anybody at that time, I was maybe the one person that knew that on this rock that from afar looks
00:23:41.180
totally blank. Sometimes edges form. And if you train yourself just right, you can start to learn to
00:23:46.300
climb from one to the next. And so it just became this, this giant puzzle. I actually spent
00:23:50.680
almost a year swinging around and trying to piece together this huge puzzle and build the belief that
00:23:57.020
it was possible. So it took you a year to like, of that sort of investigation and preparation before
00:24:02.700
you actually started climbing or was it more than that? I mean, it was on and off for a year and I was
00:24:07.020
climbing on it. You know, you kind of, I mean, the holds that you grab are, are so tiny. You know,
00:24:12.040
a lot of them, you have to actually mark them with a little bit of chalk to even know that they're
00:24:15.860
there. They're almost too small to see with the naked eye very easily. So I was mapping out the
00:24:21.780
sequences and doing that by myself. I had kind of developed these rope soloing techniques to be able
00:24:27.360
to go up there and, you know, try the individual moves. And I knew that if I could do all the
00:24:31.580
individual moves, then the route was theoretically possible. And so after a year, I got to the point
00:24:36.800
where I was able, I found a path where I could do all the individual moves, but then piecing them
00:24:42.500
together for 3000 feet was, was the real daunting part. And how did you sync up with Kevin Jorgensen
00:24:49.400
to do this? So I actually gave up on the route. Like I pieced it together. I was like, this,
00:24:54.160
this is a route. Like somebody will climb this someday, but it's just, it's just ridiculously hard.
00:24:58.160
It's so, it's so above and beyond anything I've done before that I'm never going to be able to do it.
00:25:03.200
So I've worked on film projects kind of throughout my career. And the main filmer that I worked with,
00:25:09.340
Josh Lowell from Big Up Productions called me and he, he had, he kind of knew what I was seeking
00:25:14.560
on the Dawn Wall. And he said, okay, well, if you've given up on it, we should make a film about this
00:25:18.740
so we can put it out there to the next generation. Cause he felt pretty strongly like this was the
00:25:23.140
future. This would be, this would be a big deal in the future. So I went up with a crew of four people
00:25:28.760
and spent a week climbing on the individual sections, sleeping up on the wall with the crew
00:25:33.940
and making this film to kind of show off the beauty and, and sort of the wonder of that route.
00:25:40.480
And then they put out a video called progression. Yeah. They do a tour called the real rock tour.
00:25:45.660
And it's always like the cutting edge stuff that's going on in climbing. And that video showed up in
00:25:50.240
the real rock tour one year and Kevin saw the video. And at the end of that video, I'd kind of make the
00:25:55.780
call out. I was like, I don't, I don't know if I'm ever going to do this, but I wanted to put it out
00:25:59.320
there for the next generation. And Kevin was looking for something new. I think he's heard
00:26:04.040
that and he's like, well, I'm the next generation. So he called me up. And at first I kind of wrote
00:26:08.480
him off. Cause I was like, he's Kevin, Kevin had never climbed anything like that. He was a boulder,
00:26:13.300
which means, you know, he'd never, he rarely climbed more than about 30 feet off the ground.
00:26:18.220
But since he was such a good boulder, he could do the individual moves better than I could.
00:26:22.760
And so I agreed to kind of go up there and see how it went with him. And first I was just sort
00:26:27.660
of mentoring him, but I saw, you know, he, he inspired me to sort of join him back on the
00:26:32.540
project. And that started the, I guess, six years partnership that it, that it took to actually
00:26:40.000
get it done. Wow. And then, I mean, when you guys finally decided to make the ascent, like
00:26:44.300
how long did it take to go up the wall? 19 days. And we tried several times. I think we tried
00:26:49.020
three times to do ground up ascents because most of our time was just spent kind of aid
00:26:54.100
climbing around on the wall and trying the individual moves and piecing it all together
00:26:57.460
and figuring out how to live up on the side of a big wall and climb really hard for long
00:27:01.400
periods of time. And then once we get all the moves sort of wired into our brain and, and
00:27:06.920
our memory, then we would make these ground up attempts and we failed miserably twice.
00:27:11.160
And then our third time is the one that, that worked. We actually made it and it took 19
00:27:17.180
And like, what do you, walks through the, like, how do you feel whenever you, you accomplish
00:27:21.340
it? Like, do you feel awesome? And then like, how long does that feeling last?
00:27:25.340
I mean, the, the feeling was all over the board. I mean, as we were climbing for those 19 days,
00:27:31.000
it was, it was very dramatic because I had managed to get through the hardest section of the
00:27:35.140
climb. And I got to a point where I knew success was pretty much inevitable. Like I could climb
00:27:41.080
to the top relatively easy, but Kevin was failing. And the way that you do these climbs is you break
00:27:45.940
them up into rope lengths or what we call pitches. And there was 32 consecutive pitches. And so to
00:27:51.780
constitute a successful ascent, you just have to climb each of those 32 pitches in a row. But if
00:27:57.420
you fall, you can, you can return back to the beginning of that pitch. You don't have to go all
00:28:00.920
the way to the ground. So about halfway up, Kevin started falling on one of the pitches and he cut his
00:28:05.720
fingers quite badly. And you got to remember grabbing onto these little, little tiny razor sharp edges.
00:28:10.420
So once you get little cuts in them, things tend to downward spiral. It was middle of winter. You
00:28:15.840
know, we realized that to, to climb this route, we had to climb when the, when the temperatures were
00:28:20.900
absolutely as cold as we could find, because your skin's a little bit harder. The rubber on your
00:28:25.000
shoes is a little bit harder. You don't sweat at all. So we ended up climbing it in the middle of
00:28:28.380
winter. But the problem is, is these big storms can roll in. So when Kevin was failing, we were,
00:28:34.320
you know, it felt, it felt quite urgent, I guess, because we're like, if a storm rolls in,
00:28:38.360
ice fall comes down the route and we have to basically run away and we'll fail again.
00:28:43.800
So yeah, it just turned into this dramatic thing. And then the news caught hold of it and it went
00:28:48.680
big in the New York times. And there was like all these news trucks in the valley. It was just very,
00:28:52.780
very surreal thing. And so I think I kind of knew that success for me personally could happen if I
00:29:00.400
decided not to wait for Kevin, like a week before we topped out. But luckily I did wait for Kevin.
00:29:07.220
And sort of the glory moment was on the last day, we were camped a few hundred feet from the top.
00:29:12.080
It was just me and Kevin. And then our one film, our friend, Brett Lowell, Josh's brother. And we
00:29:17.700
were just sitting there when the sun came up and, you know, we knew that we were going to make to the
00:29:21.220
top and it just felt incredible because it wasn't distracted. When we got to the top, it was, you know,
00:29:26.700
it was just kind of a circus. There was like 50 reporters there. And I just wanted to hang out with
00:29:30.920
my wife and my kids and yeah, and my life became very different very quickly after that.
00:29:39.080
I mean, I've spent the last four years now, I guess it's been just over four years since we
00:29:44.480
climbed the Dawn Wall. I guess living this new life, I wrote a book, the movie, The Dawn Wall came
00:29:50.120
out not so long ago. It's like available on iTunes now. So taking all that video footage and putting it
00:29:56.060
together into a proper movie took three years. And I've been doing other climbing trips as well
00:30:01.180
in that time. But I would say I spent a lot more time kind of at the office, working on the computer,
00:30:07.320
doing interviews, doing film festivals, doing book events. You know, I travel.
00:30:12.060
So one thing I love from your book is you talk about this idea of elective suffering.
00:30:17.800
What do you mean by that? And why do you think choosing, why do you think people should elect to
00:30:21.680
suffer? I mean, I think that most people can relate to that because things that are valuable
00:30:29.860
don't come easy. And so if you find a way to find joy in the midst of suffering, that's a good thing.
00:30:37.460
But I guess elective suffering really speaks to creating hardship on purpose because you know
00:30:45.600
it's going to change you as a human being. And I feel like my story in its essence is about
00:30:51.280
unintended hardship. But really, since I figured out a way, I kind of got addicted to hardship in a way.
00:30:56.760
So it became elective suffering. Like climbing the Dawn Wall was incredibly hard work and it put us
00:31:02.020
through a lot. And so therefore, it created this life that was elevated, or at least I felt that way.
00:31:10.060
And so yeah, I'm still addicted to that. Like everybody's got these big dreams or these big goals.
00:31:15.160
And usually what keeps them from doing that is the suffering component. You know, it's just too
00:31:21.120
much work in the end. But if you can find a way to enjoy that process, to really truly enjoy that
00:31:26.900
process, that's kind of the elective suffering. So there are any like unclimbed walls still out
00:31:33.840
there in the world that you have your eye on or are they all being climbed? There are lots of really,
00:31:38.540
really amazing big walls. Most of them are in remote locations that require big expedition travel to go to.
00:31:45.160
Like this place that I've always wanted to go, I haven't made it there yet, Baffin Island. You
00:31:49.180
know, Baffin Island is like 100 Yosemite's. But there's, you know, you got to deal with
00:31:53.680
the Arctic environment and polar bears and ice breakup because a lot of them are kind of right
00:31:58.720
on the ocean. There's, you know, they're just remote and therefore, you know, more dangerous than
00:32:05.760
I guess I'm willing to accept right now because I'm a father. Like I wanted to, like I always
00:32:11.280
aspired to go more and more into that big adventure travel world. But I started noticing that all my
00:32:17.340
friends that were doing that were dying. And so for me, that just doesn't feel like an option. So
00:32:22.400
I keep finding myself going back to Yosemite because Yosemite has these big, really inspiring
00:32:26.600
roots. But the rock is so good. And I'm experienced enough that I don't feel like it's that dangerous.
00:32:32.920
It fulfills this need to sort of explore. I mean, these big, incredible objectives are
00:32:39.520
available in Yosemite. It's not new walls per se, but it's new roots on these walls.
00:32:44.420
And so I find myself, you know, continually going back there every year and finding new big roots
00:32:49.620
in Yosemite. Well, Tommy, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more
00:32:53.640
about what you do? I mean, they can pick up my book, The Push, you know, it's at most local bookstores,
00:33:00.060
but also Amazon is a good way to get that. Or you can see the Dawnwall movie, which won audience
00:33:07.880
choice at the South by Southwest Film Festival. It's been, it's gotten pretty big. The movie,
00:33:13.840
it's a really good, like 100, 100 minute snapshot of my entire life. And yeah, people absolutely love
00:33:21.520
it. So you can, you can get that on iTunes or, and I think, I think in a couple of weeks,
00:33:27.780
Fantastic. Well, Tommy Caldwell, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:33:31.280
My guest today was Tommy Caldwell. He's the first person to free climb the Dawnwall
00:33:34.700
on Yosemite's El Capitan. And he's written about that experience in his book, The Push,
00:33:39.120
A Climber's Search for the Path. There's also a documentary about it. And you can also find
00:33:42.500
out more information about his work at his website, tommycaldwell.com. Also check out our show notes,
00:33:47.240
aom.is slash Dawnwall, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:33:52.240
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast. Check out our website,
00:34:03.300
artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:34:07.080
rewritten over the years about how to be a better husband, better father, better all around man.
00:34:11.420
Also, if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes
00:34:15.360
or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the
00:34:19.500
show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always,
00:34:22.960
thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay. I remind you not
00:34:26.320
only to listen to the AWIM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.