“This is not an effort to conquer,” Kevin Jorgeson tweeted, hours before he reached the top of El Capitan with climbing partner Tommy Caldwell on Wednesday evening. It was a shrewd message. The use of the C-word is anathema to climbers. It’s a sure-fire way of spotting a hustler. “Have we vanquished an enemy?” George Mallory asked before disappearing on Everest. “None but ourselves.”
Such Corinthian ideals look threadbare in the face of the media storm that blew the ascent of the Dawn Wall out of the gossipy bubble of the climbing world and into the mainstream. It’s not that Caldwell and Jorgeson don’t deserve the plaudits – they do. But the true nature of their achievement has at times been hidden.
El Capitan lends itself to hyperbole. It is vast and terrifying, even to climbers, but with a parking lot at its foot. The dizzying perspectives, some rebellious climbing history (brilliantly captured in the recently released documentary Valley Uprising) and the rise of social media make it ripe for exploitation.
As climbing has gained a fingerhold in the American psyche, part of that wholesome, optimistic narrative that outdoor brands like Patagonia try to exploit, commerce has inflated its image. There is now a talented cadre of media specialists in America who can capture the outlandish exposure climbers face as they hang from holds millimetres wide.
For those looking at these images over the breakfast table with no knowledge or context, it must seem baffling. Who are these people? Adrenaline junkies? Attention seekers? Tommy Caldwell, 36 years old and born in Colorado, is neither, but he knows all about fear – and the media.
In 2000, while climbing on similar walls to El Capitan in Kyrgyzstan, Caldwell and his companions were taken hostage by Islamist militants. Held for six days, the militants kept their hostages moving as the Kyrgyz army closed in. Left momentarily with a single guard, Caldwell shoved him over what he believed was a cliff and the Americans got away under the cover of night.
Caldwell remained haunted by what he’d done, and the intense media interest, until the guard reemerged. He’d survived the fall. Yet within a year, Caldwell’s whole purpose of being as a climber was threatened in a DIY accident, when he cut off the index finger of his left hand with a table saw. Surgeons reattached the finger, but its mobility and strength were hopelessly compromised, so he had them take it off again.
It could have been the end of his career, but Caldwell learned to cope, like a maestro relearning the piano. In the last decade and a half he has set records and climbed major routes all over El Capitan. Its vertical walls have become his backyard, the place he feels safe. That he outstripped his companion Kevin Jorgeson, whose own experience of the face was limited in comparison, is explained by Caldwell’s total familiarity and ease in such forbidding territory. Money wasn’t Caldwell’s motivation. This has been his life’s work, and decades in the making.
Although their ascent of the Dawn Wall was an extraordinary breakthrough, there have been plenty of those on El Capitan since it was first ascended in 1958. Look at a photograph of this vast rock overlaid with the lines of the scores of routes climbed, and you see a network or web, like blood vessels across a brain, nourishing a culture of exploration and daring. When you do something new on El Capitan, you take on its history.
Every one of those lines required commitment and suffering. Britain has a small share of the pantheon. Leo Houlding and Jason Pickles climbed a hard new route called The Prophet in 2010. It sits on the wall’s right-hand side, a mere 1,500ft to the 3,000ft of the Dawn Wall, and not quite as difficult, although more dangerous. That still took nine years of practice and exploration. Hazel Findlay, one of several brilliant young British female climbers, has also made significant ascents on El Capitan.
The Dawn Wall itself was first climbed in 1970 by a wine-quaffing maverick called Warren Harding, when Yosemite was still full of rebels who believed in Jack Kerouac’s “rucksack revolution”. So what’s new about it now? While Harding hammered in bolts and pitons and hung off them – a poor way to slay the dragon – Jorgeson and Caldwell, with Olympian levels of fitness, used finger strength and balance. It’s like comparing a steeplejack to a gymnast.
Now the circus is finally packing up after almost three weeks, those whose interest has been caught by this epic will wonder: what next? Can there be anything like this again? The obvious answer is to look for harder challenges on similar cliffs: the granite walls of Patagonia, perhaps, or Pakistan’s Karakoram. The less obvious question is not where – but who?
The number of people with the resilience to sit on a nylon ledge thousands of feet in the air waiting for the skin on their fingertips to grow thick enough to tolerate the pain of pulling up on tiny, sharp holds isn’t large. Caldwell spent almost a decade figuring out this route. There are certainly faster ways to make a living in climbing these days. Attention spans are shortening in adventure, just like everywhere else. For anyone who follows in the wake of this prodigious effort, the mental pressure will be even greater. Because the limits just got bigger – again.
Ed Douglas is a co-editor of the Alpine Journal
