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Heart Attack  Tommy Caldwell

Heart Attack  Tommy Caldwell

A bead of sweat ran down my forehead. I blinked rapidly and tears ran down my cheek. Was I crying or sweating? Considering where I was, probably both. A couple of feet below was a large roof and then 2,000 feet of air to El Cap’s base. In the last 60 feet of free climbing there were two pieces of gear: an upside-down Stopper slotted between two face holds, and a shallow in-situ Pecker slung with a rotten, faded pink sling. A crack was just inches out of reach but, too chicken to commit to the tenuous, irreversible 5.13 moves to the crack, I had been stuck in the same spot for over an hour. “What had I gotten myself into?”

The idea to try to free El Corazon ground-up sounded good last week when we were bouldering on the woody in our garage. In an era where most free ascents of El Cap are pre-rehearsed, pre-stashed and pre-ticked, ground-up sounded like a good, adventurous way to try it. I wanted something more than the usual power top-roping session where everything on the climb from the next cam placement to the next hard pitch becomes a known quantity. I wanted a bigger challenge—to be committed to the route, with no fixed ropes, prior knowledge or easy escape.

We were on Day Four and still had most of the hard climbing ahead of us. The last four pitches had taken us two full days. Why? The topo we had pulled off the Internet showed there were lots of fixed pins. There weren’t—someone had removed them. Armed with only a free-climbing rack, I initially thought we were shut down. But, with some creative use of Micro Stoppers and #000 and #00 C3s, I had managed to sketch my way between some huge 30-foot runouts up blind, shallow 5.12+ dihedrals. I was willing to risk huge falls on these runout traversing pitches, but I wasn’t about to have Beth do the same. So we devised a super-involved plan that, though labor intensive and extremely time-consuming, would keep the second safe. These complicated logistics meant that each of the traversing pitches took half a day—at this pace we would be at the top in about three weeks.

In 2005, after I freed El Cap twice in a day, I had said that it felt like a crag to me. How ignorant I had been. This didn’t feel anything like a crag—I felt intimidated and strung out. But then again, I had asked for this. In some remote corner of my mind I craved this kind of adventure—I wanted, needed to be humbled and pushed hard. But maybe I should’ve saved it for Patagonia or Alaska, where epics are expected, or taken the easy way out and done a well-traveled, safe free route like El Nino.

Now here I was on El Corazon, looking at taking a 60 footer (if my crappy placements held) that would leave me spinning 2,000 feet in space and probably yank Beth through the belay. I looked back at the upside-down nut, tried to imagine that it was closer and better than it actually was, tried to psych myself up to commit to the 5.13 sequence… and then hesitated for another 45 minutes. This was getting ridiculous. What made me think I could do the most notoriously scary free route on El Cap this way? I guess it was ego. I must be careful of that.

Tommy Caldwell

Tommy Caldwell, and his wife, Beth Rodden, completed their ground-up free ascent of El Corazon (VI 5.13b) “after seven epic days on the route, bloody and utterly exhausted.” A mere three days later he sent its neighboring free line, Golden Gate (VI 5.13b) in a record 20 hours, taking only two falls.

Learning to Crawl  Jack Tackle

Sometime around 3 a.m. the borrowed 1969 Bell motorcycle helmet that had served as my “pillow” suddenly rolled out of our forced bivouac and rocketed down the black abyss of the north face of the Grand Teton… so did my water bottle. Teamed up with my friends Art and Wayne in 1974 for an ascent of the Grand’s East Ridge, it had taken us all day just to reach a small cave above the Molar’s Tooth—barely a third of the way up the convoluted 4,000-foot 5.7+ route. The first ascent of the East Ridge had been done in 1929 in a day and, in 1936, Paul Petzolt had done the first descent of the route in a day as well, reportedly wearing cowboy boots. Yes, there were three of us, and, yes, there was lots of snow still on the route, but we had belayed every single pitch and were moving like snails on Quaaludes. None of this should have been surprising since I had never climbed any mountain by any route—in fact, this was the first for all three of us.

As the sun rose over Jenny Lake the next morning and the warmth returned to our wrecked bodies (somehow I had survived the cold night at 12,000 feet in my cotton army-surplus clothing), we started off for the summit. Packing didn’t take long—we had no water, food, stove or bivy gear. Our route finding and speed improved slightly and we summited late in the day to much rejoicing—only to botch the down climb, choosing the wrong gully and thus descended into night Number Two. Instead of sitting down and freezing our asses off again, we kept moving all night (sans headlamps), kicking steps in bulletproof snow with our heavy mountain boots, facing in, with no ice axes or crampons (a technique we had “learned” two days prior from pictures in Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills before leaving the parking lot). By mid-morning of the third day, completely worked and starving, we stumbled back to our tent at the base of the route. I fell asleep without drinking or eating anything—my first climb, my first epic was finally over.

Since that day I became slightly more adept at the game of alpine climbing, including guiding for Exum Mountain Guides since 1982. I estimate I’ve now managed to climb the Grand at least 250 times, and during all these years of trudging up and down the peak’s steep and rugged eight-mile approach, I have often seen unmistakably inexperienced
climbers laboring under enormous frame packs bursting with 70-plus pounds of huge tents, fat ropes, 75 cm ice axes, big wall racks of climbing gear, and dangling helmets and chalk bags. I can’t help but sympathetically smile and shake my head, remembering my own similar, unforgettable level of inexperience on the Grand’s East Ridge.

Just as Wayne, Art, and I did in 1974, these novice climbers, overloaded and under-experienced, are sure to have an epic of some degree—which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing. A sage old friend and mentor once told me: “Good judgment is only as a result of having survived bad judgment.” But how do you survive to acquire this good judgment without the necessary skills and experience to begin with? Well, you did what we did: look at photos, dream big, put your shit in your pack and go uphill with the excitement, allure and value that climbing mountains provides.

This past summer, on his 33rd anniversary of “what may be both the slowest and lamest ascent ever of the East Ridge,” Jack Tackle spent a “beautiful day on a spectacular mountain” soloing his old friend the East Ridge as part of a 10-hour car-to-car training day.

Jack Tackle

This past summer, on his 33rd anniversary of “what may be both the slowest and lamest ascent ever of the East Ridge,” Jack Tackle spent a “beautiful day on a spectacular mountain” soloing his old friend the East Ridge as part of a 10-hour car-to-car training day.

The Last Great Place  Jonathan Waterman

I devoted 20 years to mountaineering expeditions around the world until discovering that the Far North held the solo of my dreams: sea kayaking the famed Northwest Passage. It was a different sort of expedition than going to the Himalaya or Cordillera, but adventuring alone amid the Arctic’s polar bears, swarming mosquitoes and sea ice offered better survival odds than unroping at high altitude amid crevasses, avalanches and seracs. More importantly, I was able to get to know Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—setting for the most epic wilderness battle of our time. During the last 25 years that the nation has debated developing its northernmost 1.5 million acres for oil, the region has become America’s symbolic wilderness temple: defile this place, then nothing will be sacred.

As I set off alone in a sea kayak to cross 2,000 miles of Arctic wilderness, I thought of all that surrounded me. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a climber’s dreamland of snowy, mostly unclimbed mountains, booming up directly from the sea, surrounded by sandy spits, lush lagoons and a polygon-patterned coastal plain. It is one of those rare places where we can escape the press of crowds and embrace the privilege of being swallowed alive by mountains… or the area’s iconic polar bears. Yet these liberating ideals would be quashed by the development proposal: a labyrinth of roads and pipelines that would take a half-century of drilling to extract a paltry year’s worth of U.S. oil. If Congress approves the oil drilling, it will destroy the remote, 1.5 million acre, biological heart of the Refuge and all the logic behind its original creation.

In 1960, the Eisenhower administration created the nine million acre Arctic National Wildlife Range to protect its “unique wildlife, wilderness and recreation values,” including its 35 land mammals, nine marine mammals, 180 bird species and mind-boggling array of shining basins, rolling hills and unnamed peaks. The Range stretched north from forested valleys across the glaciated mountains to the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea, a vital calving and protein stop for the 123,000-strong Porcupine Caribou herd. In 1980, the Carter administration expanded the Range into a 19.2 million acre Refuge. Congress mandated a study of 1.5 million acres of the Refuge’s coastal plain to determine if it should be opened for oil development or remain as protected wilderness. Several years later, Congress learned from the study that the Refuge contained a lot of oil but also even more wildlife than initially thought. Since then, legislation to open the region to oil drilling has been repeatedly defeated.

But now, with a changing Congress, conservationists are more motivated than ever to move from defense to offense. For the first time in a decade, both houses of Congress have introduced bipartisan wilderness bills that would shut down future oil development in the Refuge and uphold the original environmental vision of the area.

Yes, there are thousands of miles of wilderness in the Arctic, but after having paddled it’s coastline I intimately understood the uniqueness, the environmental importance of the Refugee—it’s a garden, incomparably rich with flora and fauna, the greatest wealth of polar bear dens found in Alaska and the finest displays of geography spanning the Arctic. This last pristine corner of Alaska is oddly unscarred by the most recent ice age, sequestered in summer lushness and inhabited by millions of migratory animals—all poised to flee forever at the first tendrils of human industry. How can we not protect it?

Jonathan Waterman

Jonathan Waterman is the author of Where Mountains Are Nameless; Passion and Politics in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To learn more about the importance of the Refuge and what you can do to help save it from oil development, go to www.alaskawild.org/take-action.