46 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
the sporting scene
FINDING A WAY UP
After decades of dominance, Tommy Caldwell still seeks new ascents.
by william finnegan
Caldwell, known for scaling enormous cliffs,
“
C
ome on, Tommy!” Becca
Caldwell was urging her
husband on. “You got this!
Try hard!”
Tommy Caldwell was already trying
hard. Known for climbing cliffs that
rise for thousands of feet above remote
places, he was spread-eagled this morn-
ing three feet off the ground, clinging
to an overhanging boulder in a pine
forest near Estes Park, Colorado. The
climb he was attempting went from a
fiercely difficult start to a desperate
right-hand pinch, and he was falling
flat on his back each time he tried the
move. It was a short fall onto a soft pad
beneath him, but still.
“Come on, Tommy! This is Tom-
my’s Arete!” An arete is an outside
edge—in this case, the razor edge of a
rather tall boulder.
Caldwell hit the pad again. He was
bare-chested, wearing gray shorts and
banged-up climbing shoes, and he was
breathing heavily. He cocked his head
to study the rock above him. Almost to
himself, he said, “This isn’t Tommy’s
Arete.” Caldwell stood up, skipped the
difficult first move, and climbed swiftly
toward the top of the boulder to get his
bearings. He laughed ruefully. “This is
Tommy’s Other Arete.”
Every crag, every climbing region,
has its heroes—the locals who did the
first ascents, who identified and climbed
the hardest routes. The cantons of Swit-
zerland have them. Caldwell is Colo-
rado’s. He emerged in the mid-nine-
ties, a spindly teen-ager who quickly
became known as the strongest climber
in the state. If you look through climb-
ing guidebooks at the most difficult
routes in Colorado, which has more
than its share, the first ascent was very
often done by Caldwell.
It’s not just Colorado. In the past
twenty-five years, Caldwell has made
his way up many of the world’s most
forbidding pitches. His best-known first
ascent is the Dawn Wall, the hardest
route on El Capitan, the tremendous
granite monolith in Yosemite, which
he completed in 2015. President Obama
tweeted congratulations from the White
House. The climbing shoes he wore
went on display at Colorado’s state-
history museum. At forty-three, Cald-
well has been dominant for so long that
I figured it must get annoying to other
climbers. “You don’t understand,” Peter
Mortimer, a filmmaker who grew up
in Boulder and has worked with Cald-
well, told me. “Tommy is so beloved.
He is the nicest guy in the world and
a total mountain badass.”
The boulder problem known as Tom-
my’s Arete was, Caldwell noted from
the top of Tommy’s Other Arete, ac-
tually in Chaos Canyon, one valley south
of where we were. But Becca’s point
stood. He had done the first ascent of
this route himself, as a kid. Surely he
couldn’t let it defeat him now.
He could, though. In summer, when
it’s often too warm for ambitious climbs
(too much sweat, not enough friction),
Caldwell goes bouldering—unroped
climbing, usually intense, nearly always
low-altitude. It’s good training for big-
ger projects, building strength and ex-
plosiveness. He wasn’t out here to com-
pete with his younger self. And yet
these high canyons, every buttress and
couloir, were dense with memory and
association and the ghosts of past com-
panions. He first bouldered here with
like-minded young crushers, including
Dean Potter, a charismatic daredevil
whose girlfriend lived for a while in
the Caldwell family’s basement. Pot-
ter died in 2015, while BASE jumping
in Yosemite.
Boulderers are still finding new
challenges in Chaos Canyon, naming
them—“projecting” them, as climbers
say, with the emphasis on the first syl-
lable, meaning that they’re working on
something. Rock climbing was included,
