48 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
for the first time, in this year’s Olym-
pics; it’s a proper sport now, replete
with rules. But that’s gym climbing, on
artificial holds. Outdoor climbing re-
mains largely a do-it-yourself affair.
Any rules emerge from a rough con-
sensus among climbers. Around the
world, they scout the landscape for in-
teresting faces, picking routes up the
rock and grading their difficulty. What’s
legit and what’s not, who
first climbed what, how
hard a climb is—these ques-
tions get hashed out in ran-
dom fora, from belay ledges
to guidebooks to a host of
Web sites, none of them de-
finitive or infallible.
Caldwell has a restless
mind, always assessing and
reassessing. On the hike
back to the car, he talked
about how he and his friends had ex-
plored the area: “Now it seems slightly
colonistic, the way we used to come
out here and put our names on things,
you know?” I asked what grades they
were climbing back in the day. Cald-
well shrugged. “The grades went up
when we started carrying old couch
cushions up here, bound together with
duct tape. Suddenly, the landings
weren’t so bad, and we could go for
more.” He laughed lightly through the
words “weren’t so bad.” That’s a tic of
his. He’ll take a reference to pain and
peril—which come up a lot in his line
of work—and treat it as a private joke,
a comic riff, removing any drama.
We came to a busy trail. It was a glo-
rious afternoon, dry and sunny. While
the rest of the West struggled with
drought last summer, this part of the
high Rockies received plentiful rain,
and wildflowers—columbine and fire-
weed and mountain parsley—lit the
deep-green meadows. Passing hikers
started doing double takes. Yep, that
was Tommy Caldwell. Caldwell didn’t
seem to notice.
He is the opposite of imposing. Five-
nine, a hundred and fifty-five pounds,
with a scruffy beard and a boyish face.
He giggles a lot and has none of the
swagger of an alpha athlete. His de-
fault manner is gentle, slightly dithery,
how-can-I-help. He looks very fit, but
that’s not unusual in this part of Col-
orado, and the fact that his fingers are
built with some type of steel alloy is
not evident at a glance. The ditheri-
ness is like the little laugh—it acts as
a pleasing distraction from the real
Tommy, who is intensely observant and
has the ability to focus ferociously. Both
are useful traits for rock climbing at
your limits.
Caldwell’s limits have fascinated the
climbing world for decades. He has
very likely free-climbed
more routes on El Capitan
than anyone else, and has
been featured on the cover
of Climbing magazine an
unseemly number of times.
This small but intensecom-
munity made him famous
young and has not let him
go. It pays his bills, relishes
his struggles, celebrates his
suffering, gilds his image,
and assumes, in its opaque way, that he
will continue to climb at the highest
level and will not fall.W
hen Caldwell was a kid, he just
wanted to be like his dad. That
was a tall order. Mike Caldwell was
manic, massive (he was a competitive
bodybuilder, Mr. Colorado 1977), a pop-
ular schoolteacher and mountain guide.
Tommy, who came along in 1978 and
weighed only four pounds at birth, was
scrawny and shy, with developmental
delays. Mike, who could do seventy-five
pullups, devised a credit system for pre-
school strength training—twenty-five
cents for a hundred sit-ups, an ice cream
for twenty pullups.
Tommy was a dreamy child with
obsessive tendencies. He began digging
a hole in the back yard, planning to
tunnel through to China—not an un-
common project for a certain type of
American kid, except Tommy kept dig-
ging, banging on Colorado Front Range
bedrock, for more than two years. With
Mike’s fitness program, he took the bit
between his buck teeth and did not let
go. There’s a family photograph of him
at age three, showing good form with
a weighted barbell across his shoulders.
He did it to please his dad, and to soothe
himself. Getting strong felt good.
But Mike and Tommy’s real bond
was forged in the mountains. Mike was
an avid rock climber. He hauled his
family—including his wife, Terry, whomhe’d met when they were students at
Berkeley, and their daughter, Sandy,
who was three years older than Tommy—
to Rocky Mountain National Park,
which abuts Estes Park, the small town
where they lived. Rocky Mountain Na-
tional Park straddles the Continental
Divide and is known for fierce and un-
predictable weather, especially in win-
ter, when temperatures can fall to thirty
below. Mike revelled in harsh condi-
tions, and Tommy took pride in tough-
ing it out beside him. With Mike,
Tommy later wrote, “adventure wasn’t
adventure without an unplanned night
out. We didn’t just hike and camp on
family outings. We summited moun-
tains and slept in snow caves.” Even
when outings went sideways, which was
not infrequently, Tommy felt safe. Fam-
ily lore has Mike changing his diapers
in a high-country snow cave.
Mike believed that the risks of rock
climbing could be managed with proper
preparation and correct technique. He
drilled his kids on knots and rope man-
agement, footwork, belaying, rappelling,
all the things to watch out for: loose
rocks, frayed rope, rocks that might
fray a rope. In summer, the family ram-
bled around the West to far-f lung
climbing areas. When Tommy and
Sandy showed interest in Devils Tower,
the otherworldly butte in northeast
Wyoming, because of its role in the
film “Close Encounters of the Third
Kind,” Mike took them up it—five
hundred vertical feet in homemade
harnesses and improvised climbing
shoes. Tommy was six.
Tommy was unhappy at school,
where he never fit in. Things improved
when he switched to the school where
Mike taught. Tommy remembers his
dad as the mad, fun English teacher
who wore Spandex and threw candy
to kids who got answers right. Mike
also taught gym, and the school let him
put up an indoor climbing wall. As
climbing became more popular, kids
turned to Tommy for guidance. At
twelve, he became the youngest person
to climb Colorado’s most imposing
wall, a nine-hundred-foot sheer face,
on the east side of Longs Peak, known
as the Diamond.
When Caldwell was a kid, a new
style of climbing, known as sport, was
flourishing in Europe. He and Mike