THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 51
Caldwell, who in the past had found it
difficult to set a mousetrap, was de-
voured by guilt. Rodden went into a
prolonged post-traumatic depression.
Back in the States, she and Caldwell
were inseparable. He tried to comfort
her, refusing what he felt was an action-
movie version of their ordeal spread by
Smith and others. A rush of media at-
tention culminated, many months later,
in an interview in Kyrgyzstan, broad-
cast by “Dateline NBC.” Su had some-
how survived the fall, but wound up in
prison. Mike and Terry say that learn-
ing Su was alive was the turning point
in Tommy’s recovery.
Caldwell remembers it differently.
He was hugely relieved, but the news
didn’t change what he had learned about
his own character, his capacity to kill.
At the same time, he had found in him-
self the strength to do what had to be
done in extremis. The terror, the help-
lessness, the anguish of freezing and
starving, none of it had essentially weak-
ened him. And the difficulties of ordi-
nary life in the West would never again
seem truly arduous, he thought. Even
today, Caldwell divides his life into two
parts: before and after Kyrgyzstan.
O
ne afternoon, I watched Caldwell
work out in a homemade gym in
his garage—a gruelling routine that
included hours of hangboarding (fin-
gers), campus boarding (hands-only
climbing, no feet), treadwall (don’t ask),
MoonBoard (ditto), pullups, pushups,
hard stretching. Rock climbing at a high
level requires enormous core strength,
yogic flexibility, and unusually strong
hands, fingers, forearms, and shoulders.
Strong legs also come in handy. Ulti-
mately, it’s technique that gets you to
the top of a wall, and Caldwell has the
experience and raw ability to find his
way up almost anything. But none of
that means he can skip intense daily
training. At one point, he said, panting,
“I’ve been lucky. Most climbers strug-
gle with finger injuries. I’ve never had
a serious finger injury.” He went back
to the brutal, relentless treadwall, which
he claimed to love.
It’s not quite true that Caldwell has
never had a serious finger injury. Less
than eighteen months after the ordeal
in Kyrgyzstan, he was ripping two-by-
fours with a table saw at the little house
that he shared with Rodden, in Estes
Park. The saw jammed and cut off his
left index finger. Multiple surgeries
failed to reattach it. Caldwell remem-
bers a tense exchange in the hospital.
One of the doctors, who was also a
climber, told him that he would need
to find a new line of work. When the
doctor left the room, Rodden said, “Fuck
that guy.” Caldwell concurred.
Mike Caldwell was so distraught
that he offered his own finger, but
a transplant wasn’t feasible. Instead,
Tommy began a self-designed rehab
program, plunging the tender stub into
increasingly rough materials to desen-
sitize it, and then icing, icing. The fin-
ger had phantom pains; the missing
fingertip itched. Mike built a finger-
strengthening machine for the other
nine. Strong fingers are a rock climb-
er’s indispensable tool. Now Caldwell
had to develop adaptive techniques. For
holds like left-hand pinches, which he
could no longer pinch, he learned to
apply extreme outward force from his
shoulders. He had been known as an
intuitive climber. “I had to become more
cerebral,” he told me. “Figure out ways
to compensate. I wasn’t going to be
the world’s best boulderer now, or the
world’s best sport climber.” His foot-
work actually improved. “I figured I
could concentrate on big walls.”
Caldwell first attempted El Capi-
tan with his father, when he was nine-
teen, and got thoroughly frightened
and spanked. Before long, though, he
began to unlock some of the great cliff ’s
secrets. He climbed the Salathé Wall
at age twenty. This was the fifth “free”
ascent of the Salathé, meaning a climb
accomplished purely by hands and feet
and other body parts, with rope and
gear used only to protect against falls.
After Kyrgyzstan, Caldwell found
strange comfort alone on El Cap. “Non-
judgmental and brutally honest,” he
called the monolith, in a 2017 memoir,
“The Push.” Six months after losing
his finger, he free-climbed the Salathé
Wall again, this time in a single day,
which struck climbers familiar with the
route as superhuman.
His next big project was an odd
choice. It was a sport climb on a remote
limestone cliff in Colorado known as
the Fortress of Solitude. He and his fa-
ther had “developed” the area—found
likely-looking lines and bolted them—
in the late nineties. It was a demand-
ing hike to the crag. Mike told me that
they dug a hole near the cliff, put a trash
can in it, and stashed their tools, to re-
duce the loads they had to carry in and
out. The cliff was tall and heavily over-
hung, and the lines they put up were
unusually long and difficult. Tommy
graded one climb, called Kryptonite, a
5.14d. (The Yosemite Decimal System,
used in the U.S. and Canada, originally
graded climbs from 5.0 to 5.9, but as
techniques and gear improved it be-
came necessary to add higher numbers
and then letters, a through d.) At the
time, it was the hardest grade ever
climbed in North America. It took him
weeks of furious work.
The route Caldwell picked now was
even harder, a monster that he called
Flex Luthor. It was as though a pianist
who had lost a finger chose to play the
most technically demanding sonata in
the canon. Rodden gamely agreed to
help. She and Caldwell set up camp at
the Fortress of Solitude, where they
stayed, on and off, through the Colorado
winter. The south-facing, overhung cliff
trapped heat, so the temperatures were
relatively comfortable. The hikes through
deep snow for supplies were another
matter. Caldwell hurled himself at the
route, with Rodden belaying. It was a
hundred and twenty feet of supreme dif-
ficulty, nearly all of it upside down.
Climbers who complete a route say
that they “sent” it. When Caldwell fi-
nally sent Flex Luthor, he declined to
grade it. He simply said that it was
much harder than anything he had
climbed before. It was widely consid-
ered North America’s first 5.15—a grade
that had only recently been broached
in Europe—but it remained unrepeated
for eighteen years. Climbing magazine
called Fortress of Solitude “the crag of
the future” and Caldwell, who was then
twenty-five, “without question the coun-
try’s top all-around climber.” (Flex Lu-
thor was finally repeated, this October,
by Matty Hong, a leading American
sport climber.)
Having made his point, perhaps above
all to himself, Caldwell turned awayfrom
sport climbing. He devoted himself to
big walls, particularly to his brutally
honest touchstone, El Capitan. He spent
thousands of hours on its granite faces,
