THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 53
tem in place, so he rose early and left
the trailhead at first light. It’s about five
thousand vertical feet from there to the
top of Longs. He was carrying two sixty-
metre ropes, and all the gear he would
need to “rope solo”—an experts-only
method that would allow him to belay
himself as he climbed sections of the
great face, proceeding basically from
top to bottom. I carried a sack of veg-
etarian burritos, which he had asked
me to pick up in Estes the day before.
We climbed through a forest of
spruce, aspen, and lodgepole pine. The
trail switchbacked out of the trees into
alpine tundra as the sun rose. We kept
moving west, to a saddle called Gran-
ite Pass, and then turned southwest.
We saw a herd of elk and a yellow-bel-
lied marmot, its coat shining in the
morning sun. No other people in sight.
We talked about politics, of all things.
Caldwell asked me to explain critical
race theory. I made a hash of it, but it
helped distract from the pounding in
my head as we moved past twelve thou-
sand feet elevation.
In a huge boulder field, Caldwell
stopped to refill our water bottles from
a creek, filtering for giardia. Longs Peak
loomed above us, its north flank’s black
rock ringed with snow, its east face a
sheer red-gold granite wall—the Dia-
mond, cleaved improbably by an enor-
mous glacier millions of years ago, stri-
ated by vertical cracks, and plunging
into an unseen chasm. Caldwell asked
for his burrito, which was soggy and
not warm, and wolfed it down as he
gave me instructions. He would hike
to the summit, across the boulders and
snowfields and up the black-rock ram-
parts, and rappel into the Diamond. If
I felt up to it, I could make my way to
a snowy notch on the side of the wall
called Chasm View. From there, I could
watch him climbing on a route called
Dunn-Westbay Direct.
Chasm View was flush against the
wall, seemingly hanging in midair at
the edge of the abyss. Below the great
face was a small glacier, and beyond that
was Chasm Lake, cobalt blue, nearly
two thousand feet down. The view was
slightly overwhelming. Vertigo nips at
the photoreceptors, or maybe it’s theneurotransmitters. Caldwell and I called
back and forth—the acoustics were un-
canny—and he sounded strangely care-
free for someone clinging to a cliff by
his fingernails.
There are dozens of routes on the
Diamond, none of them easy, but Dunn-
Westbay Direct is the hardest—the
“king line,” as climbers say, going basi-
cally straight up a series of cracks for
nearly a thousand feet. Caldwell did the
first ascent in 2013. There is video of
him trying to climb the most difficult
pitch (a pitch is a rope-length), which
is graded 5.14a. The climbing looks so
strenuous, the footholds so sketchy, the
hand jams so painful, that it’s difficult
to watch, and yet Caldwell’s careful fe-
rocity is mesmerizing. Today, there was
no other climber in sight, and the scale
of the wall made Caldwell look like a
gnat in red fleece. “That’s what I love
about big walls,” he said later. “When
you’re young, it can be intimidating, but
once you get used to it the awe just gives
you so much energy.”
The summer thunderstorms hit
Longs from the west. Climbers on the
Diamond never see them coming. Cald-
well says you can sometimes feel them
even before you hear them—your hair
stands up from static electricity, bits of
metal in your gear may start to hum.
Many climbers on the Diamond have
had harrowing experiences with rain,
hail, and snow. In July, 2000, near the
apex of the wall, a young man named
Andy Haberkorn was struck by light-
ning and killed. People die of hypother-
mia, even in midsummer. For now, the
weather was holding, a bluebird day.
What Caldwell was doing on these
super-technical pitches was rock climb-
ing, but it was also mountaineering, in
the sense that weather, topography, and
survival tactics were key. His power de-
rives partly from what he calls “hacks,”
which range from route finding to rope
management. Some are fiendishly com-
plex. Others are more basic, like warm-
ing numb fingers against your belly at
one-hand rests. Mike Caldwell taught
Tommy that.
I watched him finish a pitch on Dunn-
Westbay, rappel back down to a tiny ledge,
pull his ropes, thread into a new anchor,
and get to work on the next absurdly thin
pitch. He was turned inward, testing his
finger strength, trying to remember theM AY TO DECEMBER
By August, we are sluggish with love and slide two
barrettes into the night of my hair. Like twin firef lies.
Like rabbit feet dyed blue and downhearted, stamping
the side of my head. July’s shadow is almost rot and we
haven’t spoken in days. I play pool with Mik and count
the ways he sinks ball after ball while I await the doom
of going second, soon regret letting him break. I bet
on this game. I bet on the waning of light, fame. I
know most things dim. It’s hot when I leave the bar
and I say Come, sun, you muscular star, thinking heat-
stroke might strike this state of weather from my heart.
The trigger of seasons, the treasons of these city
streets. Orchard and Broome. We loom. We make
reasons and room for why things can’t work; we lurk
into autumn. We warm our hands for October’s plume.
We say soon, soon, soon something will be revealed.
We fool no one and are no one’s fool, least of all the
late summer gods who know a burn, who rope in
hope, who prepare us for a meal of dead light. In
August, I want snow. I want July. Midsummer prophet
sight. Belief. Faith. A cathedral with all her weight. A
winter love. A new year. A regal infancy. A Sunday,
born.—Megan Fernandes