54 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
sequences. He was also inspecting the
route, looking for loose rock or anything
new that a climber or a rope might dis-
lodge. He was testing his pain tolerance,
an essential component in hard climb-
ing. Push it too far and you may rip a fin-
ger pulley, a bad but common injury, or
tear a callus. Skin, especially fingertip
skin, is an obsession among serious climb-
ers. A single “flapper” can sink a multi-
day climb. I had seen Caldwell on an-
other peak, staring intently
at his hands while being low-
ered after failing to stick a
move. When he reached the
ground, I asked if his hand
was O.K. He laughed. “Yeah,
I just always do that when I
fall,” he said. “It’s a way to
deal with the shame. Pretend
it was your skin.”
The inwardness, the mi-
croscopic focus—on rock
texture, gravity, body position, move-
ment, skin integrity—offers such a high
contrast to the grandeur of a big wall
that one can almost get a contact high
from watching. But this was an ordinary
training day for Caldwell. He had no
doubt sharply slowed the pace of his
usual approach to accommodate my pres-
ence, but otherwise was doing exactly
what he would do alone. He seemed to
be having what climbers call a “low-grav-
ity day,” just floating up the pitches. He
likes to whistle when he works, and I
tried to catch a faint tune drifting up the
wall as he paused on a decent hold, chalk-
ing his hand and studying the difficul-
ties above him.
C
orey Rich, a photographer who has
been shooting Caldwell climbing
for decades, including on El Cap, told
me, “He is absolutely a hundred per
cent unaffected by three thousand feet
of exposure. It’s like his body is tuned
to live in a vertical environment. It’s so
intuitive to him. But it’s not like he gets
up on the wall and turns into a warrior
and an asshole. He always tries really
hard, but he’s also got this lighthearted
thing, slightly removed from whatev-
er’s stressing everybody else. His brain
works really fast. We’ll be thinking about
whether to move a rope or not, but he’s
already doing it. On big shoots, it’s kind
of funny. We’ll have a budget for a rig-
ger, but Tommy’s so much faster and
more efficient, and he really enjoys doing
it. Believe me, that doesn’t happen with
anybody else. Lance Armstrong is not
going to show up at your house and
offer to tune your bike.”
What drives Caldwell to climb so
hard, to keep looking for first ascents,
or, barring that, to do top-speed “link-
ups” of big, difficult climbs? It’s partly
just to see what he can do, or still do.
But it’s also the deep allure of new places,
new mountains. Caldwell
never stops training, and he
likes to have something to
be training for.
Mike Caldwell told me
that he had drawn a firm
line with his son: “If you
go ice climbing, you’re out
of the will.” Mike has lost
friends to avalanches, and
he considers the dangers of
ambitious alpine climbing
unacceptable. Tommy has lost friends
himself. Now that he and Becca have
children, he tries to keep the risks on
his projects as low as possible. But he
sometimes talks about remote, ice-prone
destinations like Patagonia, or Baffin
Island, or Greenland: “There’s so much
to do up there.”
I was curious about what Caldwell
might be planning for fall, the season
for launching serious climbs. He men-
tioned a new sport route in California,
a 5.15a called Empath, which “all the
hard men want to try now.” He and
Alex Honnold, the subject of the Oscar-
winning documentary “Free Solo,” and
Caldwell’s consistent climbing partner
for the past decade, were both inter-
ested in Empath. But it’s considered
bad style to talk about climbs you’re
planning. The maxim is “send, then
spray”—talk about it only after you do
it, and only if you must.
Honnold grew up admiring Cald-
well as the boldest climber on El Cap.
“He was, like, this mythical hero,” Hon-
nold told me. “I was afraid to talk to
him.” But he was soon putting up his
own routes—not first ascents, as a rule,
but free solos, climbing without a rope,
in Yosemite and beyond. Free soloing
is a niche activity, too terrifying for most
mortals. Honnold has the rare mental
discipline for it. He and Caldwell started
doing big climbs together, roped, in
- Honnold eventually worked his
way up to free soloing El Cap itself, on
the Freerider route, in 2017. Caldwell
disapproved of the project as just too
dangerous, but nonetheless practiced
with Honnold on Freerider, in the hope
of improving his friend’s chances of suc-
cess. Afterward, he called it a “generation-
defining climb.”
Teaming up with Honnold electri-
fied Caldwell. Honnold, after getting
over his youthful awe, had asked him,
“Why don’t you free-solo big walls? It
would be so easy for you.” That was out
of the question, as far as Caldwell was
concerned, but he let himself be talked
into an ambitious linkup of three big
Yosemite Valley peaks—Mt. Watkins,
El Capitan, and Half Dome—which,
using a high-risk belaying method called
“simul-climbing” for all but the hardest
pitches, they finished in a single day.
“Pitch after pitch flowed by effortlessly,”
Caldwell later wrote. “Somehow [Hon-
nold’s] boldness, the confidence that he
wouldn’t fall, was contagious.” Caldwell
was hooked. “Alex was inspiring and fun
to climb with. Our respective strengths
and styles jibed like a perfectly hum-
ming engine.”
Caldwell, sitting on his deck as night
fell, brought up Honnold. On his most
recent trip to Patagonia, he said, he had
brought Becca and Fitz, who was then
still a baby. They stayed in a village that
serves as a base camp for climbers, who
come from all over to try their luck in
needle-sharp mountains with some of
the world’s worst, most unpredictable
weather. Caldwell and Honnold had
planned a first ascent that would leave
them unable to communicate with the
outside world for an unknown number
of days. It suddenly struck Caldwell how
hard that silence would be on Becca. “It
really wasn’t fair to her,” he said quietly.
She and Fitz were set to return home
as the climb began, and Caldwell thought
that the waiting would be easier among
friends and family, less stark. But he still
felt guilty.
Another American climber, Chad
Kellogg, who was staying near the Cald-
wells, was killed in the mountains that
week. His rappel line dislodged a rock
above the ledge where he was standing.
The ice is melting in Patagonia, as it is
everywhere, causing increased rockfall
as long-frozen boulders break loose from
the melting slopes. “It could have been
