52 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
exploring new ways up, free climbing
routes that even he thought looked im-
possible. He sent two major routes,
Freerider and the Nose, in a single day.
He became the dominant climber on
El Cap, and he began to see lines that
no one had ever considered.
He and Rodden got married in 2003
and built a house in Yosemite West, but
the marriage didn’t last. Rodden met
someone else, and they divorced in 2009.
Caldwell, devastated, buried himself in
climbing projects, including an El Cap
route on the Dawn Wall, which is named
for the way it catches the rays of the
rising sun. It was the blankest single
face on the monolith, and he had no
reason to believe that it would ever go.
He worked on it for seven years, slowly
putting the moves together, finding tiny
nubbins where a climbing shoe might
stick, if fiercely applied at just the right
angle in cold weather.
He found a partner, Kevin Jorgeson,
a strong young boulderer, and they
began the final ground-up push in mid-
winter, at the end of 2014. The ascent,
generally considered the world’s hardest
rock climb, took nineteen days. Jorgeson
was often on social media when they
rested. This discomfited Caldwell at
first, but by the final push he had re-
considered and started telling stories
on Instagram himself. His account
blew up. The Times followed the Dawn
Wall story closely, day after
day. Caldwell dropped his
phone off the portaledge
and concentrated on the
climbing. He had been
training harder than ever,
had built a mockup of the
most challenging single
move on a wall at home.
He was ready. Jorgeson
struggled for a week with
the crux pitch, but in the
end they sent. A documentary, “The
Dawn Wall,” released in 2018, won a
slew of well-deserved awards.
“
T
here’s non-stop, rip-roarin’ cow-
boy action in store for rodeo fans,”
the Estes Park Trail-Gazette, a weekly
that recently marked its hundredth an-
niversary, proclaimed. Caldwell isn’t one
of those fans. “I don’t really like rodeos,”
he muttered to me, as riders did invol-
untary backflips off angry bulls. Taking
the family to the rodeo had been Mike’s
idea. “Well,” Tommy allowed, “I kind
of like the mutton bustin’.” That’s a kids’
event: a sheep running full speed across
the rodeo ring with a small human
sprawled on its back, clutching wool till
he or she falls off.
Estes Park is less a cow town than
a mountain-recreation town—its pop-
ulation increases exponentially in sum-
mer—but the stands were crowded with
local folk, including Caldwell’s extended
family. Mike wore a gray cowboy hat,
turned up at the front, that looked like
it had barely survived a stampede. “It
came from the store that way,” Terry
Caldwell told me. We all sang “The
Star-Spangled Banner.” The anthem
sounded better, I thought, more heart-
felt and searching, as a chorale than as
a solo performed by some entertainer.
Mike, who seemed to know every-
body at the rodeo, had chivvied Tommy
and his kids into kicking off the night
by riding in an old horse-drawn wagon
filled with local celebrities. Mike, in his
pre-crumpled hat, was the only one
who looked comfortable waving to the
crowd. Well, there was another cheerful
performer: the Rooftop Rodeo Queen,
a high-school student who mentioned
in the promotional material that she
was looking forward to getting closer
to the Lord and, in the meantime,
looked sharp in a flashy cowgirl cos-
tume. Fitz, Tommy and
Becca’s eight-year-old son,
ducked out of sight behind
the wagon’s side. Ingrid, five
and far-sighted, looked
around curiously. I caught
Becca’s eye. She gave me a
look that said, “I got this.”
Later, Fitz had his nose
in a book, “The Mysteri-
ous Benedict Society,” while
the mutton bustin’ went
down. Fitz was the right age for it, but
no one would mistake him for a mut-
ton buster. He has his father’s shyness,
and maybe some of his stubbornness.
His interests run more to history and
dinosaurs than to bleating livestock. He
loaned me one of his books, about the
world’s oceans, on the understanding
that I would not take it home. Tommy
and Becca try to get Fitz and Ingrid
out in the mountains as much as pos-
sible. “Kind of like my dad did,” Tommy
told me. “Letting them learn to love na-
ture. But dialled way, way back.” His
laugh was both cheerful and rueful.
Caldwell expresses some of his own
love of nature through environmental
activism. He advocates for threatened
wilderness areas like the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge and Bears Ears Na-
tional Monument, works closely with
Indigenous activists, argues against min-
ing and oil development, has testified
at a United States Senate hearing. His
political work is supported by Patago-
nia, which employs him full time as a
Global Sport Activist. In 2020, he cam-
paigned hard for Biden. His positions
draw fire from the political right.
There is some sorrow surrounding
Caldwell’s politics. His parents have
joined the large faction of Republicans
who suspect that last year’s Presiden-
tial election was stolen. They’re per-
suaded by the MyPillow guy, Mike Lin-
dell, who churns out allegations of voter
fraud. Mike Caldwell told me, and Terry
confirmed, that turnout in November,
2020, in Larimer County, where they
live, was a hundred and four per cent—
you could look it up. I looked it up. Of-
ficial records show that turnout in Lar-
imer was eighty-nine per cent.
In addition to his environmental lob-
bying, Caldwell serves on boards and
committees and campaigns, taking
meetings when he can. On a mountain
called Twin Sisters, we climbed a steep
approach through the forest to an area
known as Wizard’s Gate. We were above
ten thousand feet, but the cell service
was good, and Caldwell kept his phone
tucked into his shoulder so that he could
follow what seemed to be a series of
strategy sessions. While he listened and
talked, he was sorting through gear, put-
ting on his harness, and studying the
routes running up overlapping granite
slabs into the sky.
A
few days later, Becca and the kids
were out of town with friends.
Tommy headed for the Diamond, on
Longs Peak. The Diamond is the
highest-elevation big wall in the Lower
Forty-eight. Many people bound for
Longs start hiking soon after midnight,
to avoid afternoon thunderstorms, which
are common in summer. But Caldwell
thought the weather forecast looked fa-
vorable, with a nice high-pressure sys-
