THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 57
ers might endanger themselves trying
to beat. Pause. “But should nobody ever
do anything extreme?” A friend had
suggested that the two climbers con-
sider getting “headsets like spies,” to
improve communication while simul-
climbing. Honnold liked the idea,
but Caldwell, laughing, said that he
thought Honnold might not appreci-
ate his transmissions. All the heavy
breathing, he said, “might wig you out.”
C
aldwell and the kids pulled up to
the house on an electric cargo bike
on a sunny afternoon. Little Ingrid
jumped off. They’d been to the library,
and she had a copy of “Curious George
Makes Pancakes” clutched to her chest
as she ran into the house. Fitz, more
diffident, headed into the Sprinter with
his books. Caldwell uses the big van,
parked in the driveway, as an office some-
times. He wouldn’t make it into the
mountains that day, which meant he’d
work out in the gym in the garage.“I’ve
always overtrained,” he told me. “Then,
if you take a few days off before a hard
climb, you feel light and strong.”
Caldwell sometimes questions the
depth of the pro climber’s life. “I mean,
just always looking for the next thing
to send, it’s kind of immature,” he told
me once. Jim Collins might be inter-
ested to hear that, I thought. Collins,
an author and management guru who
grew up in Boulder, discusses Caldwell’s
life and outlook in a recent book. He
believes that Caldwell’s climbing and
his ability to solve seemingly insoluble
problems are intellectual achievements
of a high order—“like gigantic game-
theory problems”—and that his tenac-
ity and curiosity mark him out as some-
thing rare. He has taken Caldwell to
meet with West Point cadets in a lead-
ership program that he was helping to
run, and with C.E.O.’s from multina-
tional corporations. In an essay called
“Luck Favors the Persistent,” he exam-
ines the careers of Caldwell, Steve Jobs,
and Winston Churchill. “I won’t be sur-
prised if Tommy becomes a leader on
a whole different level,” Collins told me.
Caldwell might disagree; he does a lot
of public speaking these days, including
motivational talks in corporate settings,
but says that he will never be comfort-
able in front of an audience.
I am not privy to Caldwell’s post-
climbing plans. But some of his humil-
ity about his place in the rankings these
days is warranted. There are always new
waves of strong young climbers coming
up. “I was cutting-edge when I was a
kid,” he told me. “Bouldering V12, sport
climbing 5.14. Now these kids warm up
on those grades!” That’s not quite true—
nobody warms up on those grades—
but the broader point is taken. Caldwell
put up routes that no one else could
climb, or even imagine. Then, slowly or
not so slowly, they have been repeated.
Even the Dawn Wall. The world’s
best sport climber, it is generally agreed,
is Adam Ondra, a twenty-eight-year-
old Czech maestro who a few years ago
put up the first-ever 5.15d, in a cave in
Norway. That route, called Silence, has
not been repeated. Ondra, meanwhile,
has sent almost every ultra-hard route
there is. Less than two years after Cald-
well and Jorgeson established the Dawn
Wall, Ondra came to Yosemite to re-
peat it. He had barely ever climbed a
big wall before. He did it in eight days.
Caldwell told Ondra, wryly, that he
wished he could have waited a couple
more years.
Ondra gave Caldwell credit for pi-
oneering the route. “Tommy Caldwell
was a huge visionary to see this in the
middle of the blank wall,” he said. Cald-
well said that he found Ondra’s mas-
tery inspiring. But it was as if they were
playing different sports. Ondra is a com-
petitor, built and trained to win. Cald-
well is a mountain djinn, a problem
solver at home in the high country.
One morning, we went looking for
boulders in a quiet corner of Rocky
Mountain National Park called Wild
Basin. We were navigating from screen-
shots that Caldwell had taken of a Web
page that morning, and I was not san-
guine about finding anything. But sud-
denly, by God, there they were. “Check
it out!” A huge, deeply overhanging boul-
der called Thug Roof topped a grassy
rise in the woods. Caldwell seemed en-
thralled. There were numerous high-
quality cave problems, including some
that he might be unable to do without
a great deal of effort, and possibly not
even then. He worked a couple of the
more tractable lines. He and Thug Roof
had a future, clearly. It was difficult to
picture him getting tired of this.
The kids don’t come out here as
often as Tommy went out with Mike,
but they do come. In August, Cald-
well spent his forty-third birthday high
on Longs Peak with Fitz. They had
set off with a plan to build a Lego set
at fourteen thousand feet, and instead
ended up camping in the boulder field
on the north side of the peak, their
summit push shut down by wildfire
smoke from California. Their tent was
blown flat in the night, but they got
the Lego set mostly built. They will
be back.
“Dear Peg, it’s my third day back at the office and I’m
so homesick. I miss you, I miss the dogs...”
• •
