The last word The daredevils attempting the “climb of the century” Jorgeson on the Dawn Wall: “Momentum is a powerful force” Caldwell: “superhuman”? Just how difficult is it to scale the Dawn Wall of El Capitan, the 3,000ft rock face in Yosemite National Park, California? Not to drill bolts into its sheer, smooth, granite and heave yourself up with ropes, but to free climb, using nothing but steely fingers and rubber-soled climbing shoes, with a harness only to prevent catastrophe in case of a fall. The climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson are finding out right now, in an attempt that has gripped the world, as the pair tweet and use social media to broadcast live updates of their progress. Not since hardy Bavarians set out to conquer the north face of the Eiger in the 1930s have climbers so publicly defied death. Then, an audience looked on from the comfort of chalets at the foot of the mountain; today, spectators look up agog from Yosemite’s valley floor or keep track around the world on their mobile phones. Caldwell and Jorgeson have split the immense Dawn Wall into 32 “pitches”, or sections, of varying length and difficulty. On pitch 16 of their route, which has taken them seven years to map and devise, there is what is known in the mountaineering game as a “dyno”, or dynamic manoeuvre. It requires the climber to jump six feet horizontally, then seize hold of a minuscule rock edge, which actually slopes downwards, in the hope that this pitiful handhold will prevent their momentum from carrying them off the granite and into the void. It is a move from the fevered imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters, who employed something similar in the opening credits of Mission: Impossible 2, starring Tom Cruise. Except that Caldwell and Jorgeson do not benefit from special effects. But pitch 16 is not the hardest pitch of the ascent. With its devilishly demanding combination of handholds and footholds, pitch 14 is. That’s how hard it is to climb the Dawn Wall. Rock climbers grade ascents using numbers, from 5.0 to 5.15. Steep ascents with good holds are rated 5.0-5.4. The hand and footholds at the upper end can be literally razor-blade thin, so that climbers slice open their fingers as they cling to the face. Pitch 16, with its almost absurd “dyno”, is rated 5.13 (or, as one outdoors website puts it: “If you can climb upside down on a glass window, these climbs are right up your alley”). Pitches 14 and 15 are both rated one notch higher, at 5.14. Although Caldwell first conceived the idea of free climbing the Dawn Wall in 2007 (he was joined in the venture by Jorgeson, the less experienced climber, in 2009), it was not until 2013 that he managed to free climb pitch 15. And finally, last November, Caldwell completed the dreaded pitch 14, leaving the pair ready to put their years of practice and research to good use and tick off one pitch after another in a single expedition, thus becoming the first men to free climb the entire Dawn Wall in one go. Caldwell has done 12 practice free climbs on El Capitan. For Jorgeson, this is the first. The pair began on 27 December, preferring the cold weather because it improves the skin’s adherence to the rock. Indeed, the two men sometimes climb at night to further enhance their grip. They have even sandpapered their fingertips and shoe soles to extract the maximum advantage. On such tiny margins is the success of their venture based. When they need to rest, the men fix slings to the sheer granite wall and sleep there, suspended hundreds of feet up in tiny windswept hammocks. Underneath, they hang their kit and victuals. “There are downsides of trying to free climb El Cap midwinter,” wrote Caldwell on 3 January, alongside a picture of him eating a very large sandwich. “Falling ice, looming storms, raging ice wind, and numb toes to name a few. But there are upsides too. We have the best chunk of rock in the world all to ourselves. The razor-sharp holds feel way bigger (when we can feel them), and we are living in a refrigerator so fresh food doesn’t spoil!” He had every right to sound positive. Two days before, on New Year’s Day, both men had inched their way, bandaged fingernail by bandaged fingernail, across pitch 14. The hardest was apparently behind them. El Capitan encapsulates the challenge that modern mountaineers set themselves. Where amateurs, even tourists, can now pay huge sums to be portered up to the summit of Everest, mountaineers are not preoccupied with altitude alone. “It has irritated climbers for a long time that Everest and the bigger peaks have dominated public notice,” says mountaineering journalist Tarquin Cooper. “What actually interests climbers is finding new paths, and bettering what has been done before, in a cleaner style.” When, in 1958, a team led by Warren Harding climbed the “Nose” of El Capitan, they used ropes and pitons hammered into the face. Such methods are part of so-called “aid climbing”, and they are frowned on by many modern climbers, who wish to propel themselves up under their own steam alone. “There is a strong athletic component to rock climbing today,” says Cooper. “It epitomises the Olympian ideal: faster, higher, stronger.” These, then, are sportsmen who ally such physical endurance, honed over many years (the late French climber Patrick Edlinger performed 1,000 pull-ups a day, some off his little finger), to equal mental strength and agility. “Rock climbing is like unlocking a puzzle,” says Cooper. “It’s not like ice climbing, where you can bury your axe anywhere in the face and pull yourself up. With rocks, there is very possibly only one way up. It’s a fiendish combination of yoga and chess.” Like the greatest grandmasters, Caldwell and Jorgeson will have memorised thousands of moves to complete their climb up the Dawn Wall. For half a century El Capitan has been a testing ground for the purists, not just for free climbers but for “free soloists” – those who dispense with the harness altogether. For them, the merest slip can be fatal. To complete a free climb of the Dawn Wall would see Caldwell and Jorgeson secure their places in the pantheon of the mountaineering greats. But on the rock face, not everything has gone to plan. Having made it across pitch 14, Caldwell, 36, and Jorgeson, 30, turned their attention to the next fiendishly difficult traverse. Caldwell made it across. But Jorgeson fell. Returning to the beginning of the pitch to try again, he made four attempts, the last at 11pm last Tuesday night. The razor‑sharp holds ripped both the tape and the skin off his fingers. He was forced to stay put for two days while he waited for his fingertips to heal. Caldwell, who had ploughed on past pitch 16, returned to support his partner. On Friday, the pair made it across pitch 15, and by Saturday they had completed pitches 16 and 17 too. More than halfway there. “Momentum is a powerful force,” Jorgeson wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday. “When it’s on your side, everything feels a bit easier.” The greatest climber in the world? On 29 November 2001, Caldwell, then a promising 23-year-old climber, suffered an accident that should have ended his career. While using a table saw during a renovation of his home in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado he slipped and chopped off the index finger on his left hand. After grabbing some ice from the freezer he rushed to hospital, where surgeons reattached the severed digit with pins. But they warned Caldwell the finger would never again be strong enough to grip a rock. To him, that meant it was useless, so he told them to remove it. The climbing community, saddened by the news, thought it would hear little more of Caldwell. How wrong they were. Caldwell and Jorgeson are on the verge of completing the “climb of the century”. In Estes Park, Colorado, Caldwell’s wife Becca, 21-month-old son Fitz, father Mike, 64, and mother Terry, 63, have been getting daily phone calls. Or at least they were until the climber dropped his mobile phone. “Off it went, 2,000ft,” Mike said. “When you’re up there on the wall you drop all kinds of things. So we’re getting information second hand [from the backup team]. He’s in very high spirits and we’re very, very excited. He’s Ahab and this is his Moby Dick.” It was Caldwell Sr, a former school teacher and mountain guide, who first took the young Tommy climbing at the age of three. He hauled him up a 200ft cliff in the Rockies in a bag, on the promise that they would fly a kite at the top. When Tommy was 14 they went to Europe to climb the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc. While still a teenager, Tommy became a world champion climber. Now he is probably the greatest living athlete most people have never heard of. Fellow climbers describe his feats as “other-worldly” and “superhuman”. “When he was a kid I was pretty aware that he had some talent,” said his father. “He was no good at traditional sports, though. Bad hand-eye coordination, couldn’t hit a baseball to save his life!” After he severed his finger, Caldwell and his father devised a plyometric muscle-training system to strengthen his other digits. “He’s now got the strongest little pinkie you’ll ever see,” Caldwell Sr said. The climber also compensated by training harder than anyone else. On an average day he does a 12-mile run at altitude, then weights, then practises climbing on a specially built smooth wall in his garage. “There’s not a single hole on that wall that a human being can use except Tommy,” his father said. “He’s been using it for 15 years. But his greatest strength is his ability to suffer. He truly is other-worldly in terms of his endurance. Long periods of cold, heat, lack of food, dehydration, he just endures.” Caldwell’s supreme mental and physical toughness was born partly out of his darkest hour. In 2000, the year before he severed his finger, he was taken hostage with three other climbers while scaling the Yellow Wall in Kyrgyzstan’s Pamir-Alai mountain range. As the climbers were perched at 1,000ft, members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group affiliated to al-Qa’eda, began taking pot shots at them. They descended and were held at gunpoint for six days in the mountains, hiding behind boulders during a shoot-out with the Kyrgyzstan Army. A local hostage was executed. Eventually, Caldwell grabbed one of the terrorists’ guns and hurled him off a cliff top, allowing the group to escape. It was a heroic act, but one that preyed on Caldwell’s conscience – he believed he had killed a man until it was confirmed that the terrorist had survived. “The amount of suffering and fear we endured made the rest of life seem like a cakewalk,” he said. “It reset my idea of what real pain is, and now I walk through life without much fear.” Longer versions of both of these articles first appeared in The Daily Telegraph. © Harry de Quetteville & Nick Allen/Telegraph Media Group 2015. THE WEEK 17 January 2015
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 10:01:57 +0000