“The Push” far more than climbing tales
ADVENTURE
Tommy Caldwell has the best stories. The nine-fingered rock climber— perhaps the best all-round climber ever— has defined his generation’s accomplishments on rock, pushing climbers to ponder the preposterous.
He famously climbed the Dawnwall route on Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan, the most difficult big-wall climb in the world, clinging to nearly invisible nubs and hairline slivers of granite after seven years of toiling on a face almost everyone considered unclimbable. In a single push he linked seven summits across Patagonia’s Fitz Roy skyline. He pushed an armed captor in Kyrgyzstan off a cliff.
All those tales and more are exquisitely detailed in Caldwell’s book “The Push.” But “The Push” isn’t a climbing book. It’s a genre-twisting read, that, while anchored in adventure, is really a lesson on how an introspective life of passion and optimistic purpose can enable anybody— even those who have never climbed a mountain— to push beyond their limits to find joy and peace.
The 38-year-old Caldwell’s “The Push” achieves the rarest of ad- venture reads: It thrills with colorful details of courage and perseverance but it enriches readers with an absolutely captivating glimpse into how a simple yet unwavering resolve can turn adversity into reward.
His parents called him their “miracle baby” after he was born premature, fighting with all his 3 pounds.
“Not giving up seemed to come natural for me,” he writes.
He was climbing by age 3, lured by his dad, Mike, to fly a Spiderman kite from atop Twin Owls outside Estes Park. He was on the granite atwyoming’s Vedauwoo by 4 and scaling Devil’s Tower and Yosemite routes by 7. His family — Mike, mom Terry and sister Sandy— didn’t just hike on family trips, “they summited mountains and slept in snow caves.”
At 12, the 98-pound Caldwell and his dad scaled Rockymountain National Park’s famed Diamond, the highest elevation big wall in the lower 48. As a 14-year-old, he accompanied his dad on a guiding trip into Bolivia’s Andes, keeping pace with the barefooted porters as they approached 20,000foot-plus peaks. That trip started Caldwell thinking “that climbing could be may path to what I considered greater truths— that simplicity, solitude, and natural beauty were the real gems of life.”
All his life, he’s loved the three-dimensional puzzle of climbing, piecing together memorized sequences of holds that required minute shifts in weight, balance and tenuous connections to stone.
As his body aged beyond his teens, Caldwell turned toward big walls. After graduating high school, he hit the road, living out of his car and climbing. As a 20-year-old, he notched the fifth-ever free ascent of El Capitan and found his purpose.
By 22, he was in love with young climbing luminary Beth Rodden. He was emerging as a big wall master when he joined Rodden on a trip to Kyrgyzstan in August 2000. As they climbed in the country’s Pamir-alaimountains— a region known as the Yosemite of Central Asia — bullets began ricocheting off the wall. Caldwell, Rodden and the two other climbers in their party were taken hostage by Islamic militants. For six days they were starving and freezing as their armed captors marched them through the mountains.
Rodden urged against violence. But Caldwell, facing starvation, need- ed to act.
In amoment that will define Caldwell’s life with a clear before-and-after delineation, Caldwell glanced at a trembling Rodden. Tapping a strength that “has been growing like a monster” he sprinted in the darkness toward his captor and shoved him off a cliff. Afterwatching the man tumble, Caldwell collapsed, sobbing.
“I had just killed a man. Not an evil villain, but a man ... who probably had a family at home, waiting for his return,” Caldwell writes.
Rodden fell into depression following Kyrgyzstan. When they discovered that the man Caldwell shoved actually survived the push, the two began to recover, with Caldwell continuing to make climbing history in Yosemite, Patagonia, Colorado and beyond.
A little more than a year after Krygyzstan, Caldwell cut his left index finger off while ripping lumber on a table saw as he worked on the cabin he shared with Rodden. Doctors couldn’t save his finger and Caldwell briefly questioned his career on rock. He turned his focus toward technique to make up for the missing digit. By 2003, he’d married Rodden and they both were climbing the hardest routes in the world as the so-called “first couple of rock climbing.”
But marital bliss is fleet-
ing. Rodden, prone to moments of darkness, found her audacious ascents were not enough. The couple rambled across the globe, scaling previously unclimbable routes, setting a new metric for their sport. Caldwell’s affirmation of climbing as his purpose only grew as he tested himself. After a 50-hour mission up the 4,000-foot east face of Patagonia’s famed First Roy, Caldwell veered between “hyperaware and randomly delirious” as he executed some of his finest work.
“This is what I’ve chosen. This is what has been chosen for me,” he writes. “Through the struggle and bone-pulsing exhaustion, a profound clarity had emerged, as if I had tapped into a place inside too often forgotten, where you are stripped bare and granted a glimpse into who you truly are. A place where you could look at the impossible and make it real. I’d never been so alive.”
While Caldwell excels at vividly illuminating his exploits— descriptions of climbs, his awe of nature, the physical challenges— his writing shines brightest as he examines his inner life. He’s an introspective guy, easily dismissing the carefree climber-bro stereotype.
As he writes about Rodden pulling away, Caldwell’s anguish is palpable.
Caldwell threw himself into an impossible project following his divorce: El Capitan’s Dawnwall. It was long considered unnavigable by free climbers — an ethical lot driven to climb only by physical power, not using tools, slings or ropes to gain upward progress. But Caldwell, who saw opportunity and possibility in the unnoticed, pieced together a plan that would eventually require more than seven years of dangling labor: studying holds, rehearsing maneuvers and scheming a single-push ascent.
“Beating my head against the Dawnwall became my beacon in the night,” he writes.
Spending several months a year on the Dawnwall and then off-seasons in Estes Park, sprinkled with record-book ascents in Patagonia, Caldwell built his new life.
Then he met Becca at Estes Park’s Rock Inn. Becca, a nurse, is not a climber but embraced and even celebrated Caldwell’s globe-trotting, projectdriven lifestyle. She stayed in Estes Park while he climbed, dedicating nearly all his time toward the Dawnwall.
Unfettered by worries about his relationship, Caldwell thrived. With Becca, who he eventually married, Caldwell said his life changed “from feeling like a slow, painful, uphill slog to more of a skip across the clouds.”
He partnered with a young superstar, Kevin Jorgeson, who committed to Caldwell’s seemingly insane optimism that the Dawnwall could be climbed free.
Caldwell recognized how outsiders might view his overwhelming obsession with the Dawnwall as a sort of addiction, especially when he adopted “an absurdly positive attitude.”
“The wall exists like a canvas, and it is your vision, ability, and creativity that turn it into a route. It’s the sort of drive that’s impossible to explain to those who haven’t been engulfed by a singular, unbridled passion,” he writes, describing how solutions to tricky sections of the route had come in his dreams.
Caldwell’s examination of the machinations of different relationships— with his dad, Rodden, Jorgeson and Becca— reveal a depth and scrutiny rarely seen in the hedonistic pursuits of adventure sports. Caldwell digs into his reasoning, angst and myriad blemishes to unveil the why of his quest to climb. “The Push” finally sees a climber offer something beyond the tired “because it’s there” trope. Just like Caldwell opened a new era for climbing by showing the world that the impossible was possible with his seven-year mission on the Dawnwall, so does “The Push” open a new realm for athletes to share the inner secrets of their obsessive pursuits.
As an ever-grateful Caldwell explores his life as a father to Fitz and, as of last March, Ingrid, he shows that a life pursuing adventure should inspire everyone, including his children. That’s the real summit. Caldwell’s hardearned lessons of laboring through failure, enduring hardships and staying focused on the larger goal can be anyone’s beacon in the night.
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or @jasonblevins