Dawn Wall climber Tommy Caldwell to read from memoir at Copperfield's in Santa Rosa
There is magic in being first.
And there is something especially magical in doing something remarkable for the very first time while the eyes of the world are watching.
Tommy Caldwell, 38, has been first in nine major ascents in the climbing world but none bigger, by a long shot, than his successfully topping out on the Dawn Wall route on El Capitan in Yosemite in January 2015.
Caldwell, along with his Dawn Wall partner, Santa Rosan and Maria Carrillo High graduate Kevin Jorgeson, became household names as they used social media to share their journey up what is considered the most difficult free climb in the world. The duo were affixed to ropes only for safety - they used their bodies to inch up one of the sheerest slabs of granite on the planet as the world watched.
When they embraced at the top, 19 days after they left the valley floor 3,000 feet below and more than seven years after Caldwell first started mapping the route and planning the project, they were international rock stars.
And yet Caldwell was conflicted. Topping out meant the end of a dream and the termination of a project he had spent seven years, season after season, obsessing over. Caldwell had spent the fall and winter months for years suspended above the ground, working out a climbable route and getting his body and mind in shape to handle it. It was his release from the pain of a public divorce, the trauma of a kidnapping, the loss of his index finger in a carpentry accident, and a way to work through a complicated relationship with his father, former Mr. Colorado, Mike Caldwell.
“I needed the Dawn Wall as my own way to heal,” he wrote in his just-released autobiography “The Push: A Climber's Journey of Endurance, Risk and Going Beyond Limits.”
The process of researching and writing the book seems to be Caldwell's way of dealing with everything that came along with the success of the Dawn Wall - the fame, the money, the speaking engagements and the increasing difficulty of finding time to be in the mountains that seem to fortify him.
Writing “The Push” helped Caldwell come to terms with his own story. He will be speaking about the book and his Dawn Wall experience at Copperfield's Books in Montgomery Village May 25.
Looking back, Caldwell calls the aftermath of the ascent a confusing time. He had solved one of the greatest challenges in climbing but had not yet untangled his feelings about what led him to the Dawn Wall.
“The immediate feeling was that of loss,” he said of the days after he completed the storied journey. “I would say I went through a bit of a midlife crisis.”
So he began working on the book, interviewing family members and friends, and trying to figure out what made him do what he did and what made him the man he is.
“I wanted to figure out what shaped me,” he said.
In part, what shaped Caldwell was a hard-driving father and a prodigious talent. Caldwell was a climbing phenom, winning contests against pros, traveling the world with his father and gaining “first ascents” as a young man.
Caldwell said his dad, with whom he is close, hasn't been able to bring himself to read the book because of its darker passages.
“With my dad, man, that's a tough one,” he said. “My dad is like the most positive, over-stoker person you could imagine and it is impossible for him to see anything but the most sunny side.”
But Caldwell's tale has darkness.
On a climbing trip in Kyrgyzstan in 2000, Caldwell, 22, his three companions, including Beth Rodden, the woman who would become his first wife, were kidnapped and held hostage for six days. Caldwell made international news when he pushed one of his captors off a cliff, allowing the foursome to flee to safety.
Then in 2001, Caldwell lost most of his left index finger in a table saw accident at his home in Estes Park, Colorado, putting his career and future in jeopardy.
“Losing a finger … it has an interesting effect,” he said. “It was when I became serious. It made me value what I do so much more, when it was in jeopardy.”
Caldwell also had to live through the public unraveling of his marriage and climbing partnership with Rodden, another big name in climbing circles.
The Dawn Wall became Caldwell's path to surviving what he called the darkest time in his life.
“Beating my head against the Dawn Wall became my beacon in the night,” he wrote.
In the book, Caldwell is hard on Rodden, he's hard on his father and he's hard on Jorgeson. But he's perhaps hardest of all on himself.
He gave a copy of the book to Rodden but hasn't spoken to her about it. He gave a copy to his dad who wasn't able to finish it. And Caldwell said he was unsure if Jorgeson, whom Caldwell said he has a complicated relationship with but, whom he loves like a brother, will attend Thursday's talk.
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