The Impossible Climb

TOMMY CALDWELL and KEVIN JORGESON’s groundbreaking ascent of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall is considered by many pros to be the most difficult climb ever attempted. But a feature-length documentary about the expedition exposes a drama even more breathtaking than the story that made global headlines.

Words DAVID HOWARD

Photography COREY RICH

Unless you’ve ever visited California’s Yosemite National Park, you’ll probably be surprised by the breathtaking scenes of transcendent beauty that fill the screen in the documentary The Dawn Wall. The film tells the story of a 19-day free climb of the famous rock formation El Capitan by two Americans on a route previously thought to be unclimbable.

The iconic granite monolith looms vast and impassive in flaxen morning light throughout the 100-minute documentary, which chronicles Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s six-year mission to scale its most forbidding and featureless face.

Most of the world’s climbing experts rank the enterprise somewhere between outrageously ambitious and utterly fantastical. Veteran climber John Long describes it in the film as “the most continuously difficult rock climb ever done – nothing else is even close to it”.

Perched high above Yosemite Valley in his portaledge, Kevin Jorgeson reflects on the gruelling challenge ahead

It’s the most continuously difficult rock climb ever done – nothing is even close”

What might come as a bigger surprise, though, is that the film’s most affecting scene takes place in a setting that’s neither epic nor panoramic, but instead a cramped shelter, with steam pouring from a camping stove next to a tired climber.

But that comes later. First, the film introduces the back story: Colorado-born big-wall legend Caldwell obsesses over the Dawn Wall, joins forces with California native and bouldering specialist Jorgeson, and the two spend several years mapping out a 32-pitch, 900m route. Looking over their shoulders when the climbers finally tackle the endeavour just after Christmas in 2014 are filmmakers Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer and their crew.

Viewers quickly learn that the climb’s ultimate test is Pitch 15, a long traverse across a flat stretch of rock as flat as a freshly ironed shirt collar. Neither climber had managed to piece together the series of unforgivingly precise moves it requires over several reconnaissance trips. After multiple failures, Caldwell summons some unknowable mix of skill and resolve, and spiders his way across. But Jorgesen is foiled repeatedly over a long sequence of days, and viewers witness him growing increasingly frustrated. Eventually, Caldwell must move on – after all, this started off as his dream – and he works his way up several other challenging pitches until it becomes clear he’ll make it.

Alone.

Except that he doesn’t. Back to that hanging shelter, known in climbing circles as a portaledge, and that nimbus of steam. In a halting, half-mumbled delivery, Caldwell declares over his bubbling camp stove that he’s not about to finish the climb without his buddy, no matter how much he’d poured himself into it over the past six years. Jorgeson nods in agreement. The exchange is over quickly and with little ceremony, but it’s a deeply powerful and intimate moment. And it’s part of what makes the documentary vibrate with tension and humanity: you’re able to watch these supremely talented climbers close-up, but you also get to know them.

Even the filmmakers, who surmised that there was a moment of reckoning coming between the two climbers, were stunned by the scene. “We all thought it was an act of madness that Tommy was waiting for Kevin,” recalls Mortimer. “Kevin had never climbed anything of that difficulty or that grade level on any route outside of the Dawn Wall in his life. It was a whole new frontier, and here he was, two weeks into this event, his body torn apart, his fingers ripped to shreds, and the whole world is hanging on his every move.”

If you tried to write a story about what the pair went on to achieve next, together, even Hollywood would have considered it too Hollywood.

TOMMY CALDWELL and KEVIN JORGESON. The two extraordinary climbers who took on Dawn Wall shared a common goal, but entered the challenge with vastly different CVs. Caldwell (top) was a big-wall veteran with numerous first ascents, while Jorgeson was known more as a bouldering specialist.

Living on the wall, it’s not like the camera team and the climbing team. We’re one team”

It was no accident that Lowell and Mortimer (along with adventure photographer Corey Rich) were the ones to capture that moment next to Pitch 15, as well as the rest of the Dawn Wall’s vertiginous glory; between them, the veteran filmmakers have produced many celebrated climbing movies. Lowell met Caldwell’s father 30 years ago when Tommy was nine, and he filmed Caldwell’s meteoric rise through the climbing ranks. Lowell had also shot Jorgeson, now 33, in action on many occasions.

“He’s as much a friend as he is a videographer,” says Caldwell. “We’ve both been super lucky to work with him all these years.”

The relationship helped both the climbers and filmmakers overcome stiff logistical obstacles, beginning with the task of dangling cameramen hundreds of metres in the air for hours on end. Rich, a longtime climbing photographer, and Lowell’s brother Brett, the film’s cinematographer, embraced the task. “Brett’s got tree-trunk arms,” says Lowell, “and he’s the only one strong enough to sit there and hold the camera steady for a three-minute take while leaning out backwards, hanging off a harness, straining every muscle in his body.”

The directors wanted more than just shots from across the plane of the wall or straight down the rock face, which presented another test: American national parks don’t allow the use of helicopters or drones. To improvise more dramatic perspectives, Lowell and Mortimer developed a system involving a rope that stretched all the way down and anchored to boulders off the base of the wall. To that, they tied a series of horizontal ropes at various heights, creating a spider’s web of rigging in which a cameraman could hover 15m from the wall, 600m off the ground.

With Caldwell watching from below, Jorgeson leads a pitch early in the expedition

During the expedition, the twin endeavours of climbing and filming merged into one. “Living on a wall with somebody, it’s not like the camera team and the climbing team,” says Caldwell. “We’re one team. For the final pitch, it was me and Brett in one portaledge, and Kevin and Corey in the other. In terms of logistics, they were part of the climbing team and we were part of the video team.”

The deep connection paid multiple dividends. For one thing, Caldwell trusted Mortimer and Lowell to unpack his complicated history in full. Cutting back and forth between the action on El Capitan, the film delves into a harrowing incident from 2000 in which Caldwell, his then-girlfriend Beth Rodden and two fellow climbers were kidnapped by militants during an expedition in Kyrgyzstan; Caldwell pushed one of their captors off a mountain in order to save them. Viewers also learn about Caldwell’s marriage to Rodden and the painful divorce that followed. Another segment explains why Caldwell climbs with half of his left index finger missing. (Hint: he’s less adept at woodcutting than climbing.)

Somehow, the filmmakers remain barely visible throughout the documentary, except for a few moments when viewers see a cameraman yo-yoing over the abyss. It’s just enough to remind you there’s more to the climb than the climb itself. The crew’s ability to blend in helps when, for example, Jorgeson bashes himself against Pitch 15, withholding nothing, including screams of exasperation and expletives. “They were some of the most intense and focused moments I’ve ever had in climbing, so the last thing I was thinking about was Brett or Cory shooting,” says Jorgeson. “This was our passion project for so long. Nothing else mattered at that moment but the moves ahead.”

As darkness falls, Caldwell pushes on, trying to complete a route that was a long-term obsession

Lowell and Mortimer ended up participating in the action in another unexpected way: by shielding the climbers from the glare of the outside world. The two filmmakers knew the climb was seen as an immense challenge in climbing circles and represented a great story. What they didn’t anticipate was how the narrative would mushroom into a source of global fascination.

The chaos began when Lowell arranged for John Branch of The New York Times to interview the climbers mid-expedition. The resulting front-page story made the climb an instant sensation. “The next morning,” Lowell recalls, “they’re getting calls and emails and texts from all over the world. They were not prepared for that at all, and I think Tommy had a big pullback, like, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work. We’re trying to do the hardest thing in our lives and we’ve created this bubble of focus.’”

Brett Lowell hangs over the abyss as he shoots footage

They did one more interview, for US radio news show All Things Considered, but declined numerous requests from other outlets. Caldwell dropped his phone during one pitch, triggering an ongoing joke among the filmmakers about whether he did it on purpose. (He says it was an accident, but adds, “At first I was like, ‘Oh no!’ And then, after that, I was psyched actually.”)

Lowell and Mortimer embraced the way the story broke into the mainstream, even as they protected the climbers from the spotlight. “I started juggling media requests,” says Lowell, “and trying to shield them a bit so they could stay in the zone and focus on what they needed to do to actually finish the climb, because the worst-case scenario would have been for all of that stuff to become a hindrance.”

Without interference, the story that unfolded naturally – the conversation in the portaledge as the two climbers struggled to hold things together – couldn’t have been credibly scripted. As Mortimer says, “It’d be too Disney-like, over the top. Like, ‘Oh, come on!’”

After a draining 19 days on El Capitan, the filmmakers faced an even more daunting task: piecing together a story that encompassed Caldwell’s adventures over 30-plus years, plus scores of hours of footage. There would be endless editing headaches over the next two years of production, but the project never flagged.

“We had a feeling that, as filmmakers, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tell a story this big with such amazingfootage,” Mortimer says. “As much suffering as we’ve been through, we’re lucky to be part of it.”

Coming in October; for details, go to uk.demand.film/ dawn-wall