In January 2015 Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson achieved the 'impossible' - over three weeks they made their way up the forbidding, 3000-foot-high Dawn Wall on the south-west face of El Capitan, an aid route first climbed by Warren Harding in 1970 who spent 28 days on it, sitting out terrible storms and refusing to be rescued.
The Dawn Wall was the last big wall in Yosemite yet to be free-climbed and Tommy - a Yosemite climber almost since birth - was certainly a prime and worthy candidate for the first free ascent. He started working the route in 2008 and tried to free the Dawn Wall in 2010 with Kevin, but sustained a broken ankle in a fall and was stumped by the crux 14th pitch. In 2013, Chris Sharma and Jonathan Siegrist joined in on the assault but to no avail.
Dawn Wall was a climb that made history and was one that Caldwell, after losing a finger in a domestic accident, had been told he had no hope of achieving. Yet conquering El Capitan represented the end of a difficult recovery from the trauma of being held hostage by rebels during an earlier climbing expedition to Kyrgyzstan.
Tommy Caldwell grew up in Colorado. He has made dozens of notable ascents, and many consider him the best all-around rock climber in the world. In 2014 he was chosen as one of National Geographic s Adventurers of the Year, and in 2015 the American Alpine Club awarded him Lifetime Honorary Membership, its highest honor. Caldwell, a frequent contributor to Alpinist, Climbing, and Rock and Ice magazines, lives in the town where he first learned to climb, Estes Park, Colorado, with his wife and their son and daughter."
Much more than an account of a single, monumental climb, The Push looks set to join the classics of the genre.
Contains several pages of colour photos.
By Tommy Caldwell.
Card Cover, 20cm x 13cm, 454 pages.
Published 2017, this edition 2018.
ISBN: 978-1-405-92474-0.