TOMMY CALDWELL

Tommy Caldwell

Five kilometers of granite teeth and seven distinct summits define the iconic Fitz Roy massif. Located in southern Patagonia on the Chile-Argentina border, this skyline has been inspiring climbers since the 1940s, yet an enchainment of all the summits eluded some of the world’s best climbers for decades.

Patagonian granite is particularly tacky and sharp; it shreds ropes. Weather circulates the latitudes between 40 and 50 degrees south and then crashes into southern Patagonia to produce hurricane-force winds and blizzards even in the dead of summer. The climbing demands proficiency on snow, ice, and difficult rock. All of these factors regularly thwarted top climbers’ attempts in the past.

Enter rock-climbing legend Tommy Caldwell, who is arguably the best all-around rock climber on the planet. In the last 15 years, he has established some of the most difficult climbs around the U.S. and on El Capitan in Yosemite.

“I’d heard about it from other climbers like Peter Croft and Dean Potter. It is just so obvious, but it sounded like the most ridiculous objective,” says the 36-year-old Colorado native.

After his first trip to Patagonia in 2006, Caldwell had a thought. Could the speed-climbing tactics developed in Yosemite Valley be applied in places like Patagonia? Iconic El Capitan routes that once took elite climbers days to ascend have become racetracks where the world’s best finish in a matter of hours. The systems developed in Yosemite allow a party of two to climb simultaneously rather than pausing to belay one another.

In Patagonia, conditions are fickle. Snow and ice often clog cracks. Climbers have to shoulder heavy packs while on route. All of this leads to slower climbing. The climbing can be dangerous, and there's no elite search-and-rescue team to whisk you away should something go wrong. The Yosemite system demands world-class competence, but Caldwell believed it would eliminate wasted time from the process, allowing climbers to take advantage of the short gaps between storms.

Caldwell filed the traverse away and waited until he had the right partner. In 2012, when Caldwell teamed up with fellow climbing superstar Alex Honnold to free climb Yosemite’s three biggest walls—El Capitan, Half Dome, and Mount Watkins—in a single day, he realized that he had found the person.

“When Tommy mentioned the traverse I was obviously a little intimidated. I was kind of intimidated [by] doing anything in Patagonia,” says Honnold, who was an Adventurer of the Year in 2010. “I knew he had a lot of experience in Patagonia, and he’s climbed with me enough to know my strengths and limitations, so if he says I can do something, I believe him.”

In terms of weather, 2014 was one of the worst for climbing in Patagonia in recent memory, except for one large window in mid-February. Once Caldwell and Honnold began, they found the route itself in poor condition. Melting snow and ice soaked them. At one point they were borderline hypothermic. Halfway through the traverse, the duo was forced to cut their fraying rope in half to maintain its integrity. This slowed them dramatically during the rappels; a shorter rope means more rappels.

“Both Alex and I have the mentality that you go until it’s obviously dangerous,” says Caldwell. “It may be miserable, but we didn’t feel like we were going to die, so we kept climbing.”

Honnold and Caldwell dispatched the major climbing hurdles in four days before descending on February 16. A single route on one of these seven peaks might take experienced climbers two to three days.

“Climbing with Alex, everything feels half the size,” says the ever humble Caldwell. “It was a surreal experience. Our shared energy got us through it.”