[wind whistling]
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Alex Honnold] I think this would be, like,
the grandest adventure that we've been on in our lives.
I'm doing this to support my friend.
[Tommy Caldwell] One. Go.
[Ingrid] My turn.
- Uh-oh. It's real.
- It's real. It's really happening.
[Alex Honnold] I do worry about how Tommy will hold up
on the Devil's Thumb.
[shouting]
[Alex Honnold] It's gonna get steep.
Wow. This is crazy.
I'm pretty sure you're uh, you're not on route.
Those are the types of risks that I don't really wanna take.
[Tommy Caldwell] You know the only thing keeping you alive
is your trust in your climbing partner,
and your best friend.
[♪ theme music playing]
[birds chirping]
[Tommy Caldwell] My name is Tommy Caldwell and I've been a
professional climber pretty much my entire life.
The Devil's Thumb has always been there,
in the back of my mind.
It's kind of like this mythical mountain.
It's got the biggest alpine face in North America that's
never been climbed.
Only a few people have even attempted it,
and a lot of the ones that did, died trying.
And so I've been putting it together in my mind,
and sort of logistically, for, like, a year or something.
But I needed a partner to help me pull it off.
So I called up Alex Honnold.
He's the guy that climbed the 3,000-foot face on El Capitan,
in Yosemite, without a rope.
- Yeah, buddy.
[Tommy Caldwell] He's probably the best climber on Earth for
an expedition like this,
and I was like, "is there any way that you'd wanna
do this whole trip with me?",
and his immediate reaction was, like,
"No, Sanni's gonna divorce me if I do that.
Like, there's no way I could do it.".
But I got in his mind a little bit and he called me back
a week later, and was like, "yeah, we're gonna do it.".
[groaning]
- I think this is, this could be mega.
This could be really big.
This is definitely not light duty.
It's hard to say, 'cause we don't know what the rock
quality is or what the weather's like, but from the
photos, it looks insane.
I mean, there's also the possibility of just going
straight up from the bottom,
you know, climbing the whole south face.
- Yeah.
Most teams of recent history,
have just helicoptered right to the base,
but that's not really my style.
So I started trying to imagine, like,
"what would be the grandest way possible to do this trip?".
I've always wanted to do a long bike tour, and I came up with
an idea for, like, this epic road trip.
Biking from my house, across nearly 2,500 miles of the
American West and Canada,
all the way to the border of Alaska.
Honestly, I haven't done a big adventure like this
in a long time.
Keep my aging body fresh.
So it's like,
"let's climb something that's very challenging
and really earn our stripes getting there."
[producer] Can I get you guys to look in each others' eyes?
- No.
[laughs].
[producer] What do you see?
- I see fear and pain.
[laughs].
[producer] What do you see?
- I mean, I'm slightly concerned about Alex's
lack of empathy on this kind of trip.
[laughs].
[Tommy Caldwell] Three, two, one.
Go!
[Ingrid] My turn.
[Tommy Caldwell] I've been sidelined for a few years with
an injury and raising a family.
Go!
So the Devil's Thumb is kind of, like, the biggest
challenge imaginable, for making my comeback.
I don't know, I just hope to have a great, you know,
a grand adventure together.
- Because I'm supportive and kind, really empathetic, too.
- This is when Alex will be who he is, you know?
It always works... it's's always worked out in the past,
and hopefully it'll work out again.
- Uh-oh, it's real now.
- It's real. It's really happening.
- This is gonna go by really fast.
I am excited that Tommy gets to go on an adventure,
'cause I feel like Tommy is the most himself,
he's the most Tommy when he gets to do this kind of thing,
and it's been a while since he's gotten to do that.
But two months is a really long time,
and they're climbing a mountain
that could potentially be a dangerous climb.
I haven't made it past that yet.
- Bye. Have a good Summer.
I'll treat him so well, don't worry.
[Becca Caldwell] Oh, no!
Love you.
[Tommy Caldwell] Love you, baby.
[Alex Honnold] This is what we like to call a "downhill",
so we really like doing some speed here.
Just try to make it look fast.
♪ Spent two years of my life in a foreign land, ♪
♪ Came home to find my mind still stuck in the sand ♪
Okay, so here's a rattlesnake that I just biked by,
heard the rattle,
and then it jumped at Tommy, who's on the other track.
Welcome to Wyoming.
♪ I had to tell myself, "Did 'em all for you" ♪
[splash]
Oh, yeah. Buffalo.
[Tommy Caldwell] This is, like, X-rated filming.
- Most people think X-rated means naughty,
you mean dangerous.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, dangerous.
♪ And oh, it shows ♪
♪ On the faces of those who know ♪
- Waiting for Alex to cruise by.
We got camera on the tripod.
Boom.
Taylor Shaffer from San Diego,
and I've been a fan of Tommy and Alex
for a very, very long time.
My job is to take some photos during this journey,
massage their sore butts, you know,
when they're just on the bike for hours on end.
- Taylor was in my kitchen one morning, and I said that
we were looking for somebody who was young and hungry,
and ready to go on a big adventure and support,
and he literally was like, "I'm young and hungry.".
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, Taylor.
You're looking like a man right now.
[Taylor Shaffer] And I'm driving the van.
I like driving, it's not too bad.
Oh, my gosh, is that Alex Honnold?
Wow.
Dreams do come true.
Check back soon.
This is the content we need, right here.
The whole youth group.
Alex can't go anywhere these days.
Tommy, nobody cares about Tommy.
See, the lonesome dad.
Then we've got Alex, over here.
Tommy's like, "okay, I'm just gonna start biking because
nobody cares about me."
[Alex Honnold] The average person might not recognize
Tommy in the crowd, but in the climbing world,
he's a total legend.
I was a ten-year-old when I first
heard about Tommy Caldwell.
I was just a kid, going to the climbing gym in
suburban California,
and Tommy was one of the best climbers in the country,
and I mean really, one of the best climbers in the world.
He was doing these insane first ascents on some of the
hardest big wall routes in the world.
He's like the Captain America of rock climbing.
Basically, he was the climber that I hoped to be.
[Tommy Caldwell] I first heard about Alex, you know, he was
kind of this budding, young climber, and then he soloed
some big routes in Yosemite before I ever met him, and
I was like, "whoa, that's not normal.
He's doing stuff that people really haven't done
at this point."
But it was in, kind of, like, this angstful way,
in terms of needing to, like, prove something.
I just remember talking to him for, like, six hours
one night, which,
[laughs].
surprised me, 'cause that wasn't kind of what I'd heard.
I'd head he was super shy and awkward.
So we, like, kind of connected.
[Alex Honnold] The first big climb that I did with Tommy
was the free trip on Yosemite.
It was something like a 24 hour climbing experience,
where we did the three biggest and hardest walls together.
Okay, I got you good!
Nice, Tommy.
[Tommy Caldwell] Climbing with Alex,
it's like a vice, in a way.
It's like smoking cigarettes would be, or something.
It's like, you know it could kill you,
but you do it anyway.
Dude, that was off the hook.
[Alex Honnold] We had the same sets of strengths and
weaknesses, basically.
It allowed us to climb in a way that neither of us had
ever actually climbed before.
[Tommy Caldwell] Climbing with Alex, all the mountains shrunk
to about half their size.
We could climb things together
that we could never do individually.
It was really addictive right from the start.
[Alex Honnold] Okay, I'm making a movie.
[Tommy Caldwell] Okay.
[Alex Honnold] Okay, Tommy. What are we doing?
[Tommy Caldwell] I mean, so we're looking at all these
awesome photos, trying to figure out our route.
Turns out the walls are a little three-dimensional,
it's a little bit hard to figure out
until we get there and see it.
There's going to be plenty of mysteries.
[Alex Honnold] Okay, I'm gonna look at more photos.
Whoa, big mountains.
Whoa, scary mountains.
Whoa, unclimbed big faces.
[Tommy Caldwell] Unclimbed big faces.
Lots of rock.
[Alex Honnold] Okay, well, that's what we're gonna climb.
Cool, that's our mountain.
Okay, bye.
[Tommy Caldwell] I first learned about the Devil's Thumb
from Jon Krakauer's book, Into The Wild.
It was, like, his formative youth climbing experience,
going and trying to climb this mountain, and his descriptions
of the mountain captured my imagination.
It's an incredibly beautiful mountain,
but it's just so remote,
and the weather is so terrible.
So I think it's gonna be a big adventure.
[Alex Honnold] Krakauer attempted to climb the
north-east ridge of the Devil's Thumb in 1977.
He made it about halfway up when he realized there was
no way he could pull it off.
People have called it "the last great problem"
in North American mountaineering.
For Tommy and me, I think climbing the Devil's Thumb
is really about the chance to do something
that's never been done before.
I'm doing this to support my friend,
I think that's kind of the role of the partner,
is to keep you motivated, to keep you moving,
to keep the team moving forward.
The bike ride, though, not really my thing.
[Alex Honnold] This slowly grinding our way across the
country, personally, I think it's a bit much.
Like, just get me to the climbing already.
[Taylor Shaffer] You guys look beat.
[Alex Honnold] Pretty tired now.
- We look like beasts.
[laughs].
[Alex Honnold] We also got up at four.
Maybe tomorrow we should--
- I'm gonna go take a shower and look fresh as a daisy.
- Tommy is known for his good nature, his positivity.
Like, he's always upbeat.
- You wanna wrestle?
- No. Heck, no.
- I think this was the stance.
Alex is sort of known for being a bit of a grump,
sometimes, on the way to the mountain.
But honestly, there's, kind of, a bigger reason that
I need this time on the bikes before the climb.
[Taylor Shaffer] How's all the legs, all the injuries doing?
[Tommy Caldwell] I mean, pretty good. Yeah.
I think, overall, they're getting better.
Everything that I know about life is, kind of, like
imbued through this lens of being a climber.
All of my craziest experiences, all of my hardest experiences,
all of my best experiences are basically all,
somehow, associated with climbing.
Year-and-a-half ago, I was trying a climb in Yosemite.
[shouting]
I swung into the wall really hard,
and it tore my Achilles tendon.
An Achilles injury, for any professional athlete,
is very serious.
It can easily end your entire career.
Biking is something I can do before it's completely healed,
and so I started to conceive this idea to do this big trip.
Which gives me about 50 days to get ready for the climb.
My old man strength is starting to pull through, here.
I'll take what I can get.
I'm usually floundering behind you, so.
- That's not, that's not actually true.
You've got, like, slightly flounder-y
in the last year or two,
and only because you ruptured your, your Achilles.
I think Tommy's Achilles injury has been hard for him,
for sure, especially for him as a professional climber,
it's like, it's his livelihood, in addition to the
thing he loves doing.
[Becca Caldwell] He needs to be set free, physically,
to fully be himself.
And then you just wonder, too, it's like, our, like, security
is kind of based on him being physically able to do stuff.
And so, having that threatened, there's that,
you know, just a little bit of vulnerability.
[Tommy Caldwell] Well, they put bolts in there,
they put a cadaver part in there,
they stitched the whole thing up using all these crazy things,
and they completely rebuilt the Achilles tendon.
Hopefully it'll hold up on the Devil's Thumb, but we won't
really know until we get up on a real mountain and test it.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Alex Honnold] We've made it about halfway on our
bike journey to Alaska,
and we're stopping off at a mountain range called
"Bugaboos", in Canada.
It's a famous climbing spot in North America,
and a proving ground for bigger alpine climbs,
like in Alaska.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
It'll be kind of a climbing boot camp to
test Tommy's Achilles,
and ease back into full-on, like, elite rock climbing.
[unzipping]
We are up early 'cause we're gonna go climb today.
Right now, we're just having a nice, early breakfast,
enjoying the stars.
[rumbling]
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Taylor Shaffer] 5:00 a.m.
We're here.
It's a big jumble of rock above us, huh?
El Cap size.
Ready to blast off.
[Tommy Caldwell] Our objective, today, is to climb
a 3,000-foot granite wall.
Alex climbed the first 100 feet in like four minutes.
Gonna have to go fast.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[grunting]
- Pretending my toes aren't about to fall off,
and start crying like a baby.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Tommy Caldwell] Alex is leading and he's going really fast,
and honestly, I'm struggling to keep up with him,
especially with being injured for the last year.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Alex Honnold] The micro's on, Tommy.
[Tommy Caldwell] Okay.
[Alex Honnold] I'm gonna keep going up the next ridge.
[Tommy Caldwell] Whoa! This whole thing is loose,
that I'm standing on.
Was is strenuous climbing past this?
- Is it strenuous? - Yeah.
[Alex Honnold] The crux is hard, at the top.
[Tommy Caldwell] Man, that was a little more physical than
I was hoping.
[Alex Honnold] How's the Achilles, Tommy?
How do you feel?
[Tommy Caldwell] Umm...
You know, like this has been a bit of a journey.
Did have two Advil 'cause of the bolts they put in my heel.
[Alex Honnold] Hey, you ready to take us to the top?
- Yeah. - Oh, yeah.
[Tommy Caldwell] Woke up today, might as well be bad-***.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, that's the spirit.
[Tommy Caldwell] Alex is being pretty patient with me,
but we both know the partnership to take on the Devil's Thumb
together doesn't really work if I can't keep up.
[heavy breathing]
[Alex Honnold] Nice, Tommy. Come on.
Nice, Tommy.
Nice, dude!
Nice effort.
[Tommy Caldwell] Thank you.
[Alex Honnold] Solid, Tommy. Come on.
I do wonder if he's more beat than he lets on.
I mean, I think he's kept shockingly high spirits,
but truly, it's taken a toll.
Tommy just took the lead after a year-and-a-half of injury.
What a boss.
Tommy Caldwell, childhood hero, you know?
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Tommy Caldwell] Getting off belay, Alex.
[Alex Honnold] Nice job.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
Alright, Tommy. Come on.
[Tommy Caldwell] So high up there that you can't even see
the mountains anymore.
Oh, my God.
[laughs].
Just amazing.
After nearly two years of recovery, where, at times,
I didn't know if I'd ever climb big mountains again,
honestly, it just feels incredible.
[laughs].
Oh man.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah!
Yeah, Tommy!
High-fives. What a boss.
Yeah, good work.
Bam, the summit.
- Yay, the summit! - I have no idea if this is...
[Alex Honnold] Tommy gets to the summit and I can immediately
see that he seems pretty emotional,
and, and we celebrate.
It's really freaking cool.
Oh, yeah.
- Well, I think that was a great day.
Pretty psyched.
Not long after that, I was back home,
just trying to get my life back together,
bought this little, tiny, rundown cabin.
Didn't know how to use power tools or really remodel.
And I chopped off my finger with a table saw.
My doctor said my climbing career was over.
But through both those experiences,
I built this intense drive to not lose climbing.
I basically learned that climbing can
save me from anything.
[cheering].
[screaming]
[Alex Honnold] Our climbing the Bugaboos was definitely a
big step, but I do still worry about how Tommy will hold up
on the Devil's Thumb.
You know, he turned 45 on this trip.
I mean, for a professional athlete, that's old.
[Tommy Caldwell] I think Alex walks this interesting line of,
like, supporting me and pushing me.
You know, he's not, like, a hugely sympathetic
climbing partner, that's for sure.
He makes these off-handed, kind of, harsh remarks,
at times, and he's actually said to me, he's like,
"maybe I should find somebody younger and more hungry,"
and I don't know whether that's tongue-in-cheek,
whether that's truth.
I don't know.
I think I wanna show Alex I still have it, but I think,
more than that, I wanna show myself that I still have it.
[♪ peaceful music playing]
[Tommy Caldwell] Hey, dude. We made it to the ocean.
[Alex Honnold] We made it to the ocean.
[Tommy Caldwell] We are in Prince Rupert, British Colombia.
There's no roads beyond here, so this is where we ditch our
bikes and sail to a place where we can start our final
approach, on-foot, to the mountain.
[waves crashing]
Alex is, unfortunately, passed out in the bottom of the ship,
face-down, trying not to puke.
Somebody's gotta captain the ship.
- Yeah, it's starting to get a little bouncy.
[Tommy Caldwell] Well, we're sailing, there's whales.
- Oh, yeah.
[blowing]
- That was sick.
[blowing]
[Tommy Caldwell] I love doing trips with Alex, but he is a
little bit of an enigma, I would say.
Every time we are out doing something that, I think,
is kind of incredible, Alex is, oftentimes,
pretty grumpy about it.
I always thought that it was just kind of a shtick,
like, he was just being funny,
but I think, now, there's, like,
a little bit more to it than that.
He gets the most happy when we find a scrappy,
little climbing gym.
That's when he's the most joyful.
I mean, I'm realizing that he needs to pull hard on
small holes, all the time, to feel right in the world.
We should do what we did before, which would be you
leading the free blast.
Back in 2016, Alex was prepping for his big Free Solo
climb in Yosemite,
which was really putting his life on the line,
and I was trying to help him get ready.
He used to periodically go through existential crises,
he would blow up his relationships.
You'd call him and he'd just seem dark and conflicted.
Can you read me your journal entry for today?
[Alex Honnold] Says, "Today 7-C plus one fall on crux,
too pumped, need more fitness.
[Tommy Caldwell] Do you ever put things like,
"miss my dog, and my mom?"
I don't know.
- No, no. - No?
[Alex Honnold] I think I felt like I could only perform,
as a climber,
with a certain amount of angst or kind of aggro energy.
You know, that I needed some darkness in order to achieve.
When I grew up, nobody in my family hugged, full-stop.
And so I didn't really start hugging until my mid-20s,
and it was a conscious effort to, sort of,
learn how to touch other people.
Some people look at me and they're like,
"oh, he's, you know, an emotionless robot," like,
"he feels no fear, he's just like a climbing machine."
I feel emotions, I would just say that I'm probably
less emotive than, than the average person.
[Tommy Caldwell] With Alex, there's always a
protective wall.
I think it's hard for him to let down his guard of this,
like, persona of the fearless climber.
You ready? One, two, three.
Alex, you should do it.
[Alex Honnold] No chance I'm jumping in.
[laughs].
I'm also here, hoping for a transformative experience.
And hoping to figure out what a trip like this actually
means for me, as well.
I think I'll feel a little more at ease once we get some
real intel on what the climb and the mountain
actually looks like.
[Tommy Caldwell] Hey Dieter.
Finally.
Yeah so great to meet you.
[Dieter Klose] Great to meet you.
[Alex Honnold] Nice to meet you.
[Dieter Klose] Nice to meet you.
[Alex Honnold] Thanks for having us.
[Dieter Klose] My pleasure.
[Alex Honnold] Dieter Klose is probably the most prolific and
knowledgable climber on the Devil's Thumb.
He's one of the few people on Earth who can give us
real info on the potential climbing routes,
and on navigating the maze of obstacles
between here and the mountain.
[Dieter Klose] The Devil's Thumb is very remote.
You're totally alone.
It's only climbers that are really drawn, I think,
because it's so forbidding.
[Alex Honnold] These are awesome.
[Dieter Klose] I thought you'd like this one.
It gives you a good, you know, view of the north-west face.
[Tommy Caldwell] Makes it look very ominous.
- It's terrifying. - Yeah.
So there's no routes on
any of this part of the north-west face?
- Negative.
- So there's nothing over there? - Yeah.
[Alex Honnold] There are three potential routes, that we're
considering, to reach the top of the Devil's Thumb.
The south face is the cleanest route.
It's a good option in bad weather, but doesn't offer
much in terms of climbing objectives.
A much more impressive option would be to do a full traverse
of the entire Devil's Thumb massif,
which means to summit each of these incredible
needle-like spires
on our way to the top of the Devil's Thumb itself.
The final option is to summit via the massive wall of the
north-west face, which has never been climbed.
[Dieter Klose] It might never get climbed,
because it's so fickle.
It's like, everybody that's gone there, you know,
high-end climbers,
don't even go onto the face at all.
- But why don't they try?
- It's avalanching.
- Yeah.
- Normally, you don't go to a climbing destination that's
also a good place to go avalanche-watching.
- I know. They're beautiful, right?
If they don't hit ya.
- Can't wait.
[Dieter Klose] I was on the west buttress, I got hit by rockfall,
and my daughter was six-months-old, and for me,
that was a total wake-up.
Like, it was, "you're a dad now,
you're not doing dangerous climbs anymore."
I don't think there's any advice, that I can give you,
that you don't already know.
I mean, it's like, I would say, "stay alive, you have a family."
[Alex Honnold] It'll have to just be, like, a
game-day decision, I think, on which route we actually take.
- You won't know until you're right there.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, totally.
[Tommy Caldwell] The next step is figuring out how to
actually get to the mountain.
[Alex Honnold] Navigating this new approach, up a new valley,
that nobody has really travelled through.
[Tommy Caldwell] So this approach route is kind of
your brain child?
[Dieter Klose] Yeah.
- So if it's terrible, we can blame you?
- Absolutely.
[Tommy Caldwell] That does look hard to get through.
- It's just miserable walking.
It's rocks on ice.
- Oh, my God, just like this nice rain,
there's the mountain, somewhere, in the distance.
- Yeah. You picked a [bleep] place to climb.
[Tommy Caldwell] I know.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Alex Honnold] Up the river, across, and then zigzag on
the ledges, hopefully.
[grunting]
Rawr.
[♪ majestic music playing]
Look it, we see it!
What?!
[Taylor Shaffer] Here we are, the Devil's Thumb.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, whoa.
[Alex Honnold] Oh, wow. This is cool.
[Tommy Caldwell] Oh, my God, it looks so crazy right now.
So beautiful.
We've journeyed all the way from Colorado,
and first view of the mountain.
That looks so epic.
[Alex Honnold] It's awesome.
This is, like, insanely pretty.
[Tommy Caldwell] We're about to hike over a glacier,
and then we have to go
all the way around the corner, over there.
[Alex Honnold] This is what Dieter calls,
the witch's cauldron.
What used to be, relatively benign, snow fields, have now
melted out into shattered glaciers and exposed rock.
We are now on the glacier-glacier.
We have to watch out to not fall in holes.
[Tommy Caldwell] Oh, jeez.
I think I'm gonna do it different, just 'cause
I'm an old man.
[Alex Honnold] The terrain that we're navigating is
exactly the kind of thing that you probably
don't wanna be doing on an Achilles injury.
His greatest risk are, sort of, acute stresses while hiking.
[Tommy Caldwell] After my surgery, I, like,
convinced myself that I was totally fine.
I got in the walking boot and I was like,
"oh, I can actually climb in the walking boot.".
So I started climbing again in my orthopedic boot,
I resoled the front with climbing shoe rubber.
I was like, "oh, I'm just gonna get back after it.".
So I went out with Alex, one day, to test it,
and just, like,
pushed into this foothold really hard and felt it go again.
It just, like, catastrophically exploded,
like, audibly, like, pow, you could hear it.
[Alex Honnold] I mean, sadly, I was belaying Tommy when he
re-ruptured his Achilles.
He re-ruptured it either three or four times through the
recovery process, and had another surgery, and had,
I mean, all kinds of, it was quite a saga.
It makes me feel slightly complicit.
I don't think it's totally my fault, but I was like,
"oh, maybe we should've been reining him in a little
instead of urging him on."
So I think, for me, this trip is less about, sort of, like,
a personal drive,
and more like a certain feeling of obligation.
If I can help him accomplish this big climb, and make his
official comeback to climbing,
I think that'll mean a lot to both of us.
Hit it with speed, Tommy.
Is that really better than pitter patter?
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, 'cause I can't, like, I can't jump on
to the toe of my foot, I gotta land on my heel.
It's probably, like, the hardest terrain imaginable
on a healing Achilles tendon,
and we're trying to go fast because
we don't want it to last all night.
One, two.
[Alex Honnold] Yes, Tommy.
[Taylor Shaffer] It is fully dark now.
A little terrifying.
[Alex Honnold] We still have everybody?
Okay.
Even Taylor, back there?
[Tommy Caldwell] We finally reach a place to camp
at around midnight.
The bolts in my heel get, I think, just, like, walking,
just, like, tugs on them, and given, you know, 13 hours of it,
tugged on them a fair amount.
[Alex Honnold] Alright, we did 13-and-a-half hours today.
The watch says it's three-and-a-half days
till we recover, so let's set the alarm for a couple hours
and go again.
Should be fine, huh?
[♪ peaceful music playing]
[Alex Honnold] After nearly two months, and over 2,000 miles,
we're finally here.
[♪ playing guitar]
♪ Alex and Tommy ♪
♪ About to climb the Devil's Thumb. ♪
♪ We're up high on a glacier ♪
♪ In the sun ♪
♪ Man, this has been so fun ♪
[laughs].
- Racking up, putting together our tiny kit
to go across all the mountains.
[Alex Honnold] The weather, right now, looks fine.
So we're gonna go rock climbing soon.
The Devil's Thumb is notorious for bad weather, and yet,
when we get here, a huge high-pressure system comes in,
and we get a good forecast.
[Tommy Caldwell] Alex racked, I usually let him do it,
'cause then, if I do it, he just takes half the
stuff off anyways.
- That's not even true. Look how big that rack is, it's huge.
The thing is, we wanna be prepared for rappelling,
we wanna be prepared for anything, and we're simul
climbing huge blocks really, so we want a lot of gear.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah.
[Alex Honnold] And we're both, you know, we're both young
fathers, we're trying to keep safe.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah.
[Alex Honnold] Our luck with the weather means we have a
chance to really go big
by attempting the first one-day traverse
of all five peaks in the Devil's Thumb massif.
[Tommy Caldwell] We'll have to move really fast and light
to basically race up and down
each of the five peaks before sunset.
[Alex Honnold] It's over 3,000 feet up and down the
first two peaks, called, the witches.
Then, another 800 feet straight up this incredible spire,
called The Cat's Ears.
Potentially the most dangerous section is this insane
600-foot rappel down to notch between the Cat's Ears and
the Devil's Thumb.
The final climb up the Thumb itself
is 1,500 feet of vertical rock.
- Let's go for day packs. - Yeah.
- Just going for it.
[Alex Honnold] The Devil's Thumb is the main objective,
but the spires next to the Devil's Thumb are equally
impressive, from a climbing perspective.
They're, like, the stuff from fantasy, like, slender,
little needles sticking in the sky.
[Tommy Caldwell] The fact that we're gonna try and just,
like, blast the whole traverse, basically, in a day,
sounds kind of intimidating to me.
I wonder how it's gonna go.
But I like the strategy, you know, you gotta, kind of,
go for broke sometimes.
[Alex Honnold] The key to our partnership, and taking on
crazy climbs like this, is speed.
When you can move faster together, you can climb
further before you run out of things
like daylight, or supplies.
Over the years, Tommy and I have, sort of, refined our
technique to allow us to climb pretty darn fast.
Simul climbing is when both climbers climb simultaneously.
Come on, Tommy!
Come on!
- Bah!
- Yeah.
And it's contrast to normal climbing, where one climber
goes up and brings the other climber to them.
[Tommy Caldwell] Done climbing, Alex.
[Alex Honnold] Both climbers are moving in tandem, which is
way faster, but also a bit more dangerous.
[Tommy Caldwell] The leader is, oftentimes, climbing 50,
60 feet above their last piece of protection, which means,
if they fall, they're gonna fall twice that distance.
120 feet.
[shouting]
[Alex Honnold] Whoa, you okay?
Whoa, jeez.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, yeah. I'm fine.
The stakes are high, so you need to be very aware,
very on top of your game.
A fall like that on the Devil's Thumb
would probably be fatal.
[phone chiming]
[Ingrid] Hi, dada.
[Tommy Caldwell] Hey, Ingrid. How you doing?
Hey, Fitzy. What's up, buddy?
[Fitz] Awesome.
[laughs].
[Tommy Caldwell] Hey baby.
[Becca Caldwell] How's it going?
Ready for tomorrow?
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, getting all geared-up, psyched.
Everybody's getting ready for tomorrow.
Tomorrow's the big day.
I think I always question the risk side of adventures
like this, especially these days, as a father.
That makes me a little bit nervous, but on the other hand,
this is, like, what we do, this is what Alex and I do.
[Becca Caldwell] Ingrid, dad's talking to you and he's about
to go up a mountain, so pay attention, please.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yep. I love you, sweetie.
[Ingrid] Don't go!
[Tommy Caldwell] Back in a few days.
[♪ guitar music playing]
[unzipping]
[Alex Honnold] Okay, here we go.
[Taylor Shaffer] Have a good day.
[Alex Honnold] Oh, yeah. See you guys later.
[Taylor Shaffer] Bye.
[Alex Honnold] Oh, yeah.
[Taylor Shaffer] Finally going rock climbing.
Off they go, into the darkness.
I just hope everything goes safe and sound.
[Alex Honnold] No-one has ever attempted climbing
all five peaks of the Devil's Thumb massif
in a single day.
Honestly, I'm not sure we can pull it off.
[Tommy Caldwell] Wow.
[Alex Honnold] We have to move super fast, and Tommy's body
just isn't what it used to be.
But I also know how badly he wants this climb
to be a success.
This is Tommy's trip, Tommy's idea, Tommy's goal.
I just hope I can help make it happen.
[Tommy Caldwell] There's always part of you that says,
"What if this doesn't work?
What does that mean for me, for my career, for my life?"
There's only one way to find out.
[whistles].
[Alex Honnold] Good morning mountains.
I think this is the official start of the route,
I'm starting my timer.
We have now begun the outward traverse.
[ticking]
[Tommy Caldwell] Oh, yeah.
[Alex Honnold] Wow.
Seeing the whole thing up here looks amazing.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, I was just taking it in.
Doing a one-day ascent adds a sense of urgency
to the whole day.
If we don't make it during the daylight hours, we're either
gonna have to keep questing through the dark,
stop and shiver through the night, or bail altogether.
So we normally start climbing big mountains in our tennies.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah.
[Tommy Caldwell] No rope?
[Alex Honnold] Yep.
[Tommy Caldwell] Alex starts climbing up to the base of the
first spire without a rope, because it's faster.
[Alex Honnold] There's Tommy,
soloing up the beginning of the route.
Tommy climbing carefully.
[Tommy Caldwell] I'm just not comfortable climbing without
safety gear the way Alex is.
I feel like he's already pushing me over that line of risk,
but I also don't wanna slow us down right out of the gate.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
We ended up climbing, unroped, almost half of the first route.
But it does get us into position to start the
first pitch a little head of schedule.
[Alex Honnold] Okay, I'm freaking repacked.
Are you ready to go?
Tommy Caldwell is starting the first section of
technical rock climbing.
There's the top of the Witches teat.
Okay, you're tied in.
Line's on, you have all your things.
Take me to the summit.
The first spire is 2,000 feet of vertical, with no clear
route to the top.
Tommy sets off in the lead,
and he quickly climbs out of sight.
[Tommy Caldwell] Okay. Traction's on!
[Alex Honnold] Nice, I'm climbing.
When we simul climb, we try to go for really long stretches
at a time, without stopping.
Which means that we place protection less frequently.
I mean, sometimes you're going 100 feet in between pieces of
gear, so that means you could take a 200 foot fall, which,
on this type of terrain, would probably be fatal,
because you hit ledges,
and bounce off things, and you'd probably die.
The thing with simul climbing is it requires total trust
from your partner, because, oftentimes,
you can't hear your partner and you can't see your partner,
but you just have to know that they're doing the right thing.
I come around the corner and see Tommy up, below this big
chimney system that we're aiming for, and I can
immediately see that he's fully off-route.
[Alex Honnold] I'm pretty sure you're uh, you're not on route.
- What, do you think I'm supposed to be over left more?
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, I know you're getting into all kinds of
weird [bleep] over there.
[Tommy Caldwell] Seemed like the way, but.
[Alex Honnold] No, uh, uh, uh.
I mean, I kind of think you just, if you can reverse what
you just did, just down-climb and quest back over, into it.
[Tommy Caldwell] I get to a place where the rock is wet,
the cracks go away, things seem dangerous and loose.
And so I resign to the fact where I actually have to
down-climb about 100 feet, and get back on route,
which probably adds another 20 minutes to our day.
[Alex Honnold] Oh, my God, there's rocks falling.
Tommy's crossing.
We all get lost sometimes.
I find it a little bit frustrating, though, because
you know that those things just compound themselves over a day,
and if you think you're gonna be out for a 24-hour
push in the mountains, any time you waste 20 minutes,
like, that stuff adds up.
[Tommy Caldwell] Sorry.
I got lost for a minute, there.
[Alex Honnold] No worries.
Tommy, back on track.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Tommy Caldwell] Is that you, Alex?
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, I'm climbing.
[Tommy Caldwell] I'm feeling the pressure to move fast.
This feels like the moment when I have to, kind of,
dig deep and prove I've still got it.
Honestly, I'm just gritting it out.
That's why I've gotten where I am, and so
part of me wants that to be kind of like,
as strong and as fierce as it can be, always.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, buddy.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
Yeah!
[Tommy Caldwell] Woo! I'm on the top, Alex!
[Alex Honnold] Oh, yeah.
That was pretty good.
[Tommy Caldwell] We make it to the summit of the first peak,
which is only the beginning,
but it feels like a big success to me.
Look at this.
This feels like, freaking, straight out of
Lord of the Rings to me.
Menacing mountains everywhere.
There's the Devil's Thumb, we're going over there soon.
There's Alex, just, you know, walking around unroped.
Motored up this.
[ticking]
Yeah, right now, I'm feeling like we're,
we're making good life choices.
Hopefully it stays that way all day.
[Alex Honnold] Okay. I'm rapping.
Let's see where we get.
We're making good progress,
but we need to keep up the pace
if we wanna avoid getting stuck up here in the dark.
I mean, depending how uh, how that feels,
we could basically just solo.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, let's just solo as far as we can, huh?
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, it looks easy, but it's super exposed.
[Alex Honnold] Pretty exciting.
Are we roping up there, Tommy?
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah.
[Alex Honnold] Uh-oh, Tommy got scared.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, I kind of wanna rope up.
It's a little unnerving.
[Alex Honnold] I'm climbing.
[Tommy Caldwell] I know that Alex wants to just stay
unroped, you know, he's a free soloist.
But he stops, and we rope up for the next section of the climb,
which is kind of nice.
I was like, "oh, he's taking it seriously.
He kind of cares about me a little bit."
[Alex Honnold] You're on, Tommy!
[Tommy Caldwell] Okay, I'm climbing, Alex!
Oh, man.
Just looks so sketchy.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, Tommy!
Oh, my God. That's a good shot.
- What should I do? Should I pray?
Should I throw my hands in the air?
[screaming]
[laughs].
What are we? Where are we?
[Alex Honnold] Oh, my God, the wind.
This is kind of unnerving.
Okay, let's start rappelling.
We descend the other side of the ridge,
down into a shoulder on the side of the Cat Ear spires,
which is over 800 feet of climbing.
Alright, you wanna lead this one?
[Tommy Caldwell] Uh no, you should lead it.
[Alex Honnold] No, no. I think you should.
We start working our way up the side of the first spire,
and we find our rhythm,
and we just fly.
[♪ upbeat music playing]
Nice job, Tommy! Cruising.
[Tommy Caldwell] Thank you.
[♪ upbeat music playing]
Yeah!
You're on belay, Alex!
Yeah.
Pretty crazy spot.
Woo!
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, buddy.
[Tommy Caldwell] Oh, yeah.
This might be the craziest summit I've ever been on.
[Alex Honnold] Oh, I can't wait.
Wow.
[Tommy Caldwell] Boom, good work.
[Alex Honnold] That's a good summit.
[Tommy Caldwell] This is something I kind of don't feel
like dancing around on top of.
I'm like, "Oh, my God."
You could do that.
[Alex Honnold] Maybe I'll do a handstand.
Here I'll shoot some video.
[Tommy Caldwell] Does it look epic?
[Alex Honnold] I mean, it'd be more epic if I could take,
like, two steps further back, but I'll die.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say this is one of the craziest
summits that we've been on.
Oh, my God, yeah, don't fall.
- Hi, mom.
[laughs].
- Hi, Becca. Hi, Sanni.
- On the top of the Cat's Ears spires.
- Cat's Ears spires. This is a totally insane summit.
- My adrenaline is peaking standing here.
- I know, I feel a little shaky.
This is how you do PT for the Achilles, right?
- Yeah, totally.
Just one-foot balance on top of the Cat Ear spire.
[Alex Honnold] Jeez.
What do you think of the Devil's Thumb behind us?
The north-west face looks imposing.
- That's the face of death, huh?
God, it does kind of look pretty deathly, actually.
Look at that.
[Alex Honnold] Oh, wow.
[Tommy Caldwell] Oh, my God.
[Alex Honnold] Giant avalanche.
[Tommy Caldwell] Wow.
That is why we're not gonna climb the north-west face.
[Alex Honnold] Look at all the consecutive lines of
debris down here.
There have been some big avalanches down there.
That thing seems like death.
[Tommy Caldwell] I know that avalanches have killed several
people on the north-west face of the Devil's Thumb, and so
in the back of my mind, it just feels unsettling.
I'm definitely glad we didn't go that way, but we still have
to figure out how to get to the top of the Thumb itself,
which is another 1,500 feet straight up,
and we have no idea how to climb it.
Check out that, that shield of rock, with the zigzagging crack,
that black crack.
That looks cool, huh?
[Alex Honnold] I guess we'll see if there're holds,
we'll see if it goes.
[Tommy Caldwell] Come on, huh, do you wanna finish this off
with a bang or what?
[Alex Honnold] No, I just wanna get to the top.
Before we can start the climb,
we have to do our biggest rappel yet.
It's like 600 feet straight down, which is insane,
and potentially very dangerous.
Okay, we are now totally detached from the mountain.
There's no anchor.
Can you actually see over the edge there,
like where the [bleep] we're going?
[Tommy Caldwell] I mean, no.
[Alex Honnold] Sick.
[Tommy Caldwell] We're working against the clock, so Alex and I
are doing some very advanced techniques for speed.
And one of those techniques is simul rappelling,
which means we put the rope through an anchor,
and then we counter-balance each other, on our two ropes,
as we rappel down.
[Alex Honnold] I mean, do we think that thing looks good.
It, like, seems good enough.
It's just basically, like, a one-nut anchor.
[Tommy Caldwell] The problem with simul rappelling is that,
if somebody loses control of their rappel, both people die.
[Tommy Caldwell] Okay, ready to weight.
[Alex Honnold] Ready to weight. Weighting.
The scariest part of alpinism, for me, is rappelling because
it's the one time where one simple thing
could kill you both.
You're completely trusting your life to your equipment.
Okay, there's no way we can knock that off.
[Tommy Caldwell] There's sharp edges.
There's always the chance that a rope can get damaged, or,
you know, worst-case-scenario, even cut.
[Alex Honnold] This is so far.
It's 600 feet of free hanging space,
and it's really quite scary.
Wow.
This is freaking crazy.
[Tommy Caldwell] It's gonna get steep.
[Alex Honnold] You are 100% trusting your life to
your very skinny rope.
Only slightly thicker than a shoelace, really.
And this very skinny piece of hardware, that you
left behind, to rappel off of.
[Tommy Caldwell] This is kind of [bleep] scary.
[Alex Honnold] Oh, my God, the wind.
[Tommy Caldwell] The wind is, like, taking me.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
This is the craziest thing we've done all day.
[Alex Honnold] This is, like, an insane rappel.
[Tommy Caldwell] Rappelling like this is always
a little stressful.
So what just happened?
[Alex Honnold] We just did 600 feet of rappelling.
It was very scary.
[Tommy Caldwell] It's, like, intimidating to do that stuff.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, it's real intimidating.
Well, I mean, the thing about it is that, if a piece of gear
blows, you die.
[Tommy Caldwell] Do you ever think, when that happens,
like, "why do I do this?"
- Well, those are the types of risks that
I don't really wanna take.
'Cause, you know, like, if the flake ripped and both pieces
came out, and we both just die, you'd be like,
"well, that was friggin stupid."
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah.
So we finally made it to the Devil's Thumb itself,
and it's massive.
From its base, this thing is nearly five times taller than
the Empire State Building.
We're in the notch below the Devil's Thumb.
Alex is taking us to the top.
[Alex Honnold] Well, we'll see.
Here we go.
Tommy asked me to take the lead and...
Oh, yeah!
...I think part of it is because Tommy just isn't
quite feeling 100% gung-ho.
The bolts in his heel might be hurting.
Basically, he wants me to step up and lead us to the top,
and we don't have a lot of time left to do it.
Woo!
Micro's on, Tommy!
[Tommy Caldwell] Okay, cool. Thank you!
[Alex Honnold] The wall is huge.
It's thousands of feet straight down below us.
- Does it look easy above you?
Like, should I gain?
[Alex Honnold] If you want to, this middle part's kind of hard.
[Tommy Caldwell] This is next level.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah.
[Tommy Caldwell] We climb the first 400 feet
relatively quickly,
and Alex actually stops, which surprises me.
[Alex Honnold] Starting to get a little tired.
Also, don't fall on this part, we're on a one-piece anchor.
[Tommy Caldwell] Okay.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, I was really like,
not bad at climbing.
A little scary, though.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, a little wet.
I had one foot slip, but,
luckily, I had a good hand jammed in.
[Alex Honnold] At least we're higher than the Cat Ears again.
Now, I wanted to go over there...
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah.
[Alex Honnold] ...But it's not good, so we're going around.
As we're climbing up, I run into a section of,
somewhat difficult, tricky climbing.
We still got like a ways to go.
I mean, it's like way, way up.
[Tommy Caldwell] We could go straight up those zigzag
cracks, I think it would work.
[Alex Honnold] Tommy yells up that he wants to go straight
through this really imposing head wall.
It's this huge, overhanging section of rock jutting out
from the face, blocking our final approach to the summit.
Let me just figure out how to uh, how to make this work!
Looking up at the summit, in this moment, it's almost like
time slows down.
I realize the summit means a lot more to me than
I would've expected from just the climb.
It's like the trip has never been just about
climbing the Devil's Thumb,
the trip's about spending two months with Tommy,
and helping him achieve his dream
of making his big comeback.
That's the reason I'm here.
Come on, Tommy!
Come on!
[Tommy Caldwell] Woo!
In the world of climbing,
a partnership that is as special as this
is not easy to find.
[Alex Honnold] Yeah!
- Woo!
I said, at the start of this trip, I was worried about
Alex's lack of empathy,
but he's supported me every step of the way.
He's not lacking in anything.
He's my best friend.
[Alex Honnold] This is the moment of truth, to get Tommy
to the top.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Tommy Caldwell] Suddenly, I see him go out, onto this
shield of rock.
You are going that way?
[Alex Honnold] Yeah, yeah I'm gonna try.
Yeah.
[Tommy Caldwell] I shout up at him, I'm like,
"you're doing the shield, you're going up the gash!"
We're gonna end this whole climb in the most
heroic way possible,
which is climbing up the most spectacular
section of the wall.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Alex Honnold] Climbing really freaking scary troughs.
Very scary.
[Tommy Caldwell] As Alex is climbing that final shield,
I see him, sort of, working his way back-and-forth up these
zigzagging cracks.
He's getting in them at times, and then he's coming out, and
finding little gear placements,
and balancing on the little edges.
[Alex Honnold] This is pretty freaking mega.
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, nice work!
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[Alex Honnold] There's one last pitch above me,
and then it's a clear shot to the summit.
[sighing]
Ho!
We're on top of a freaking big wall.
[Tommy Caldwell] Heroic way to end.
[Alex Honnold] After such a long journey, after such a
long adventure, I'm surprisingly,
like, I mean, moved is the only word, I don't know.
And particularly seeing Tommy below me,
powering up the final stretch.
[Tommy Caldwell] I've spent a life of, kind of, overcoming
adversity, and, sort of, harnessing the angst from
setbacks to push me forward.
I was worried about my Achilles, just being, kind of,
an old man, being able to keep up with Alex, but
I'm turning back into, like, a mountain athlete,
in a way that I haven't in a few years.
[Alex Honnold] You're on the lip, Tommy!
Enjoy yourself, this is freaking mega!
Woo!
[Tommy Caldwell] I know that the summit of big journeys,
like this, marks the end of this, almost, love affair,
and I, I'm not quite ready for that.
I'm feeling just incredibly lucky to be in this place
on such a beautiful day, with such a good friend,
and have things go so well.
- Yeah, Tommy!
Yeah!
[Tommy Caldwell] Wow!
That was incredible.
[Alex Honnold] Two months.
[Tommy Caldwell] Good work.
Oh, my God.
[Alex Honnold] What do you think?
[Tommy Caldwell] Look at this place.
[Alex Honnold] It's pretty cool, huh?
- Pretty amazing.
- Your triumphant return expedition climbing.
You're back!
[Tommy Caldwell] Yeah, I'm back.
I mean, I think I've gotten to the point, on this whole trip,
where I was like, "well, you know,
if we climb the Devil's Thumb,
it'll just be the icing on the cake."
This is pretty sweet.
[laughs].
Usually, it's not about the destination, but this is about
the whole freaking destination.
[♪ majestic music playing]
- Scary.
I think the real power of an expedition is the fact that
you condense years of life into a single month or two.
But at the same time, you know,
I think I'm maturing my spirit.
The relationships in my life, and the friends that I keep.
When I was younger,
it was just so glamorous to be dark, and broody,
and conflicted, but now, I'm like, yeah,
I think I'm kind of getting it, you know?
Like, why not do the same hard things,
but be happy while you're doing them?
It's like, why not?
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.