Legends: Tommy Caldwell

Current age: 33

Started climbing: as a toddler in the early 1980s, in Estes Park, CO

Disciplines: bouldering, sport climbing, adventure and big-wall free climbing

Résumé highlights: FAs of 5.14+ sport climbs in Colorado, has free-climbed 11 different El Cap routes, including five FFAs and two El Cap free routes in a day

When and where was your first road trip?

My first road trip was probably to Yosemite at around age 4—my sister, my mom, my dad, and myself. We did that trip every summer until around the time I was nine. That was kind of my dad’s stomping ground. He always had Yosemite in his heart, and that’s probably where my love for Yosemite came from, because I have all these fond memories of being there as a kid. At first it was just floating down the river in a raft, or sitting in the meadow watching my dad climb. Then around the time I was 6, I can remember pretty vividly doing the Lost Arrow tyrolean.

Who were your first heroes?

I was so young that my heroes were my dad and the dirtbags in Camp 4. They were the people around me, not so much the people I read about or heard stories about. Both my parents worked at the Colorado Mountain School, and I was the little kid running around in the parking lot goofing off and stuff all the time. And the mountain guides of the Colorado Mountain School were some of the people I idolized.

What was the state of the art when you started climbing?

I was in middle school when I started to take trips alone to places like Shelf Road. I guess that’s when I had my own motivation and starting to think of climbing other than as something I did as a family outing. Sport climbing was just coming into fashion, and we were kind of following in the footsteps of the French, at least in my mind back then. Places like Buoux had come around. I think not too long before that was that thing that Tony Yaniro did at Sugarloaf [Grand Illusion]. That was kind of state of the art.

Then here where I lived, in Estes, my dad and a few other people were trying to embrace that sport-climbing vision and bolting, but there were a lot of old traditionalists who were really pissed off about it. And I just remember as a kid there being so much tension. It was like shortboard versus longboard surfers, with routes getting chopped and a lot of egos flying around, and it definitely wasn’t a very harmonious scene.

What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in climbing since you started out?

Well, right off the bat, I feel like the tension has gone away. I feel like people have embraced all the different kinds of climbing as their own independent facets. And then it’s kind of cool how they’ve merged, too. People realize that hard bouldering or hard sport climbing are really good for going and doing big-wall free climbs. Or even in some ways those are the same people who are crushing it in the alpine—like people like Hayden [Kennedy], who was a sport climber for the longest time, is just rocking it in the alpine.

What’s better, what’s worse?

The whole scene is much more harmonious. I think people respect each other and get along. There’s a lot of positive energy out there. What’s worse is… I don’t know, anytime something grows bigger and bigger it can lose a little bit of its soul, maybe? Sometimes I feel like there is a bit of little-league parenting type stuff—and I’d say I was even a little bit like that for a short time when I was competition climbing. My dad was pretty stressed about that. And that’s something that’s a little hard to see. I really liked the culture of climbing that was sort of rebellious, and it was something you did as an outsider. And now it’s becoming more mainstream.

Most surprising climbing experience?

I suppose getting shot at in Kyrgyzstan was pretty darned surprising. If we were smarter, maybe we would have been able to foresee that.