The Dawn Wall

Hello?

Hey, guys. This is John Branch from the New York Times.

How's it going up there?

Good, John.

How high up are you guys right now?

We are about 1,200 feet up the wall at our base camp.

This has been our home for nine days now.

Tommy, I guess the bottom line question here,

why are you doing this?

What's the point of all this for you?

On the air tonight

with a story of two men

attempting to free climb the famously steep face

of El Capitan in Yosemite.

Inch by nerve-racking inch,

using only their fingertips to grasp razor sharp edges...

Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson

attempt the hardest climb in the world.

No one has ever free-climbed the Dawn Wall.

Three-thousand feet of straight-up granite.

A climb watched by the world.

These guys have captured the world's attention.

They're trying to make history.

El Capitan's infamous Dawn Wall.

As a kid, Tommy was slow at everything.

He had a lot of difficulty in school.

The teachers actually at one point told us

that he was mentally retarded and would never learn.

I was developmentally delayed through... Probably still.

I was this very fragile little kid,

incredibly shy.

But meanwhile, my dad was, like, the symbol of a man.

He was this big bodybuilder dude and mountain climber.

Larger than life.

Tommy was small.

He was way behind.

Didn't crawl until he was over two.

I think my dad felt

the best way to prepare this fragile little kid for the world

was to toughen him up a little bit.

So he took me on all these adventures.

Three years old, strap on the skis.

Camping in a snow cave during a blizzard.

Every summer, we'd go to Yosemite with my family,

and my dad would take me climbing on these giant walls.

Some of the craziest climbing stunts you could ever do,

and he did it with a six-year-old.

The things that Tommy's dad took him on,

today you would have Child Protective Services

coming after you.

He basically took hardship and rephrased it as growth.

He was loving, but he definitely let me suffer.

The word that was in my mind was resilience.

It seems to me one of the best gifts you can give your kid

is an ability to deal with adversity.

By the time I was 14 or 15,

there was climbs that I could do that my dad couldn't.

Tommy's strong.

Climbing was the first thing in my life

where I could stand out a little bit.

All right. Woo!

So Tommy was 16,

and Snowbird held the Snowbird Invitational that year.

This big climbing competition.

We thought we'd drive over there and watch the comp

and get some autographs.

We just went there to be fans, really.

And the day before the big competition,

they had a Citizens' Comp that anybody who shows up can enter.

So I entered that, my first competition ever.

Well, Tommy won.

And I don't know if this was an official policy

or just something they dreamt up on the spot,

but they asked Tommy

if he wanted to enter the World Invitational the next day.

Hello, everyone. I'm James Brown,

and welcome to Snowbird, Utah,

for the International Sport Climbing Championship.

Expert climbers will test their skills

against a man-made 120-foot wall.

There were 12 competitors.

The icons of climbing. And it was so intimidating.

This will be a very challenging field.

Looks like Tommy's the only one in there that we haven't heard of before.

Nobody had ever heard of me.

I was just this scrawny little kid.

I was videoing Tommy as he goes climbing up this thing.

Let's hear it for the 16-year-old.

Come on, Tommy.

Nobody has made it past that roof.

He got past the final roof.

So Tommy's winning.

All right, Tommy!

And I started shaking.

I can't hold the camera.

I just dropped the camera.

I mean, I completely lost it.

Tommy got to the top.

The only climber to complete this climb.

So all of a sudden, Tommy went from nobody at all

to winner of Snowbird.

I mean, that was just unbelievable.

It changed his whole life.

Tommy became known

as one of the best young climbers.

But he didn't grow up

the way most of us do.

Through high school, he didn't have girlfriends.

He didn't have a social life. He just went climbing.

I was doing this series of competitions,

and I met this girl, Beth.

She just caught my attention totally. I was like, "Whoa!"

Tommy just had this really big, goofy, endearing grin.

We both lived and breathed climbing.

Tommy's this climbing savant,

and then he meets Beth, the female version of himself.

He's head over heels.

I just found ways to go wherever she was.

Okay? Yeah.

I found out she was going to Yosemite,

so I followed her out there.

We ended up climbing a big wall together.

You know, we were next to each other all the time.

Twenty-four hours a day together.

Sleeping 1,000 feet off the ground on this portaledge,

which is like a hanging cot.

You sleep head to toe. There's just more room that way.

So I laid down,

and then, she laid down the same way that I was,

with her head at the same end.

And I was pretty excited by this.

I was like, "Ooh, goodness. This is getting exciting."

I just hadn't been in love before,

and I just fell hardcore, right off the bat.

We just clicked.

We had so many dreams of traveling and climbing together.

And then, we got invited to go on a big adventure trip.

An expedition to Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyzstan is this beautiful, mountainous country

in Central Asia.

We'd seen pictures from friends that had been there,

and it looked like a paradise for climbers.

I was a photographer working in the outdoor industry.

And this amazing opportunity came about for me

to shoot an expedition with Beth and Tommy and Jason.

We were just four young climbers looking for a big adventure

in a new and unusual part of the world.

We charter a helicopter into the Kara-Su Valley.

Unbelievably beautiful.

Just felt like kind of a dream come true,

out in the middle of this adventure

with this girl that I was totally in love with.

A week-and-a-half into our trip,

the four of us were sleeping in portaledges,

a 1,000 feet up the wall,

and we wake up to gunshots,

these piercing, close gunshots.

The bullets hitting the wall right between our portaledges.

We're sitting there like,

"Oh, my God, we're getting shot at."

And you can't run away. You can't do anything.

We're just sitting ducks up here.

We look down, and you could see these figures.

These guys waving at us to come down.

We rappelled down to the ground.

We're encountered by four guys, heavily armed.

They took us to our base camp.

All of our tents were cut open.

A lot of our food was splayed around the meadow.

They had us start hiding our camp.

And so suddenly, it hits us, we're hostages right now.

Later, we learned that these guys

were part of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,

these rebels that wanted to overthrow the government.

We were caught up in this battle

between these rebels and the Kyrgyz military.

All of a sudden,

Kyrgyz military helicopters started to fly over,

soldiers show up on the hillside,

and this battle breaks out.

The rebels start pointing their guns at us, yelling, "Hide!"

Then we dive in these trees.

The rebels had taken a Kyrgyz soldier hostage.

They took the other captive.

And they just shot him in the head.

I just remember shaking uncontrollably

and Tommy just holding me as tight as he could.

Are they just going to kill us next?

Once it's dark, the gunfire dies down.

And the rebels start marching us through the mountains.

It's four rebels, the four of us.

It's really cold. We're 11,000 feet in elevation.

We don't have warm clothes.

We don't have any food.

We had no idea where we were going.

We would hike through the night,

and then during the day, they would hide us.

They hid us in the craziest spots.

Burying us in holes in the ground

so that we wouldn't be seen by the military.