My earliest memory is being in a snowhole aged two-and-a-half with my dad somewhere up a mountain in a blizzard. I don’t know what my dad saw in me – I was a geeky kid – but he had that philosophy: prepare the kid for the road, not the road for the kid.
We lived in Estes Park in northern Colorado, and I’m still there. It’s got the best mountains for rock climbing in the state – right around my house. We’ve had bears break into the house and a mountain lion taking down elk right outside our back door. I started climbing as a kid around here, and by 14 I was making a bit of money out of competitions. Climbing as a profession didn’t really exist, but I knew this was what I wanted to do.
I’ve climbed in a lot of places, but only once in the UK, at Stanage Edge in the Peak District. When I was younger, I’d rent a car for a month in the south of France with four other climbers and just climb and sleep in ditches – super dirtbag poor. In 2014 I went down to Patagonia with Alex Honnold and I totally fell in love with the place. It’s crazy windy and you’ve got giant rock walls on top of glaciers – it feels like home a little bit. When the wind dies down, the climbing is as good as it gets. One of the low-hanging fruits of climbing was to do the Fitz, a traverse across the jagged range of Mount Fitz Roy. We got lucky and managed to pull it off.
From an early age Yosemite became the centre of my universe. I’ve been going every summer since I was a child. I love everything about that place: waterfalls, high-quality rock, history. I did my first big wall – 900 metres – with my dad when I was 12. Later, I’d be up at Yosemite with British climbers like Leo Houlding. I kept going back and its big walls became an obsession. Conquering the Dawn Wall last January took seven years of training and planning: I designed a new type of shoe; I developed a special ointment to mend my fingertips; I built replicas of particular moves in my back garden then practised over and over again. I went pretty deep – even now I could talk you through every single move for the first 2,000 feet – I did it so many times. It was like a giant body of knowledge that had to be gained.
Climbing a big wall over several days is like running a giant construction project: constantly making lists, rigging ropes, organising food, figuring out camera angles – but you’re in this crazy place with your best friends and it does take on a party atmosphere sometimes, like a big dudes’ camping trip. We drank whisky at night and watched Netflix movies, which felt bizarre.
For two seasons we failed at the same place: on the 14th pitch, about halfway up. We’d get there and there’d be storms, or my fingertips would wear out. It was a particular move that I could barely do even if my skin was good and I hadn’t spent a week climbing to get there. I had to learn how to get there faster, before my fingers gave out. But this time [my climbing partner] Kevin [Jorgeson]’s skin gave out and we had to wait on a ledge for a week, crowdsourcing taping techniques, eating special food, using special cream. The moment we broke through that section was pretty amazing although there were still two more really hard pitches to do.
Funnily enough, the moment when I topped out was a low point. I knew I couldn’t just spend time with my wife and son (Fitz, aged two) like I wanted, but had 10 hours of television interviews to do. And the obsession was over. The intensity of it is addictive and you’re with your best friends in scary situations – you bond more. The relationships are extraordinary. I look at other people in the world and wonder how they become close without climbing! Everything just gets a bit more intense and brighter in that world. What really drives me is the exploration of self – the curiosity. It’s a great way to figure out who you are and what you are made of.
People ask me what’s next, but there’s been lots of times in my life where I’ve worked up to a big climbing goal and said: “Yeah! It doesn’t get any better than that.” And that’s happened about 10 times, so you never know, you can never see those coming, you just do what you love and something pops up. But I’d love to go to Baffin Island, Greenland, Pakistan, the Himalayas – there’s tons of rocks out there.
• Kevin Rushby interviewed Tommy Caldwell at the Kendal Mountain Festival in Cumbria which provided his transport and accommodation.
