For some of us, climbing is life. Culture, community, motivation, love, loss and desire are inseparable from a pointless activity that, for many of us, becomes the world. Being a professional climber for 30 years has given me an insider’s view of the sport. I’ve followed along as climbing has grown, and through that change I have seen stories full of grit and inspiration. When you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll get the news, sure, but my hope is to highlight the stories that may not reach you through the haze of the internet. You’ll get a glimpse into what’s getting me fired up in the climbing world.

I’ll be talking with friends, many of whom have also dedicated themselves to the climbing life. You’ll hear about folks on the cutting edge of our sport and its various disciplines, and about those fighting to protect the places we climb. I’ll highlight what I see as a groundswell of creativity in our sport beyond what’s easily quantifiable. Climbers are finding ways to expand the magnitude of their adventures through ideas like eco-pointing, big linkups and taking on sailing expeditions to the most remote regions of the world.

Routefinding is the art of navigating through unfamiliar terrain. Using our brains instead of Google Maps to get from point A to point B. In a world that feels like it’s moving faster, striving for efficiency, speed, ticks and checked boxes, this is an invitation to slow down and embrace the unknown.

Thanks for tying in with me.

Tommy Caldwell’s signature. A thumbs up with a mountain in the background.

Why I Rode My Bike to Alaska and What the Nat Geo Film Missed

Hubris probably got the best of me. I wanted to finish off Ron Kauk’s testpiece, Magic Line, quickly, so I decided to skip the gear placements in the crux and just go for it. I got pumped, couldn’t place gear and tried to sprint to the next rest. Then I slipped. Thankfully, my belayer pulled in several armfuls of slack with lightning speed. I slammed into the wall just a few feet above the ground and instantly knew I had remodeled something in my leg. I never imagined that an Achilles rupture would mean two years until I could properly climb again.

What surprised me most about my forced time off was that my morale was basically unaffected. I always thought my happiness was based on a constant ability to go rock climbing. But having that taken away gave me time to focus on my family and find purpose beyond pulling on holds. I dove more deeply into my activism work and was happy. Was I losing my edge or just evolving? I am still trying to figure that one out.

One of the things I got involved in was advocating for policy around a piece of legislation called the “Roadless Rule,” which aims to save old-growth forest in Southeast Alaska, specifically Tongass National Forest. The idea is that if they prohibit road building, it makes it much harder to remove trees. President Clinton introduced it, Trump rolled it back and environmental groups lobbied Biden to reinstate it. When I learned the Devils Thumb—a 7,000-foot peak boasting the largest unclimbed alpine face in North America—sits squarely in the middle of the Tongass, I knew I had to go. But I didn’t want to just fly there.

During my research on the Tongass, I’d also come across the term “ground truthing.” The phrase was adopted by environmentalists from the world of mapping and surveying. In her 1970 essay “Ground Truthing,” Terry Tempest Williams defined it as “walking the ground to see for oneself if what has been told is true.” For me, ground truthing is about immersing yourself in a place—tasting it, smelling it, getting it all over you. It’s about experiencing the natural world in its rawest form. It occurred to me that biking to Alaska felt like the best way to get intimate with the place I wanted to protect. I realize now that I must have also had some pent-up adventure stoke and a desire to show myself that I wasn’t getting soft.

So I began working on a plan to ride my bike 2,400 miles from Colorado to Alaska, stopping to climb along the way. I’d sail the Inside Passage to Petersburg, Alaska, to access the Devils Thumb on foot, hiking through the Tongass National Forest. If all went well, the trip would take two to three months. It sounded good in theory. Good enough that when I told my friend Alex Honnold about it, he wanted in.

Alex and I left my house on June 29, 2023. We headed north into Wyoming, aiming for Petersburg using bike directions from Google Maps. We soon found ourselves forging marshes and questing across the desert, following faint cattle trails through southern Wyoming, aiming for Mount Hooker in the Wind River Range before going on to the Bugaboos nearly 1,000 miles away.

Two people sitting next to their bikes eating food.

On a bike, the subtleties of the landscape come alive. Wild horses traveled in scattered herds on the horizon, cloud bursts lit up with evening light and rainbows colored the sky. We settled into the rhythms of the road, listening to books on nature and psychology and embracing the time on the bike to think. (My favorite book was The Hidden Life of Trees.) When we’d stop for lunch we’d get into deep conversations about life, relationships, environmentalism and the future of our planet. Alex’s morale is directly proportional to the strength of his fingers, so we’d squeeze in hangboard workouts to our 100-plus-mile days.

I was surprised by what we saw when we finally made it to central British Columbia. I had imagined this section of Canada to be a vast swath of forested wilderness. Instead, it was smoke plumes, burn scars and clear-cuts. We were constantly buzzed by logging trucks and industrial traffic. For a trip that was supposed to be about saving trees, the extent of the destruction was shocking. We pedaled down Highway 16, locally known as the “Highway of Tears” because of the number of women and girls, many of them Indigenous, who have been murdered or gone missing on the route. In contrast to the wild places we’d passed through previously, it felt dystopian.

When we got off our bikes and onto a sailboat to travel through the Inside Passage of Alaska we were thrown back into wildness and beauty—seals, humpback whales and countless birds. We spent three days learning from Marina Anderson, a Haida and Tlingít activist who shared her work, knowledge of the land, and Indigenous perspective on community and activism. Humbled, we got back on the boat and carried on to the Devils Thumb.

The glacier that was historically the approach to the Devils Thumb had melted into an impassable iceberg-filled lake. So we forged a new route up an adjacent valley, following a river that was so filled with salmon you could reach into the water and grab one with your hands. Eventually, after bushwhacking through thorny Devil’s club and thick brush for four days, we broke through the tree line and got our first sight of the peak.

The climb itself was incredible but less of an endeavor than we had planned for. Like the glacier at its base, the Devils Thumb—so shrouded in alpine lore as the site of many deaths, ripping avalanches and difficult alpine ascents—had melted out. It’s now a 7,000-foot spire of dry rock and the kind of climbing Alex and I are used to. We ended up climbing not only the peak itself but the entire range in a single day.

The National Geographic film focuses on the climb and certainly brings out the beauty of the place. For reasons I don’t fully understand, the film doesn’t go into the environmental issues surrounding Tongass and instead highlights the “bromance” between me and Alex. But for me, the real magic of this trip was in our quest to find purpose in our climbing that goes beyond sending.

The Tongass National Forest is the world’s largest remaining temperate rainforest, making it infinitely valuable as an undeveloped wilderness and a massive carbon sink. This part of Alaska has recently gone through an economic transition away from large-scale, old-growth logging to a more diversified economy. The U.S. Forest Service has managed this area for 30 years and is currently revising its management plan. There is an open comment period until the end of 2024 where the public can weigh in on how this region should be managed moving forward.

The comment period is open until January 2025. Show your support for the Roadless Rule now to protect this forest from logging and other extractive operations.

Comment Now

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Sure you’re committed, but would you sail the Atlantic for a climb? Sébastien Berthe and Aidan Roberts did. Aidan even started a newsletter about it.

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Little Cottonwood Canyon climbing now on National Register of Historic Places.

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Mt. Hooker sends: Amity Warme does Sendero Luminoso and Northwest Passage goes free.

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So much respect for Kilian Jornet’s huge human-powered adventure in the Alps.

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A dedicated crew returned to Greenland’s Mirror Wall and named their new route in honor of the late Keita Kurakami.

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Check out the new management plan for Bears Ears National Monument.

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These guys make aid climbing look cool.

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Connor Herson’s on a tear: Midnight Way FA, The Shark FA, Magic Line send.

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Action alert: Help save Moe's Valley from development.

Do you know where your chalk comes from? It’s a pretty complex and resource-intensive process to get it ready for your chalk bag. There’s an estimated 12 billion-ton reserve of magnesite here on Earth, which we humans mine to make all sorts of products, from climbing chalk to laxatives to synthetic rubber. According to an informative article in Climbing Mag, the magnesite gets filtered through a series of baths in hydrochloric acid and baking soda until it’s just a wet paste of pure magnesium carbonate (aka chalk) sitting in a tub of saltwater. The paste then gets filtered, pressed, heated, crushed and boom! you have chalk.

But should we really be mining for chalk? It turns out that you can get the same quality chalk through a desalination process. Seawater is transferred to baths and then evaporated, leaving pure magnesium carbonate residue behind. Maybe there’s some climate tech future where we will get more drinking water through desalination and use the leftover magnesium carbonate for chalk. Or will we even be concerned with climbing at that point?

Hi, I’m Jane, and I’m the editor for “Routefinding.” Mostly you won’t know I’m here, but every now and then I’ll throw my two cents in. For better or worse, climbing matters a lot to me. I grew up in a tight-knit climbing community in the Tetons, which gave me respect for history and for the 5.8 grade. I cut my teeth on Yosemite Search and Rescue and have since graduated to a less intense line of work beyond the confines of the Valley.

To me, “routefinding” means adapting to the terrain ahead and finding the best path forward. I can’t think of a better ropegun than Tommy for these uncertain times, and hopefully, we will all come away from this newsletter feeling a little less runout and a little more inspired.

I’d love to hear from you, too—send an email to routefinding@patagonia.com to let me know what you think.

Jane Jackson

A person ice climbing. M10 Alpine Shells.

Patagonia is proud to introduce the M10 shells, made for athletes pushing the leading edge of alpinism. We prioritized mobility above all else, with underarm gussets on the M10® Storm Jacket and M10® Anorak to eliminate hem lift and a unique, jiu-jitsu inspired 4-Point Gusset on the M10™ Storm Pants developed in close collaboration with Colin Haley. These minimalist alpine shells have just what you need and nothing you don’t, offering unrivaled freedom of movement in an ultralight waterproof fabric made without “forever chemicals.”

Explore

To see the M10 shells in action (and some sweet climbing for that matter), don’t miss the Josh Wharton and Vince Anderson film Jirishanca.

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Photos: (Top) AUSTIN SIADAK (Middle) TOMMY CALDWELL (Middle) TAYLOR SHAFFER (Bottom) VINCE ANDERSON

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