With jaw-dropping big wall ascents and a life packed with adrenaline and adventure, climber Tommy Caldwell has had a career worthy of – and captured by – a feature film.
But after an agonizing Achilles injury that resulted in numerous surgeries, bolts in his foot and two years off climbing, Caldwell, then in his 40s, was worried about his future.
He enlisted friend and fellow climber Alex Honnold, famed for his free solo ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan, to join him on a comeback climb. The trip would see the duo aim to become the first ever to finish a single-day traverse of all five icy granite towers of the Devils Thumb massif, located in the Stikine Ranges mountain range that straddle the Alaska-British Columbia border.
The Devil’s Thumb itself is known as being one of North America’s most dangerous walls, and the five peaks, Caldwell tells CNN Sport, were …