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Kevin Jorgeson Yearns for the Dawn Wall’s Summit, and His Living Room
本帖最后由 jane 于 2015-1-13 18:31 编辑
纽约时报文章,
Kevin Jorgeson Yearns for the Dawn Wall’s Summit, and His Living Room
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — Inside Kevin Jorgeson’s living room, his smiling, bearded face popped up on the screen. His hair, two weeks since a shampoo, stuck straight up.
He spoke as if it were just an ordinary day and an ordinary circumstance.
He said hello to his girlfriend, Jacqui Becker, and his mother, Gaelena Jorgeson. But his eyes shifted uneasily as his portaledge, a hanging tent hooked halfway up El Capitan, lifted and swayed in Sunday’s gusty winds.
In a few days, he hoped, he would be home through the front door, not through FaceTime.
Jorgeson, 30, and his climbing partner, Tommy Caldwell, 36, are trying to become the first to free-climb El Capitan’s Dawn Wall, a 3,000-foot vertical route of barely dimpled granite in Yosemite National Park. Their quest has been years in the making, and they last touched horizontal ground on Dec. 27. With good fortune, they will reach the summit this week, having ascended to climbing lore.
After it happens, or even if it does not, Jorgeson will return here. He was born and raised in Santa Rosa, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, four hours to the heart of Yosemite. He has a deep family connection there; a great-grandmother worked for the concessionaire in Yosemite a century ago, and the family has a photograph of her standing on the famed “diving board” atop Yosemite’s Half Dome in 1916. (She hiked, not climbed, in a skirt.)
Jorgeson showed an early aptitude for climbing. His parents learned that when their toddler seemed to vanish, they should look up. At 3, he climbed most of a two-story ladder at an aunt’s house before he was spotted. As he grew older, he often disappeared into the garage rafters or was found atop the chain-link backstop at a baseball field.
“It probably scared other parents more than us,” his father, Eric, said.
Eric Jorgeson worked for Santa Rosa’s Recreation and Parks Department and had a love for the outdoors that he passed on to Kevin and his younger brother, Matt. Kevin Jorgeson’s first exposure to climbing came at a wall inside a Santa Rosa sporting goods store. When Vertex Climbing Center opened shortly after, when Jorgeson was about 11, his father gave them both beginning lessons.
“It got him hooked,” said Eric Jorgeson, who, divorced from Gaelena and remarried, now lives in Idaho. “And it told me that it wasn’t the sport for me. But it got him through the teenage years without any of the typical teenage problems.”
By 16, he was competing in international climbing contests and had his first sponsorship, from Marmot, the outdoor apparel and equipment maker founded in Santa Rosa and now based in nearby Rohnert Park. He took his wall-climbing pursuits outdoors.
Jorgeson became one of the world’s best at “highball” bouldering, which features extremely difficult, relatively short ropeless climbs. He was the first to ascend Ambrosia, near Bishop, Calif., one of his favorite climbing areas.
Beyond his physical abilities, Jorgeson seems wired for climbing blank faces of rock, where precision and patience are as important as strength and flexibility.
“It’s a mental thing — he’s really good at memorizing sequences,” his father said, recalling Jorgeson’s ability to rehearse taekwondo moves or the best moves down a river in a kayak. “I bet after this climb, if you sat with him and said, ‘What’s the fifth move on Pitch 12?’ he could tell you. That may be an exaggeration, but he probably could do it for Pitch 15.”
Yes, Pitch 15. Should Jorgeson complete the free-climb ascent in the coming days, his struggle with the sideways traverse of Pitch 15 will be the heart of the story.
“I’ll always remember that battle,” he said.
Over the course of a week, he fell on 10 attempts, always on the same spot, shredding the skin from his battered fingers has he clung desperately, and vainly, to sharp, pebble-size holds on the wall. Caldwell made it past Pitch 15 and continued checking off pitches up the wall as Jorgeson lagged behind.
After Jorgeson failed on several attempts in the middle of last week, he texted one word to Becker, his girlfriend: “Devastated.” His next text said he did not want to be known as the man who almost climbed the Dawn Wall.
He rested his fingers, waiting for his skin to heal over two days, before embarking on another attempt on Friday afternoon. In the back of his mind, he knew that if he failed again, he would most likely end his quest in deference to Caldwell.
“That would have been my call,” Jorgeson said Sunday. “It definitely crossed my mind briefly, but I didn’t linger there too long. Answering that question wasn’t going to help me.”
He added: “I’m not going to lie. I did feel a lot of pressure that day.”
By then, Jorgeson had studied footage of each of his failures — how he pinched the rock on this hold, how he cocked his wrist on that one. He found that each fall had to do with a single foot placement.
“A millimeter change in the angle of my right foot on the exact same piece of rock,” Jorgeson said. “Before, it didn’t match the contour of this tiny little pebble I was trying to step on.”
It worked.
“It clicked,” he said. “I reached this balance where I could do this pivotal move and unlock the next sequence.”
Jorgeson made it past Pitch 15 as a crowd in the El Capitan meadow far below cheered in the chilly twilight. By Saturday night, he was through Pitch 17. After a rest day on Sunday, he reached the top of Pitch 20 on Monday, pulling alongside Caldwell on the ledge of the Wino Tower.
From there, the final dozen pitches, extremely difficult by rock-climbing standards but not as difficult as what Caldwell and Jorgeson have completed, might be done in two days of climbing.
And then Jorgeson will come home.
“A shower,” he said of the first thing he wants after more than two weeks hanging on El Capitan. “There’s so many things. I can’t let my head go there yet, though.”
Jorgeson and Becker met at a resort in Anguilla three years ago. Jorgeson knew the manager, who had an opening for a fitness and climbing instructor. Becker was living in New York and teaching hula hoop lessons as an executive for a fitness company. Friends at the resort called them “Hoops and Rocks.”
Jorgeson contradicts the “dirtbag” reputation of climbing, showing that the sport’s credibility need not stem, in part, from a vagabond, grungy devotion.
Becker quickly recognized that Jorgeson was different from any stereotype.
“We had a meeting with clients, and he was dressed up and sophisticated and had a killer taste in whiskey,” she said. “It caught my attention.”
Part climber, part businessman, he started a company called Pro Climbers International to represent climbers and expand the sport through training, workshops and events.
But there were times in the past few years, as he devoted months to the Dawn Wall, that Jorgeson wondered whether he was being selfish — spending too much time on an individual goal and not enough doing things that would promote the broader climbing community.
As it turned out, the Dawn Wall push in the past couple of weeks, and the attention it received, forwarded both goals more than he had imagined.
The idea of free-climbing the Dawn Wall — using only hands and feet to move upward, relying on ropes only in case of falls — belonged to Caldwell, dating back a decade. In 2009, Jorgeson asked if he wanted a partner.
Since then, for several months each fall and winter, Jorgeson has been consumed by the task of the Dawn Wall when he could have been expanding his business. Both men admitted that it often dominated their daily lives, filling their thoughts when they woke and keeping them awake at night.
Two years ago, after a 17-year wait, Eric Jorgeson finally received a permit to raft through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. Kevin Jorgeson anguished over whether to go with his father or meet Caldwell at the Dawn Wall. He eventually chose the 19-day raft trip, afraid he was letting Caldwell down.
The quest has taken an emotional toll, not only from the implausibility of the pursuit but also from the loss of friends to climbing over the years. Most haunting to Jorgeson was the loss of Brad Parker, a top climber also from Santa Rosa, who fell to his death in Yosemite in August.
Jorgeson had a deep conversation with Caldwell about it in September, and Caldwell opened up about the hurdles he had faced — a kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan and a divorce among them. Jorgeson committed to at least another year on the project. Maybe the next attempt would be the one.
In August, Jorgeson and Becker rented a small house outside Santa Rosa. A pair of sheep live in a field outside, and a 17-year-old cat, Monkey, clambers about inside. The living room includes Jorgeson’s childhood piano, a wood-burning fireplace, hula hoops and a large mirror used as a message board. (“House needs” include four stools, a kitchen island and “art for walls.”)
They considered moving to more familiar climbing meccas — Caldwell lives in Estes Park, Colo., at the doorstep of Rocky Mountain National Park — but Jorgenson preferred to be close to home, within reach of the ocean.
While there are no rocks to climb within view of his home, his quiet getaway is less than an hour away — the above-the-ocean climbs of Goat Rock at Sonoma Coast State Park. His postclimb plans with Becker include swing-dance lessons, furnishing the house and a trip to Europe.
Those must wait. Jorgeson is still a bit tied up.
“This is pretty awesome to watch,” Gaelena Jorgeson said to her son on Sunday. He was hanging on El Capitan; she was hanging out in his house. “You’re awesome.”
He smiled through a shaggy beard. He said he would see everyone soon. |
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IP卡
狗仔卡
发表于 2015-1-11 11:59
显身卡
楼主
发表于 2015-1-11 16:02
