The View from the Top   March 2006

by Scott Cory, with Donald Huntington
Photos by Corey Rich, Jennifer Cory and Russell Byrne

I’m only 15 years old but have already been a professional climber for three years, many people standing on the ground looking at climbers moving like ants up the sheer face of a rock wall wonder whatever possesses us to put our lives in dangesr in that fashion. >>>

I think it is difficult to find words to exactly describe peoples’ passions about art, music, gardening or whatever it is they find to commit themselves to. If people don’t “get it” about why I spend almost all of my free time either climbing rock faces or planning to climb them, then I don’t have words to describe my feelings or to explain my motivations. All I can say is that I ascended my first wall when I was seven years old and my imagination was instantly captured by the lure of climbing to high places.

Why I Climb
An interviewer once asked Sir Edmund Hillary after he became the first man to conquer Mt. Everest why he had climbed the thing and Hillary replied, “Because it’s there.” That explanation works for me. I see a difficultlooking mountain or even a rock face and say to myself, “I can do that!” If I can surmount the challenge by climbing to the summit, the feeling of then being able to say, “I did it!” is the best thing in the world! When I get to the top of a difficult climb I experience a huge feeling of relief accompanied by a wonderful sense of accomplishment! You can become addicted to the rush you get during moments like that.

I made five trips to Las Vegas just to climb a 55-foot rock named “The Gift,” which has a rating of 5.12d on a scale where 5.15a is the highest. I finally conquered the climb when I was nine years old, becoming one of the youngest people to do that. I probably failed more than 30 times before I finally succeeded. My triumph occurred early in the morning on the day when we were getting ready to leave. I went to the site in order to make one final effort. When I at last got to the top, I stood on the peak, took off my shirt, and shouted into the broad, wide space below me, “I am a champion!” That’s about as good as life gets!

Another great thing about climbing is the fact that everything relies on my own aptitude, training, and skill. As opposed to a person engaged in team competition, on the side of some mountain I’m holding success or failure totally within my own hands.

First Ascents
My first climb took place when we were visiting Squaw Valley. While we were waiting for a tram, we found a climbing wall and the whole family tried climbing it. We all had fun, but for me the experience went way past fun, I guess. I was in first grade and had gotten a tantalizing glimpse of something that I could devote my life to.

When we got home I bought a climbing magazine so I could locate local gyms with climbing walls. I was fortunate because it turned out that the Bay Area has superior climbing venues. San Francisco’s Mission Cliffs, for example, provides one of the best indoor training facilities in the state. A new facility in Sacramento called Pipe Works provides state-of-the-art walls, as does Touchstone Concord, and Iron Works in Berkeley.

My parents have always been cool about my sport. My dad has promoted my love for climbing without any reservations that I ever learned of. We’ve had a lot of wonderful adventures together. My folks encourage the positive attitudes that my sport develops, as well as the outlets it provides for keeping me out of trouble. I don’t have much time for video games. Plus, I’m in top physical shape. Parents appreciate these things.

My dad took me for my first real climbing experience to Mission Cliffs and always tells people that I took to the sport like a fish to water. (I suppose he could better say that I took to it like an ant to a banana tree.) I worked hard and in six months I was tackling more difficult climbs than 80 percent of the adults I was climbing with. After a few months my folks took me outdoor climbing to Red Rocks in Las Vegas and I began climbing more difficult routes than any kid my age had ever attempted before.

I’ve been competing since I was seven years old and have participated in many national and international competitions. During the past six years I was in the top five for my age group, usually in the top three. One year I was ranked number one internationally. This is quite an achievement because competition climbers in most foreign countries are home-schooled and participate in a nationally managed Olympic-quality training program. On the other hand, I attend high school at Heritage High and manage my own training, admittedly with the advice of a number of professionals. I spend three to five days a week climbing, plus doing cardio and weight training. I don’t maintain any special diet, but I’m growing faster than mom and the school cafeteria can shovel food into me.

My climbing has changed vacations and holidays for my family. We used to take every vacation to Tahoe, but now our family travels center around my climbing, so we’re seeing other parts of the country and other places in the world. We’ve been to 30 or so states and I’ve climbed in 15 of them. My favorite places include Yosemite, of course, plus Las Vegas, and Tahoe. I’ve been climbing in Peru several times, as well as in Mexico and Thailand. This year I hope to join teams climbing in Antarctica, where there is a 3,000-foot granite wall that has never been climbed before and Madagascar, which has a wall two miles long with 2,000-foot vertical surfaces.

Climbing for Fun, Money, and Thrills
The great outdoor sporting company North Face, “The King of Outdoor Industries,” signed me to a contract when I was still only eight years old. They provided me with all the equipment, clothes, tents, and sleeping bags that I needed. I began to represent other companies such as Bolle Sunglasses, Met-Rx. PMI Rope Company, Petzl, and Montrail Shoes.

Hans Florine started talking to me about climbing El Capitan when I was only eightyears old. After three years of training, when I turned 11, we finally assembled a video team that shot a documentary of me and another young climber, Tori Allen, who was 13 at that time, as we climbed El Capitan together. We were the youngest team ever to make the ascent. Seven members in all made the climb including us two climbers, the camera crew, and riggers for the camera crew. The climb took the team three days.

Steve Schneider, who climbed with us, decided we needed a nightly song and taught us a campfire song called “I’m a villain.” So there we were perched like eagles in small tents fastened to the side of that colossal stone wall bellowing into the darkness,

I’m a villain, a dirty little villain
I put poison in my
mother’s Cream of Wheat!

I imagine the night owls thought we were crazy!

The only place you can sleep while doing a multi-day climb up some perpendicular rock face is in a tent fastened to the side of the wall, which can be uncomfortable. You keep being awakened by awareness of that yawning blankness looming a few inches from your elbow. It isn’t as dangerous as it sounds because you’re harnessed in and there’s no way you can roll out of bed in your sleep.

We arrived at the top of El Capitan one week before 9/11.

At age 10 I did a photo shoot in Thailand on Railey Beach, one of the areas that got wiped out by the Tsunami. The next year, at age 11, I turned professional. Later that year I became the youngest person to climb the face of El Capitan in a day.

Climbing has its inherent dangers, of course. Everyone knows you won’t survive if you fall off the top of a 2,000-foot cliff. What people might overlook is that a fall of 40 feet will kill you as surely as a fall from 2,000 feet. So after the first two percent or so of such a climb you just have to make 100 percent sure that you don’t fall. And, in fact, that’s about how sure I am about my climbing.

People imagine climbing to be dangerous until they try it and learn how safe the sport can be. I think about the dangers of any climb I’m on, which is the best way of making climbing safe. The greatest dangers come from inattention and failure of some critical piece of equipment. So we need to be always hanging on with more than one point of contact. Climbers generally get killed only when they take unnecessary risks. There are old climbers and bold climbers, but there are no old bold climbers, to paraphrase Chuck Yeager’s famous line about flying.

Alpine-type peaks can kill people without them falling. I lost a good friend named Alex Lowe when I was nine years old. Alex got caught in an avalanche in the Himalayas. He had been part of a team that was going to be the first to ski down a 25,000-foot mountain. They had ascended to 22,000 feet when the avalanche put an end to their adventure and to Alex’s life. I still feel bad about the loss, but if Alex had been able to beat that avalanche, I know it would have been one of the greatest experiences of his life!

I was climbing a mountain in Peru named La Esfinge. I was getting close to the summit and the temperature of that mountain at three miles up was sub-freezing cold. I had nearly run out of energy, and realized that I could fail and drop down into the darkness below. I simply filled my mind with positive thoughts, however, and kept barreling ahead until I finally reached my goal. That’s the best climbing gets - when you meet a challenge that requires all your energy, but you still succeed!

A Community of Climbers
The world of competition climbing has created a vibrant sub-culture. Because of the great climbing areas around here, some of the best climbers in the world are training in our local facilities. We are creating a tightly knit community of people who are dedicated to the sport and to each other. Hans Florine is an area resident who holds the title of World’s Fastest Climber.

A climber, Conrad Anchor, has become a mentor to me. Conrad is the man who found George Mallory’s body on Mt. Everest. Conrad is an awesome guy who is supportive of everyone who climbs. He has always been behind me 100 percent in encouraging me to excel in the sport.

I became friends with a couple climbers named Beth Rodden & Tommy Caldwell. I’ve known Beth since age seven. The two of them, with two others, were climbing a rock wall in a remote region of the Middle East when Kyrgyzstani rebels fired guns at them, forcing them down from the wall they were on, and then held them captive for seven days. One day the rebels made the mistake of leaving the four captives under the guard of only one man. They were on the side of a cliff and the guard wasn’t a trained climber, so Tommy simply grabbed his gun belt, pulled him over the edge of the cliff, and they were able to escape.

Beth was traumatized by the experience of her capture. She channeled her dark feelings into positive energy, however, and began to turn her passion for climbing into outward acts of service to other people. The activity of climbing in service to others helped her work through the terrible experience and to regain her emotional stability.

After 9/11 a few of us began thinking about ways to help the victims and quickly realized that a climbing fundraiser was the most effective way we could raise money. Three of us, Beth, Tommy, and me, climbed El Capitan in 13 hours and 40 minutes in an effort to raise money for the families left behind by the firefighters and policemen who had died in those falling buildings. We were able to climb so quickly by urging each other on.

Meet the Press
When I was still seven years old I began to be featured in newspaper and magazine articles. My picture eventually appeared on the front page of USA Today and featured in the Life Style section. I was on double cover pages of Sports Illustrated, and featured in major articles in such publications as the London Observer, London Times, and Outside Magazine.

My exposure moved to the next level when I was invited to New York, all expenses paid, to appear on the Regis and Kelly TV show. My family and I got out of the plane at Newark Airport and were wondering what kind of taxi service we would have. We felt like VIPs when a giant stretch limo took us in first-class style to the Sheraton Towers on Manhattan Island where they checked us into two giant rooms.

The newspaper and magazine interviews hadn’t completely prepared me for my initial encounter with network television. A newspaper interview gives you time to consider your responses, but when you’re sitting before a live audience with five TV cameras pointing at you there’s no time to stall or to reconsider your response.

Some of the questions were a little risky. “How do you go to the bathroom when you’re on a ledge 1,500 feet above the valley floor?” Kelly asked. “Is it just a matter of ‘look out below?’” Lots of interviewers ask that question. The answer is “Yes,” but it’s a subject we don’t particularly like to talk about. Nevertheless, I imagine that ten years later, that’s probably the only thing some of the viewers remember from the interview.

After we finished with Regis & Kelly we were scheduled for an episode of Current Edition with CNN. We looked around for the limo but discovered that ABC didn’t provide transportation to take people to their competitor networks. We had to walk to the CNN headquarters!

I did that interview when I was 13 years old.

Five years from now I intend to be climbing as a fulltime occupation. I hope to continue in the sport as long as I can lift one foot above the other. I’m in my eighth year of climbing and I’m the strongest I have ever been. “I’m on the top of the world looking down on creation,” the song goes. That’s how I feel sometimes, and the view from the top is great these days.

For more on Scott check out his website at http://www.scottcory.com/