Interview: Dierdre Wolownick, the Oldest Woman to Climb Yosemite’s El Capitan

 

Running her first marathon in her 50s was never on Dierdre Wolownick’s list of life ambitions. Neither was learning to speak eight languages. Nor, for that matter, was shattering a world record—twice—to become the oldest woman to climb Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan, the captivating 3,200-foot granite monolith. But if there’s one philosophy that Dierdre lives by, it’s that human potential is far greater than we’re led to believe. It’s when we come face-to-face with our limits, dangling off the precipice of life (literally in her case), that we learn what we are truly capable of.

Some may recognize Wolownick from her appearance in the 2018 Academy Award-winning film, Free Solo, in which her son, Alex Honnold, made history for becoming the first to climb El Capitan sans ropes. Wolownick, inspired by Alex, became an avid climber in her late 50s. What started out as an endeavor to better understand her son quickly became an integral aspect of her life, one that would allow her to develop deep bonds with fellow climbers and experience a new way of interacting with the world.

I recently spoke with Dierdre about all facets of her life, from climbing, to writing, to motherhood. Here’s what she had to say.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

 

Brina: Tell me a bit about your upbringing.

Dierdre: I grew up in New York City, Jackson Heights, which the New York Times calls, year after year, “the most international neighborhood in the country.” It was an exciting way to grow up, after World War II. New York is filled with people from all over the place. So I grew up using lots of languages, hearing them all the time, and that’s how I wound up in languages.

My mother had polio so I was her little helper. I was into music from the age of 4 or 5.

Brina: How did you end up as a writer? What led you to want to be a writer?

Dierdre: I grew up very quiet. At that time, in a Polish American family—Eastern European way of thinking of things—children ought to be seen and not heard. As long as you were quiet, then no problem, you were good. I was, and I helped my mother all the time. She couldn’t do steps, she couldn’t run or pick up stuff.

I grew up in my head. I didn’t have a lot of friends. They couldn’t come over because I was busy with [my mother], school, music, drawing. I started writing really young, making up stories. I always had the imagination of a writer. Music and writing were my only solace, my sanity—kind of equally. It grew from there.

Brina: What was your first job?

Dierdre: Teaching. I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. When I was this big [extends palm downwards] I used to assemble all the littler kids, and I’d teach them school in the backyard. I went to high school, college, and back then, you could do everything in four years. So when I graduated, I was a teacher, with my certificate. Back when education was free… Don’t get me started on that. [laughs]

I did my junior of college in France, and while I was there, I taught English as a foreign language all year. So I was sort of a teacher from that year. I started full-time teaching as soon as I graduated.

Brina: You said you’d also taught English in other countries, as well.

Dierdre: I taught in France that year, then all over Southern California, which to me was a foreign country. I taught in Japan for four years. We [late husband and I] were both teachers for four years, in English as a foreign language.

Brina: What kinds of physical activities did you grow up doing?

Dierdre: I was very active. Everybody roller-skated in the streets back then, ice skated all winter. They used to spray parking lots so they would freeze. I was always on my bike after school. Very active, but nothing organized. Just for fun. I was a climber, too, when I was real little, but I wasn’t supposed to be. I was supposed to wear dresses and not let the boys see my underwear when I climbed up the tree, and help my mother, so I gave that up really young. I loved it, though. It took decades for that to come back. It was kind of latent.

Brina: Most people would just box it and put it away, like, “I’m not supposed to do that.”

Dierdre: Most fall into that sad trap, giving up what they love because they’re “not supposed to.” You believe the adults. But I was always more stubborn than that. You have to be really stubborn to be a rock climber.

Brina: How did you rediscover your desire to climb?

Dierdre: My son was beginning to be famous, from the age of sixteen onwards. I’d see pictures of him in magazines, and people reaching out to him about his exploits. I didn’t know anything about those exploits. I was way too busy to find out. There was a seven-year period when a lot of people in my life died. I was working full time, I was remodeling 3 houses. So I would see these things and put them aside [magazines]. It started to peter out. Long story short, I had a little time to myself. Alex was home and he couldn’t climb, he had an injury. But he could belay.

Again, I’m a language person—I’ve taught five different foreign languages in my career. I don’t like not knowing what’s going on around me. Alex and his friends talked about their trips all over the world. By this time, he was a North Face and Black Diamond sponsored athlete. I didn’t know what they were talking about. This bothered me. He had no other life—this was his whole life—and I didn’t speak that language. So I wasn’t part of his life at all. He’s my baby boy, I wanted to be part of his life.

I had him take me to the gym. I figured I’d see what it’s like. I’d learn the names of everything, then I’d understand more of the magazine articles and things. That’s not how it played out, though. I knew I was afraid of heights—everybody is—but what you’re afraid of is falling off, not the height itself. When you’re on a rope, you can’t fall off. And that does wonders to your head. I figured I’d go up half the wall, I’d be afraid, then I’d go home. But I got up the whole wall— it’s 40 feet at the gym—and I had great fun. I did 10-12 walls that day and discovered, “This is fun!” [laughs]

He left on another trip. I was alone. You can’t climb alone—unless you climb like Alex—you have to have a belayer. So it took me a month and a half to get the courage to go back by myself to the gym. I really didn’t know what I was doing. He showed me once. I went and started making some friends. The rest is history.

Brina: Did you feel closer to your son after that?

Dierdre: Yeah, I understood what his world was like. He had tried to explain stuff over the years, but they were just words. In language, you have to have a context to pin them to. Once you have that context, it’s all very clear. The best part was that my imagination—as a mother—was far worse than anything that actually went on out there. I didn’t know that until I started doing it myself. I realized, “Oh, that’s not so bad after all.” Except for free soloing. [laughs] There’s no way that you can exaggerate free soloing. It changed everything.

Swapping roles is what I began to do with Alex. When we went outdoors, he was in charge. He told me what to do. I was the little kid. Like when your parents are very old, you swap roles, you take care of them. That’s what we learned to do. It’s an experience that every adult should have—to learn to be a child again. I was like a little kid in a snowsuit—you know the Michelin guy. I couldn’t do anything, didn’t know what to do. But he knew exactly what to do. This experience changes your outlook. It’s humbling. Little kids have it rough. [laughs]

Brina: How often did you climb with Alex?

Dierdre: Once a year. It’s like babysitting for him. And I was still teaching back then. All the pro-climbers in the world train in Yosemite in spring and fall. My birthday’s in the fall, so I usually manage to be there. He and I usually climb something extraordinary. Yosemite National Park is enormous and covers miles and miles. There are climbs that are so beautiful. And not hard, but far— you have to march 7 miles to get there.  We’ve done a lot of those, because he knows where to go—what gear to take, everything. I’m the little kid, just follow along. [laughs]

Brina: What was it like preparing for climbing El Cap the first time—not just physically, but mentally and emotionally?

Dierdre: The National Geographic crew followed Alex around for three years to do that movie. They went everywhere he did—cinema verité. It’s a French term that means “truth.” They didn’t wanna just tell his story, they wanted to show it. So they followed him to the dentist, the doctor, everywhere. He met his now-wife during that process. Everywhere they went, there was a photographer. Can you imagine that? [chuckles]

During those three years, the last year before he did his climb, he and I did a big wall. In climbing, “big wall” means it’s vertical, it’s granite usually, and it’s often—not always—too big to do in one go. You have to sleep on the wall. We did it on okay time—we left at 9 in the morning and were done by dinner. On El Cap, most climbs take 4, 5, 6 days. So, I’m thinking, all the way down, “I just did a semi-big wall. I wonder if I could do that other big wall.” Because that’s the litmus paper of climbers—like playing piano in Carnegie Hall. If you’re a real climber, doing El Cap is it. It popped into my head on the way down, and I didn’t think I would do it with anybody but him. Period.

I didn’t think he would agree to that. I’m a mom, I started when I was sixty. I’ll never be a good climber. One day when he was coming to the house, I was at my computer dreaming of El Cap. I asked him, “Any chance that someday you might lead me up El Cap?” He didn’t bat an eye and said, “Yeah, sure. But you have to learn how to jug.” I didn’t know what that meant, so I set out to learn what jugging [also known as jumaring] was.

I had done marathons by that point, trained for them. I knew how to set up a training schedule. I took my jumars to one of the climbing gyms in the region. It’s dangerous, a different skill than other people are doing in the gym. I went with a friend. The first time I tried it, it was horrible. I was wrecked. It was hard work physically, mentally, and core-wise, balance-wise. I got on the first time. As soon as your feet leave the ground, you spin on the rope, then you spin the other way on the rope. You have no control over that, especially outdoors when there’s wind.

I got on the rope and I was halfway. My leg was bleeding from the metal banging into my shin. I got to the top, then I came back down. I went 35 feet. El Cap is 3,200 feet. [laughs] I trained for 18 weeks and went 3 days a week to Yosemite, in the middle of the week. There are fixed ropes that always hang on El Cap, and they go up 1,000 feet. I used them to practice. I got better and better at jugging.

The first time I got on a rope outdoors, I was alone. It took me a long time to find the rope—El Cap is enormous. It was an experience. I had to ask a lot of climbers. Everybody out there is in pairs—two young guys, or three, or four. With these refrigerator-sized backpacks carrying all their gear. Then there was me—mom, with my little day pack, alone. I got all these strange looks and kept asking, “Do you know where the Heart lines are?”

I got on the first Heart line and it’s terrifying. You’re hanging on a rope this [puts hands together] big, 100 feet off the ground. It was my first time trying it. I didn’t go up 100 feet the first try. All the while, I’m thinking, “I’m alone. Nobody knows where I am except Alex.” He was training to do El Cap—he was always on El Cap. I didn’t know he was gonna do what he did. If I encountered a problem I didn’t know what to do about, I was on my own. I went up a few feet, few more feet, few more feet. About two-thirds of the way up this 200-foot rope, when you turn around, there’s nothing. Nothing above you, nothing below you, nothing around you. Nothing. It takes a while to wrap your mind around that. I knew how to do everything, and I checked everything 19 times.

Two-thirds of the way up, there was a knot. Nobody ever said anything about knots. So I said, “Hmmm.” I had to think through what to do. Going up, it was pretty easy—I had 3 things holding me onto the rope. So I took one off, and attached it above the knot. That worked out. I attached it to another knot, that worked. So I kept going. But coming down doesn’t work that way. Coming down, you’re wading through it. Going up, you’re hanging on the rope. To come back down, you have to take these things down. It took me 40-50 minutes, maybe an hour of waiting there. In the meantime, the tears are streaming down. I tried to call Alex, a friend, but nobody would answer. That’s when you find out what you’re made of. I didn’t know about knots and ropes, I’d never heard of those things.

Anyway, I lived to tell the tale. I’m thinking, “You can cry all you want but nobody’s gonna help you.” Not sure exactly what I did now, but I did figure it out. That was the biggest learning moment of the whole 18 weeks, that one day.

If you don’t do it right, people could die. Most people take 4-5 days to do the climb that we did. We went up and down in a day, which is extraordinary. I didn’t know at the time how extraordinary that is.

Brina: Were you planning that?

Dierdre: I asked him if we could do it. He planned it, so I followed along. Had I known more, I might not have done it. We got down in 19 hours—quite a record.

Brina: I didn’t realize the level of detail that goes into planning.

Dierdre: Yeah, people don’t. He trained for 10 years to do El Cap. He was figuring out how to do everything—people don’t take that into account. I trained 18 weeks, 3 days a week, and the other days I was in the gym and running. Your whole life goes into it

Brina: Let’s talk about rituals. For a climb—whether bigger or smaller—do you have a routine or structure you follow to get into the right headspace?

Dierdre: [shakes head] No. I never had time for that. I would rush from job to job, go to the gym and start climbing. I never had time for myself. It was either climb or do these rituals.

Climbing is meditation. When you climb, you cannot think about anything else. It’s 100% focusing in a way that other sports aren’t. You can get really hurt if you’re not watching what you’re doing. It’s not like other sports at all. That’s why I like it more than organized sports.

Brina: Do you find that writing and climbing present you with overlapping challenges? Do they require you to exert yourself in a similar way?

Dierdre: Writing and climbing are the same. You have to focus, it’s an individual thing. Nobody can help you climb. Nobody can write words into your head. There’s a zone thing, too. [Writing] isn’t as physical. If you don’t get the book done, you won’t die. You won’t fall off the chair and kill someone. When you’re doing a big wall like El Cap, one of the biggest things is if you drop something, it could kill someone. A 10 oz carabiner falls 3,000 feet, it’s like a big boulder hitting you on the head. In that aspect, no. You’re not gonna die, you’re not gonna kill anybody [while writing].

In every other way, they’re similar. Nobody can tell you if you did it right until it’s over.

Brina: What advice do you give to people who feel stuck where they are? Or who have a goal they want to do, but they’ve been told by society they can’t do it?

Dierdre: Start keeping a journal, turn off the television. Five minutes a day is all it takes. It’ll become more than that as you develop the habit. The best shrink in the world, it’ll allow you to figure out anything. There’s so much of life that needs to be figured out, but we’re taught not to do that in school.

Brina: What’s in store next? What do you see yourself doing, climbing-wise or in your personal life?

Dierdre: All kinds of things. I’ve gotten back to music. I’m playing with the Capitol Pops Concert Band, mostly doing a series of piano duets for senior centers. That’s a lot of hours per week, practicing and rehearsing with them. This Mother’s Day weekend, I’ll be in Yosemite. They’re making a movie about me. I was contacted by a filmmaker in Philadelphia. She wants to tell this story. Four days we’ll be filming in Yosemite. After that, we’ll be filming at my house and the climbing gym.

There’s all kinds of great things on the horizon. My daughter is also into extreme sports—hers are running and cycling. She cycles 1,000 miles at the drop of a hat. She did Portland to South Lake Tahoe. She and her partner James are riding across the country—Portland to Portland. I might meet them in Portland, Maine, since I have family out there and haven’t been able to travel for 3 years now.

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Huge thanks to Dierdre for taking the time to do this interview. For more on Dierdre, check out her memoir The Sharp End of Life: A Mother’s Story and follow her blog, Dierdre’s Place. She’ll also appear in a documentary about her life, from the producers of Beyond Sixty.