In some ways, climbing in the clouds is comforting. You can no longer see how high off the ground you are.
I grew up a clumsy kid with bad hand-eye coordination. Yet here on El Cap, I felt as though I had stumbled into a world where I thrived. Being up on those steep walls demanded the right amount of climbing skill, pain tolerance, and sheer bull-headedness that came naturally to me.
I tend to pick objectives that I feel are safe because I know that, in the moment, I always go for it. I have some rules for myself, though: Look for the rock faces without a lot of loose rock. Always rope up on glaciers where there is even a slight chance of falling into a crevasse. No pure free soloing. Never climb below hanging glaciers.
I crave time in Yosemite like I crave food and water.
I have a very distinct goal all the time that I'm working toward, and I love the way it makes me live.
Every climb is different. The Dawn Wall was so dry and aggressive that my fingers would dry out to the point where they would crack. So I actually had to add as much moisture as possible.
From an early age, Yosemite became the centre of my universe. I've been going every summer since I was a child. I love everything about that place: waterfalls, high-quality rock, history.
One of the reasons the Dawn Wall climb went so viral is that you get great Internet access on El Cap. It's like the best Internet access in all of Yosemite, so we had our phones with us.
The Dawn Wall and the Fitz Traverse were super-satisfying climbs. But I will always be searching for the next thing - the need to accomplish and explore are just woven into the fabric of who I am.
Climbs like the Dawn Wall don't come around every day.
One of the nice things about indoor training is you can make holds that are better on your skin, so you can train more before your fingers wear out. You can get stronger faster climbing inside.
I have always let my motivation guide me, and that has served me well. Climbing has taught me how to thrive and created a life that I feel incredibly lucky to have.
I've always been really curious about the limits of human capability.
I pretty much bailed on high school. I mean, I graduated, but I wasn't even there for my own graduation.
When I was super young, we were hiking to the top of the 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado. You know, when I was in my early teens, we went to Bolivia and climbed to the tops of the highest mountains in the Alps. You know, those experiences were so exciting that when I came back to school, I was actually quite bored.
Through climbing, I've learned to find goals and work toward them. That's just the way I love to live.
I have different shoes for different types of climbing, six or seven different shoes that I alternate.
Stand at the base and look up at 3,000 feet of blankness. It just looks like there's no way you can climb it. That's what you seek as a climber. You want to find something that looks absurd and figure out how to do it.
My natural abilities weren't necessarily brute power and strength. They were more about the ability to endure and not give up.
My earliest memory is being in a snow hole, aged two-and-a-half, with my dad somewhere up a mountain in a blizzard. I don't know what my dad saw in me - I was a geeky kid - but he had that philosophy: prepare the kid for the road, not the road for the kid.
