Climbing Lurking Fear was still the hardest thing I’ve ever done by far but just being on El Cap is a mind-bender. They’re not pull-up-from-the-ground pull-ups, but nonetheless, for me, they’re extraordinary. Every time I walk by it, I do 10 pull-ups. I’ve never been able to do push-ups or pull-ups so I got one of those pull-up bars you can put in a doorway and started working on it. I went to Yosemite to train three days a week for 18 weeks in a row. “I never in a million years thought that I could climb El Cap.” (The following interview has been edited and condensed.) There certainly was no danger,” she said. “These were wonderful, greatly satisfying things but nothing was really physical. In 1990, a few years after moving to suburban Sacramento, where her husband grew up, she founded an orchestra in West Sacramento and conducted it. As an adult she taught five languages and wrote books, including a 2019 memoir, “The Sharp End of Life: a Mother’s Story,” in part about her first El Cap ascent.
Growing up in New York, she painted and played the piano in Jackson Heights, Queens. The grueling climbs were a departure from the first half of Ms. It took her six hours to reach the summit, and after camping there overnight, she came down in six and a half hours the next day. On that adventure she went up an easier route that climbers typically use to descend. Wolownick returned to El Cap without her son to climb it again, this time to celebrate her 70th birthday with a small group of friends and guides. Reaching the summit of El Capitan in 2017, she became the oldest woman to make that ascent, according to Hans Florine, an American rock climber with a record 179 climbs of the vertical rock formation.Īnd she has not slowed down. Her own effort - which did use ropes - was “by far” the most demanding thing she had ever done, Ms.
Of course, it helped that the author and now-sponsored athlete had one of the most accomplished rock climbers in the world to guide her: her famous son, Alex Honnold, the star of the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo.” The film chronicles her son’s breathtaking journey to become the first person to climb “El Cap” with no rope or safety equipment whatsoever. The route she tackled then, Lurking Fear, typically takes four days to complete. Wolownick made a record-breaking ascent up El Capitan, Yosemite National Park’s granite monolith that has some of the longest, most challenging rock climbing routes in the world. Then, at 60, she became a rock climber - and not just any rock climber. In her 40s, Dierdre Wolownick taught herself to swim. “It’s Never Too Late” is a series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.
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