Rock Star
Legendary rock climber Beth Rodden has navigated sudden success, endured a high-profile divorce and survived a traumatic kidnapping. As she releases her candid new memoir, the Davis native talks about learning the ropes as a kid at the Rocknasium, the perils and pitfalls of fame, and finding grace in the cracks of mountains and life alike.
One of the greatest rock climbers of all time is afraid of heights.
What Beth Rodden is not afraid of these days is admitting it. In her page-turner of a memoir, A Light Through the Cracks: A Climbers’ Story, out on May 1, she describes staring down the 3,000-foot face of Yosemite’s El Capitan at the start of every climbing season during her big-wall scaling days, her stomach in more knots than her belay line.
“I haven’t been on El Cap in quite a long time but I would guarantee you l’d be scared up there,” she says on a call from France, where she is vacationing with her second husband and their 9-year-old son. “But there were certain tenets in the climbing culture that you didn’t go against, and being invincible against fear was one of them.” So she simply worked through the fear as she continued to bag numerous difficult, newsworthy ascents. That was, however, after the kidnapping by terrorists, and before the Richter-scale divorce that shook the climbing world.
The pioneering rock climber started out as a teen phenom in Davis. (Photo by Ryan Moon, courtesy of Beth Rodden)
Few 44-year-olds have lived enough to justify a memoir, but Rodden started young. One Sunday in September 1994, when she was 14 years old, her dad dropped her and a friend off at the Rocknasium in Davis, looking for a fun way for the girls to spend an afternoon. By then, there were only about 50 rock climbing gyms nationwide—California alone has over 90 today.
“So for Davis to have one was pretty rare, and pretty great,” Rodden says, marveling at her good luck growing up in the right place at the right time. “And I just never looked back.”
“Beth had great technique,” says Rocknasium co-owner Mark Leffler, an early mentor, remembering the teenager, then still under 5 feet tall, making an outsized impression at his gym. “Everybody loved to watch her climb. I remember her getting really focused and really intense about the sport. She was on it. I actually learned a lot from her.”
Within a couple of months, Rodden entered her first competition. She went on to win junior nationals four times, and at 17, finished third at the youth climbing world championships in Austria. Her parents Robb and Linda Rodden took turns chaperoning, always renting the same car (it had to be a Mercury Mystique) when they traveled around the U.S., and making sure Beth had her favorite fleece sweater and ate her favorite pre-match meal: penne pasta with red sauce and a virgin strawberry daiquiri at the Olive Garden. In her memoir, which vividly captures the life of a family revolving around a young athlete, Rodden describes this parental attention as “catering to my superstitions.” But her dad remembers it as parentally strategic. “Our job was just to make sure we provided a lot of routine and structure,” Robb recalls, “so she could succeed at those events and didn’t have anything distracting her.”
While other kids worked fast food counters, Rodden earned her spending cash by winning prize money and athletic sponsorships. “I did actually apply for a job at the Davis Food Co-op,” she says with a laugh. “I love the Co-op. But the shifts they had didn’t work with my training schedule.”
Rodden only lasted two quarters as a freshman at UC Davis—where Linda worked in communications—leaving in 1998 to take a solo trip to Smith Rock State Park in Oregon. There, Rodden climbed a route called To Bolt or Not to Be, becoming the youngest woman in the world to complete it or any route of that difficulty. Soon she became a mainstay in climbing magazines, and began living off of sponsorships—often just a few hundred dollars per month, plus some free swag. “I could scrape by,” she says. “I was living out of my car or in my parents’ house, so it wasn’t like being able to pay a mortgage or rent, but I was able to afford food.” To this day, climbing is the only job Rodden has ever held.
She was only 19 when The North Face offered to sponsor an overseas expedition in 2000. Rodden and 21-year-old fellow climbing prodigy Tommy Caldwell, whom she had just started dating, joined two other climbers, John Dickey and Jason Smith, for this journey to uncharted virgin walls in the remote Eurasian republic of Kyrgyzstan. Only days into what should have been a six-week tour, the four woke up in their bivouacs suspended from a cliff face to the sound of gunfire pinging of the rock around them.
They were taken hostage by members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and six days of trauma ensued: The four survived firefights and night-long forced marches, subsisting on nothing but a handful of PowerBars salvaged from their ransacked gear. They managed to escape when Caldwell pushed an armed guard off a cliff (they later learned the man survived the fall) and they ran through the night until they came to a friendly Kyrgyz military base and safety. The story made international news. And Rodden felt preternaturally bonded to Caldwell in a way that transcended romantic love.
The couple recovered from their ordeal at her family’s house in Davis. Rodden made sure to visit Dos Coyotes to wolf down her favorite Caesar salad—she and Dickey had spent a night of their captivity describing their favorite meals to each other, and the memory of that salad had been a beacon for her. But as comforting as home was, Rodden’s PTSD went undiagnosed and untreated for years, in part due to the bravado climbers were expected to display at the time. “Therapy was taboo in our community. It was thought of as weak,” she says.
Beth Rodden and Tommy Caldwell hold a news conference in 2000 at the Rocknasium in Davis after surviving a hostage situation during a climbing trip in Kyrgyzstan. (Photo by Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo)
Rodden and Caldwell tied the knot in her backyard in 2003 and scored cover stories on climbing magazines with every challenging route they mastered. In 2005, they free-climbed “The Nose” on El Capitan, something no one had been able to accomplish since 1998. They were so close that they shared a phone and email address. Known among climbers as “The First Couple of Rock,” they trained so hard they sometimes fell asleep on the floor.
A Light Through the Cracks isn’t just a great athlete story, it’s a great marriage story, and even a great divorce story because Rodden stares over that cliff, too, and approaches it with breathtaking honesty and self-awareness. Despite a mutual devotion forged in adversity, Rodden admits that for her, there had never been real passion in their partnership. In 2008, when she met Randy Puro, an amateur boulderer and software engineer from Berkeley, sparks flew. She and Caldwell divorced the following year; and she and Puro married in 2012. For a while she felt villainized by the climbing community—more by others than by Caldwell himself, with whom Rodden eventually came to a place of mutual admiration and appreciation (both are remarried now and their families have even gone on climbing trips together). “To have such a kind and supportive person there with you to bumble through those years—I’m grateful for him being in my life, then and now,” she says.
Battered by divorce and a string of injuries that stalled her progress as a climber, Rodden began to speak out in print and online media about her internal struggles, and found an audience eager to hear about climbing while pregnant, balancing motherhood with an athletic career, and a whole different kind of fear: her anxieties around body image. “One of the biggest surprises was how much it resonated with so many different people,” she says. “Young girls, women who were older than me, men—I was really surprised with all the men that wrote to me about body image. They feel pressured to have a six-pack and chiseled arms, and they’re embarrassed to take their shirt off things that I naively assumed only women experienced.”
Today Rodden divides her time between Berkeley for Puro’s tech career and Yosemite, where Rodden’s climbing career now focuses less on big-wall climbing and more on solving riddles in rock—climbers, like physicists, call these “problems.” She’s become well known as a specialist in crack climbing, scaling smooth surfaces by wedging those tiny fingers into long, thin fractures in slabs of granite.
Eight years ago, when her son Theo was a toddler, Rodden finally summoned the courage to seek therapy for the PTSD she’d struggled with since the kidnapping. Getting in touch with her emotions has enabled Rodden to have a much bigger, messier life than she had ever imagined, with its own challenges and rewards. Life, she has learned, is nothing like a climbing problem. “Years later, I’m finding out how powerful the healing journey of therapy can be,” she says. “But it’s not this linear progression with a finish line. I don’t know if I’ll ever solve the puzzle.”
One admirer of her forthright attitude is arguably the world’s most famous climber—and Rodden’s old friend—Alex Honnold, a Carmichael native who was the subject of the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary Free Solo. “She has strong opinions about things and isn’t afraid to talk about them,” he says. “All things that I think are really positive for the sport.”
And although Rodden hasn’t climbed big walls in a few years, the magnitude of her reputation has actually grown as others strive to repeat her feats of athleticism, according to Honnold. “You have to wait and see how history sorts someone out,” he says. “Many of the hardest routes she put up are just starting to see repeats 10 years after she did them. She was ahead of her time.”
Years after her triumphs on El Cap, Rodden describes another, more personal breakthrough on her fear-conquering journey: the moment she stripped down to a sports bra to expose her “mom belly” in public for the first time, at a climbing wall in Fontainebleau. Rodden had been working on a tricky problem, and her loose shirt was interfering with her ability to cling to the rock with her whole body. Shirtless, she writes, “my skin wrapped around the rock like cling wrap on a chocolate chip cookie.” Bouldering problem solved, Beth Rodden finished the climb to stand right where she belongs—on top of the world.
You Might Also Like
The Rise and Rise of Alex Honnold
