Running head: The Impossible Climb Made Possible 1
The Impossible Climb Made Possible:
A Rhetorical Criticism
Northern Arizona University COM 300W
The Impossible Climb Made Possible 2
The Impossible Climb Made Possible:
A Rhetorical Criticism
Climbing is a challenging, unrelenting, and high-risk sport. Being a climber myself, I
know the challenges and constant battle one has to push oneself further and further. Climbing
itself has a long rich history. At the heart of the sport has long been the historic national park,
Yosemite Valley. Yosemite Valley has seen centuries of climbing starting back in the 19th
century. The valley is surrounded by large walls upon which have glorious views. These walls
have attracted many climbers to them. These walls hold many historic climbs in their bones and
have seen numerous attempts to make the impossible possible. One of these momentous walls,
known as El Capitan, has seen a great portion of these historic climbs. El Capitan is a granite
wall that extends about 3,000 ft. towering over the valley (Kallen, 1996, p. 1). What was once
seemed to be an impossible face to climb, El Cap now has over 70 established climbing routes
(McNamara & Sloan, 2005, p. 1). El Capitan’s first assent began in the summer of 1957 by
Warren Harding and various crewmembers. Harding and a few other members finally completed
it in the fall of 1958 (Kallen, 1996, p. 1). El Cap would continue to be climbed by climbers such
as, Warren Harding, Dean Caldwell, Steve Sutton, Charlie Porter, and many more.
The Dawn Wall is a section of El Cap that gets it’s name from the dawn light that first
hits the valley lying directly first on this bold towering face. The Dawn Wall was first climbed in
1970 by Harding and Caldwell all done through a method known as aid climbing, which relies
on nylon ladders attached to placed hardware to support a climber’s weight. The Dawn Wall had
never been climbed by using the rock as holds to climb up only using ropes to catch a fall, until
January 14th 2015. Andrew Bisharat wrote in an article (2015), “Nineteen days after they set out
The Impossible Climb Made Possible 3
to achieve one of climbing’s most difficult challenges, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson
reached the summit of the 3,000-foot rock known as El Capitan in Yosemite National Park on
Wednesday, marking the first free ascent of a notoriously difficult section called the Dawn Wall”
(p. 1). The New York Times quoted Alex Honnold, a renowned professional climber: “What
makes the Dawn Wall so special is that it’s almost not possible”(2015). Bello said (2015) that
they, “…attempted what many considered impossible on one of the world’s most difficult
climbs…” (p. 1). President Obama also had something to say, posting a tweet on twitter saying
that Caldwell and Jorgeson “remind us that anything is possible”. Even the daunting wall itself
almost speaks to viewers telling anyone that knows a little about climbing that it’s Dawn Wall
face is impossible
Rock and Ice Magazine recently released their April 2015 issue, which is a special edition
