Climbing Past Disability

Bob Dotson
Today Show.com
July 21, 2009

There is nothing so majestic as the sheer rock of a mountain — unless it’s the majesty of the human spirit. Twenty CLIMBING PAST DISABILITY UP WORLD’S TALLEST CLIFF

years ago, at the foot of a cliff called El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National Park, I was witness to both.

El Capitan is one of the most difficult and challenging climbs in the world. Only the gutsiest climbers attempt to scale its heights. Only the very best make it 3,600 feet to the top.

On that day back in 1989, two men — one with good legs, another with powerful arms — shared their strength to climb the tallest unbroken cliff on Earth. On that day, I watched Mike Corbett turn to grin at the man hanging onto his back and ask: “Are you ready for the rock?”

Comeback from calamity
Corbett had carried his friend, 29-year-old Mark Wellman, to the base of El Capitan. But Wellman would have to pull his own weight — three quarters of a mile — practically straight up.

It had been seven years since Mark Wellman made his last climb. He was on his way down when he slipped on some gravel and plummeted into a crevasse.

Wellman dangled at 13,000 feet, wedged in a crack with a broken back, for 30 hours. “I remember I couldn’t wait until the sun came up to warm me up,” he recalls.

His legs were paralyzed, but his spirit was not. Wellman bounced back and took a job as a ranger in Yosemite National Park. He began to dream of climbing again.

“I’m right below you,” Wellman called to Corbett, who was scampering up the cliff to anchor the ropes.

Corbett had hand-stitched canvas chaps to keep Wellman’s legs from rubbing against the cliff. He also designed a special ratchet that would allow Mark to ascend, but not slip back. After each pull of the rope it would hold him in place until he could pull again.

“Everything looks good!” Corbett yelled down.

No one knows El Capitan better than Mike Corbett. By age 34 he had scaled it a record 41 times. “Nice and easy. Don’t strain,” he reminded Wellman.

Looking fear in the face
To improve his grip in preparation for the climb, Wellman hung from a device built to resemble a mountain ledge. He trained like that every day for six months, staring his fear and physical limitations squarely in the face.

“You have one life to live,” he explained. “You better enjoy that life you have. If you don’t, you’re wasting it.”

He just had his two hands, two arms, to tug him up those ropes, 6 inches at a time. The first day he did 2,000 pull-ups.

“I couldn’t do it,” Corbett admitted with a laugh. “I could do seven.”

But that wasn’t all Wellman’s arms would have to do. They would also have to hold Corbett if he fell.

“My life was in his hands, and vice versa,” Corbett said. “I trust him.”

Wellman held the lines while Corbett ranged far above, lifting himself on nubbins of rock the size of bottle caps. Together they studied the cliff like a puzzle, trying to find its weaknesses — cracks in the surface where Corbett could set supports, so Wellman could yank himself up.

Before the two could crest the summit, Corbett would have to climb the mountain three times, placing the pegs, then retrieving them after Wellman passed. It would be an up-and-down dance that might be too draining in the heat of July.

In fact, temperatures reflecting off El Capitan reached 120 degrees during their climb. “God, it was hot today!” Corbett sighed, gulping water.

“I’m beat, man,” Wellman admitted.

But they had pressed on through the swelter, helping each other. Though Wellman didn’t have the use of his legs, the mountain had made him and Corbett equals: On El Capitan, everyone is limited physically. “If I had his arms and my legs,” Corbett gasped, “we’d be in great shape.”

That evening, they hunched small as mice on a portable ledge thousands of feet above the valley floor. They slept one fitful turn from the abyss. The two were an unlikely pair to hurl themselves at a mountain: Wellman with his broken back and withered legs; Corbett weighing less than the two hundred pounds of supplies he pulled up with them. If Santa had a sack that size, he would have serious doubts about Christmas.

Danger zone
On the fourth day, they inched their way over a massive ledge that stretched like a roof above them. “You holding up all right, Mark?” Corbett called.

“Yeah! I’m holding up.”

It was the most dangerous part of their ascent. “We’ll be hanging until we set the ledge,” Corbett said.

Wellman had to swing 25 feet away from the cliff. “It’s like 130 feet up there, huh?”

“No, more like 150,” Corbett  replied.

“OK, keep holding me!” Wellman cried, as he began to dangle like a spider building a web.

Twenty climbers with good legs had died on El Capitan. Wellman and Corbett knew gravity could be unforgiving.  “It’s OK to be afraid,” Corbett had told me. “It’s OK to be scared because I think that keeps you alive.”

“If you have a dream,” Wellman had added, “the only way that dream’s going to happen is if you do it.”

“Even if it’s 6 inches at a time?” I asked.

“Yeah. Even if it’s 6 inches at a time.” Just like a caterpillar.

They were no longer pulling with muscles alone, but with their hearts. It wasn’t just the mountain Mark Wellman was trying to conquer; he was trying to overcome his fear. He was not just pulling himself up; he was pulling away from the memory of the tragic moment that had changed his life forever.

A world askew
For a week Corbett and Wellman lived in a harsh, tilted world.

“I’ve got five cigarettes left,” Corbett joked. “I figure we’ll have to make it to the top pretty soon.”

Somewhere above them, swallowed in shadow, was the summit. They could feel its presence.

“After you’ve been up there five or six days,” Corbett had explained, “you get what’s called Summit Fever. All you can think about is the top.”

The heat had put them behind schedule; now they were being hammered by wind. But they could not rush. Tired climbers tend to be sloppy. To be aware of one’s limitations and remain within them is the essence of good sense when the sky is under your feet.

“I’m cautious,” Corbett said. “I’m not a daredevil.”

By this point the whole world was pulling for the paralyzed park ranger to make it to the top. But Mark Wellman thought the world ought to remember the man who had pulled for him first: “Corbett’s a real good pal. He’s my legs.”

The two men had become joined by a bond far stronger than any they had in the world below. For 168 hours they had hung together on tiny pins pounded into a vast granite wall. El Capitan had been more than a proving ground of strength and skill; for Wellman, who had lost the use of his legs in a fall from a mountain, it was the place he discovered he had not lost his courage.

Top dogs
On the final morning, the two rose slowly, like men with boulders on their shoulders. Mark had done 7,000 pull-ups in seven days.

“I can smell the summit,” he shouted, a smile cracking through his grim determination.

“Almost there!” Corbett grinned back.

Swirling gusts made it difficult to look up and see. They sensed the summit first.

“Yeah! I feel it!”

Their adventure ended as it began — with Mike Corbett carrying his friend the last few yards to the summit.

“Yeow!”

There was nothing left to climb but sky. After eight days, Mark Wellman, the park ranger with the fractured spine, had scaled the largest single piece of granite in the world — a triumph of courage, strength, skill and most of all, friendship.

His amazing feat changed forever Americans’ conceptions about disability. The following year, on the anniversary of that historic climb, President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, the first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities.

Wellman had proved forever that the disabled need not have limits.

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