Excerpted from Uplifted: The Evolution of a Climbing Life ©2025 by Sonnie Trotter. Reprinted with permission by Patagonia.
Sonnie Trotter has spent much of his life calculating risk—logging roughly 5,000 days scaling rock faces around the world. In his 20s and 30s, he pursued his climbing goals with relentless passion, undeterred by the dangers of the sport. In Uplifted: The Evolution of a Climbing Life, Sonnie takes readers on a journey through the highs and lows of an unconventional life spent outdoors. From his early days scraping together funds to chase his climbing dreams to tackling some of the hardest routes on Earth, Uplifted offers an intimate look at what it means to dedicate a life to climbing—while also navigating the messy, beautiful challenges of raising young kids.
Chapter 1
MOUNT STEPHEN
2013
Anyone who’s driven west on the Trans-Canada Highway from the province of Alberta into British Columbia has seen—and surely been enraptured by—the towering Rocky Mountains.
Dozens of razor-sharp summits and white, lofty tops pierce the sky in every direction, as far as the eye can see. I always slide the driver’s seat closer to the wheel so I can take it all in. Simply the sight of them consumes my imagination … even in the side-view mirrors.
Eventually, deep in the range, past the turnoff to Lake O’Hara, there’s a long, steep, descending hill called the Spiral Tunnels. The region’s name comes from the famously constructed railway tracks, on which heavy trains weave in and out of the commanding landscape on terrifyingly steep grades.
A monstrous rock face rears up above the trees on the south side of the road. It looks as though half the mountain sheared off and crumbled into a billion pieces. This steep, unclimbed feature, once dubbed “The Great Wall of China,” proudly dominates the northeast flank of Mount Stephen (10,495 feet/3,199 m). It’s not nearly the tallest of the Canadian peaks, but with its base less than a mile off the highway, it is one of the most accessible.
Stephen is a very old mountain—roughly 500 million years, according to geologists—and made of a special blend of quartzite, dolomite, and shale. The western hillside is littered with ancient fossils that are exceptionally well preserved, and thus the peak requires a permit to climb. This dramatic summit was named in 1886 after the first president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Sir George Stephen. Word is that it was the first Canadian mountain over 10,000 feet to see a documented ascent, by J. McArthur and T. Riley in 1887 via the West Face.
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More than a century later, my own climbing journey would begin some 1,300 miles east of Mount Stephen, in the flatlands of Ontario. Like most Canadian kids, I was a hockey player until then, but quit because I was too small. In 1995, at fifteen years old, I tied my first figure-eight knot in the echoing interior of an old grain silo that had been refurbished as a climbing gym, and life was never the same again.
“This is a refreshing memoir, fast, fun, and joyous, which reflects Sonnie’s lifetime spent on the rock,” said Alex Honnold, author of Alone on the Wall. “He’s always climbed with a certain effortlessness. This book captures that ease and joy in his retellings of adventures around the world.”
Overnight, this quirky indoor climbing facility, Of Rock and Chalk, became my second home. I would slowly graduate from V1 to V13, and 5.4 to 5.14, from toprope to lead, sport to trad, big walls to first ascents, and eventually make my way into the mountains. However, if you’d told fifteen-year-old me, climbing the inside of a mill in my baggy harness and oversized rental shoes, that I’d someday attain these lofty grades, I probably would have laughed at you.
In the summer of 2013, I was thirty-three and possibly in the best shape of my life. I had eighteen years of climbing experience behind me and was feeling as though I would never get tired, climbing almost every single day, in almost every single style. As my climbing partner Tommy Caldwell and I approached Mount Stephen’s Great Wall of China in the scorching heat of mid-July, my legs and lungs had never felt stronger. Still, the 3,000-foot face above looked vertiginous, and my heart and head pounded every time I stopped to look up. Though we moved quickly through the trees and over rocks, in hindsight, I wasn’t entirely present.
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Usually, I’m able to climb with a strong sense of conviction, but on this day, I was feeling more constrained. For every two steps uphill that we took, there was one metaphorical step back down—one thought ruling my mind, and then my body, pulling at my heels.
Though we moved quickly through the trees and over rocks, in hindsight, I wasn’t entirely present.
During Tommy’s and my descent off the wall back to safety that took hours, it became clear that I’d been responding to a furious yearning to meet my first, yet-unborn child.
^ ^ ^
Earlier that morning, under a starry sky, Tommy and I had left my town of Canmore, Alberta, pointing our wheels west toward the big peaks of the Continental Divide. It was just over an hour before we reached the parking lot below Mount Stephen, only minutes from the charming little railway stop of Field, British Columbia.
Getting out of Tommy’s van at nearly 4,200 feet above sea level, I expected to feel the fresh, cold air that accompanies this type of elevation at dawn. But as my feet crunched down on the gravel, the sun still yet to be seen, I felt a warm breeze on my legs.
My stomach churned. Perhaps the espresso, I thought. We tried to find a better vantage point near the lot to survey the virgin wall, scrambling up on a berm and pulling away the branches. The colossal wall was, and still is, as alluring to me as any rock feature I’ve ever seen: tall and seductively steep, a sweeping face of colorful quartzite. Pink, purple, and orange swaths of rock are linked together by intricate bands of beautiful gray streaks, drawing the eye.
To each side of our desired line, on the biggest, gnarliest part of the face, we noticed two thin waterfalls running off the rock. The heavy ice pack on top was receding quickly, as it usually does in the radiant months of June and July, but had not yet fully melted away. I learned only later that it’s typically mid- or late August before the ice melts or slides off completely. In September, the first snowstorms begin, creating a very short window of opportunity for an attempt at free climbing the wall—climbing using only our hands and feet, with the rope and protection to safeguard any falls but not to take our weight or aid upward progress. On this day, the ice pack clung treacherously to the forty-five-degree summit slopes, not yet ready to give.
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