Uplifted: Stories of Climbing with Friends in High Places

by Sonnie Trotter Narrated by Not Yet Available

Overview

How is a person changed by commitment to their passion, and how does their commitment change over time? These are questions that esteemed climber Sonnie Trotter asks as he reflects on the most thrilling adventures of his sport and his life.
Trotter has been dangling from astonishingly high places for over 25 years, more than half his life. He's been at the forefront of the sport for most of that time, specializing in first ascents on rock faces most people cannot imagine scaling. In*Uplifted, Sonnie recounts the most memorable moments of his career but also the rich relationships, including with epic climbers such as Tommy Caldwell ("Dawn Wall") and Alex Honnold ("Free Solo"), that are the spine of the sport, as well as the psyche that draws one to and evolves as one grows into and through this unique and challenging endeavor.
From learning to climb in an ancient grain silo in southern Ontario, to mastering some of the hardest, tallest rock climbs on Earth, Sonnie shares entertaining but candid tales about life on the road, living in the dirt, overcoming obstacles, and changing within his sport. He writes as if he is sharing stories around the campfire at the end of a great day, when you are bone-tired but loving the camaraderie, so much so that you don't want to retire to your tent. He embodies a “humble masculinity” in what is perceived as a high-adrenaline, hard-charging sport, but reveals that it is very much about careful consideration, insightful reflection, and balancing challenge and risk.
Sonnie speaks openly about how his attitude towards the risks climbing demands has changed as he has aged and changed his life's circumstances. Now married with two young children), he describes how he has reconciled these parts of his life and his identity. This is a crossroads that many - whether from commitment to a sport or through other circumstances of life - have faced and will relate.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191794464
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Series:	Patagonia
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

When I was fifteen, growing up in the Toronto suburb of Newmarket, I started writing down thoughts and ideas that resonated with me. I began wanting to remember concepts and philosophies that I connected with and statements that instilled curiosity and wonder. I picked up a small blue journal, pasted outdoor branding stickers all over the outside, and began filling the pages.

I suppose our mid-teens are the age when we humans start feeling a deeper sense of the way things are in the world, and we begin to ask ourselves why they must be this way. Songs, poems, and books all contain moving and powerful meditations, and one of the first passages I copied onto the pages of my journal was this version of a quote from the author Leo Buscaglia: “The only hazard in life is to risk nothing.” The words climbed inside my developing brain, and built a home. The gist was simple and profound: to be truly free, we must be willing to risk.

Around this time, I also left behind a so-so career in team sports and discovered rock climbing, first via ESPN’s Extreme Sports Network, which showcased the sport, then an event climbing wall, and finally a local climbing gym. It’s a sport with risk baked in—and it couldn’t have been a better fit. I hung a “No Fear” poster of the late, great California climber Dan Osman climbing ropeless on my bedroom wall. Hundreds of feet above the ground on a difficult rock climb called Atlantis in the Needles, California, Osman has one hand lodged in a good flake and the other pressed against the vertical wall, his body cantilevered out from the cliff in a flag maneuver. The position is outrageous, the risk tremendous—but Osman could not appear to be any freer. He's doing what he loves, despite the risk.

I, too, was hungry for a similar type of freedom. A restless kid, I wanted to explore my own potential, to move, to try hard, to push my limitations. Like Osman, I wanted to experience that exposure, perhaps even a little fear and pain, and I longed to see the world beyond my town, country, and continent. As it turns out, rock climbing was a great way to do all of this.

Today, with my beautiful wife Lydia, we have two children, ages nine and five. This morning at our home in Canmore, Alberta, they made dozens of white snowflakes for our Charlie Brown Christmas tree, cut from tiny pieces of folded-up paper. With real snow piling up outside, they sat on the floor by the window, laughing and giggling, still in pajamas and bare feet, taking over our tiny living room. Meanwhile, Lydia and I tried to prepare them for school. Wet boots were set on the heater to dry, and clean clothes were piled in a messy lump beside the dryer.

Our kitchen table—my office on one side and Lydia’s on the other—is littered with markers, coloring books, scissors, and glue. Not to mention maple syrup–covered plates and sticky glasses of partially drunk milk (which I’ll finish later). Honestly, with puffy eyes and tangled hair, Lydia and I are still waking up ourselves, always on the hunt for another sip of coffee. After what seems like hours, we get the kids dressed, brush their teeth, pack their lunches and school bags, get their jackets, hats, and mittens on, and coax them out the door. Later, both Lydia and I will shoehorn work and climbing into our busy day, then wake up the next morning and do it all again.

As I write this, at the age forty-three and after twenty-eight years on the rock, I define myself as a climber, son, brother, husband, and father. None of these things are mutually exclusive, and they’re in fact all intertwined. Today, I make decisions based on what is best for my family and the well-being of my wife and children—which also means recalibrating my own relationship to risk. I adore my family to no end, and I owe it to them to be here. In my twenties and thirties, when I set out with a vengeance to climb as much and as hard as I could, living the itinerant professional-climber life and often taking big risks to pursue my goals, I had a difficult time visualizing that someday I’d have a home to come back to and kids to provide for. Less than a decade ago, my friends and I were climbing cutting-edge rocks with sparse protection, sometimes no wider than a thumbnail, courting huge falls; or heading to the wildest mountains for multi-pitch climbs riddled with alpine hazards and constant exposure. Now, I stick closer to home, doing more sport climbing and bouldering, where the falls are much safer, the risk more pedestrian.

Over the years, I’ve written articles about our ascents and expeditions for magazines and blogs, but I’ve never tried to gather them into a single package before, with a beginning and end, a message, and a title. Writing this book has been daunting, if I’m being honest.

I also found it hard not to talk about the minute details of my journey, and I use terms like splitter, crux, crimps, slopers, jugs, aid, and beta. It’s everyday jargon for a climber but could be confusing to non-climbing readers. I do my best to explain the context of where I am and what those words mean, plus you can reference the glossary at the back of the book.

Of course, these stories only make up a tiny fragment of all the places I’ve been and people I’ve climbed with. It wasn’t easy choosing what to leave in and what to take out. When you’re a diehard, you might be out at the rock 200-plus days a year, which ends up being a lot of stories when those years turn into decades. I estimate I’ve climbed around 5,000 days in my life so far, give or take.

As I’ve revisited some tales from the cliffs while writing Uplifted, one recurring lesson I’ve taken away is that we should do what we feel the most like doing; we should chase our dreams and do it now and fully, because life is short and it can end at any time, as my own and my friends’ near-misses in the mountains have shown me. We should follow the fire within whenever we can, listen to ourselves carefully—over and above the voices of others—and seek out the amazing places that our journey takes us, both internally and externally.

Naturally, this approach comes with a certain level of risk, but doesn’t everything? Is it not risky just to be alive? Of course, the variables are many in the vertical world, but I think it’s far more important to our growth as humans to confront and manage risk than to avoid it completely. Doing that might take time and practice, but like everything, the more we do it, the better we get; and the more we surround ourselves with likeminded people, the easier and more fun adventure becomes.

Ultimately, this book is the story of a young boy who discovered a new way of living called rock climbing and dove into it headfirst to see where it would take him. My hope is that the words and phrases within these pages will inspire you to choose a path that is your own, no matter where it leads.