Outdoor Retailer - Winter 2020 - 68

How I Got Here: w/ Dierdre Wolownick

The Long Way to the Top

The oldest woman to climb El Cap tells how she finally broke free from limitations of
parents and family and found a home in the wild. by Dierdre Wolownick
ALLYOU NEED IS LOVE.THE BEATLES HAD ITSTRAIGHT.ARICH, FULFILLED
life must include love-of people, of self, of learning, and of our natural
state, the wild. My love of the outdoors was a thread that wove its way
through my whole life, but I wasn't allowed to acknowledge it for decades. It ran like an undercurrent, strong but unacknowledged, affecting everything in my life but unrecognized, and thus, undervalued.
At first, I had to hide it. Picture a cute, 4-year-old city girl dressed in a
lovely pink dress hand-sewn by mommy, auburn ringlets bouncing in
the dappled sun, climbing up the metal street lamppost faster than the
boys (while the grownups sat inside, out of sight, talking). Or hopping
from the L-shaped metal steps on the electric pole to the bough of the
old sugar maple and onto the garage roof with the bigger boys.
"Get down from there!" Aunt Helen would shout from her secondstory window. We would scurry and hide, waiting for her to finish hanging her laundry so we could go up again. The adventure of climbing was
undeniable. But forbidden.
By the age of 5, I loved the feel and challenge of the rough conglomerate of the Mile Rocks in Pennsylvania, where all the kids played and
scrambled and climbed while the parents had coffee at our grandparents' house. In the 1880s, when they created the town of Hazleton,
Pennsylvania, they moved huge, house-sized boulders in order to
level land for homes. They dumped them into a small ravine at the
edge of town, where they piled on top of each other, forming manmade mountains. To us kids, though, they were real mountains. Even
though the drive to Pennsylvania from New York always made me
carsick, I recovered fast each time, knowing that adventure waited for
me at the Mile Rocks.
Each year on our last day of school in Manhattan, my high school
class took the boat ride up the Hudson River to Bear Mountain State
Park where my friends would follow me as we hiked deep into the woods
looking for bears, and peace. Why me? Did they recognize in me something that sought out the wilderness, something that knew how to find it
and love it?
I did love it, even though it was not part of my life in New York City.
I was bound to stay close to home and be my handicapped mother's
arms and legs, but something in me longed to be surrounded by green.
By mountains (although I'd never been higher than 1,600 feet in the
Poconos). By wilderness. It was a love that never dimmed, no matter
how long it was forced to lie dormant.
WHILE I WAS YOUNG, NONE OF THIS PASSION WAS ACKNOWLEDGED.
The yearnings tore through me-a strong, unrelenting undertow that

68 OUTDOOR RETAILER

/ Winter 2020

BIG-WALL THINKING
At 66 years old
Wolownick climbed El
Cap with her famous
son, Alex Honnold.

I couldn't ignore, yet couldn't indulge. My mother's polio kept her at
home-and me with her, her helper, her reacher and carrier of things,
stair navigator, gardener, sous-chef. None of this was expressed in those
terms. I was her daughter. It was my duty to help.
But my father's stories about his canoe trips up the Hudson before he
knew my mother fired my imagination more visually and more forcefully
than any of the books I got from the library each week. I felt the rocking of
the canoe, the lurch of each paddle stroke. My city blood rushed with excitement and danger as they capsized. I heard the slapping of the water,
the screeching blue jays, and my own heartbeat, faster and faster.

Photograph by Carlo Nasisse

Outdoor Retailer - Winter 2020

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