Married professional climbers share what it feels like to wake up hanging off the side of a mountain
Big-wall climbing is one of the most extreme human-powered pursuits in the world. Ascending routes so long that they often take days, sometimes weeks, to complete, climbers haul hundreds of pounds of food, water, and gear along the way.
These steep and technical climbs take incredible skill, endurance, and planning, including plotting out where and how to sleep. Using a portaledge — a cot-like platform that hangs from the cliff — climbers get a night’s rest suspended hundreds, if not thousands, of feet above the ground.
We talked to professional big-wall climbers and married couple Bronwyn Hodgins and Jacob Cook about how sleeping on a portaledge works and what it feels like to rest with nothing but a whole lot of air beneath you.
What is big-wall climbing?
Big-wall climbing involves scaling cliffs so large that they typically cannot be ascended in a single day. How difficult a big-wall climb is depends on the climb’s length, location, and technical grade.
Big-wall climbing is more complex than other types of rock climbing because climbers pack everything they need to survive for days on the cliff. (Water is the heaviest item, with a week’s supply for two people sometimes weighing 100 pounds).
Most climbers use ropes and can only climb one rope length at a time — generally 200 feet. To deal with this, longer climbs are broken into smaller sections called pitches, which link up to create a multi-pitch route.
A pitch is essentially a rope length, or shorter, and it ends at a point where a climber can clip into an anchor system, taking their weight off the rope so they can belay the next person, protecting the second climber from a fall as they climb. When both climbers get to the checkpoint, they haul up their supplies. Then they start all over again, repeating the process, pitch by pitch, until they reach the top.
A classic big-wall climbing destination, El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National Park is 3,000 feet tall. Its most famous route, the Nose, has 31 pitches and typically takes four to six days, and many nights perched on a portaledge, to accomplish.
Meet climbing partners Bronwyn Hodgins and Jacob Cook
Hodgins and Cook have collectively chalked up about 100 nights on big walls. Now based in Squamish, British Columbia, the couple first met 10 years ago through a mountaineering club at Leeds University in England.
Cook had been climbing his whole life, but Hodgins was new to the sport. They quickly became climbing partners and eventually started ticking off big walls worldwide, including putting up routes on Baffin Island in Northern Canada that no one had done before. They both have climbing achievements to be proud of, but after just a decade of climbing, Hodgins is now one of the best female big-wall climbers in the world—a quick progression to anyone familiar with the sport.
In November 2018, Hodgins became the first Canadian woman to free climb El Capitan with her five-day ascent of Freerider — the 3,000-foot route made famous (to non-climbers, anyway) by Alex Honnold in the Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo.” (Free soloing is done without a rope. Free climbing — the way Hodgins climbs — is when you use a rope and place gear in the rock as a safety net but try to never put your weight on the gear or rope as you climb. The term “free climbing” means you’re climbing free from direct aid. Aid climbing is a style of climbing where you reach the top by any means necessary, pulling or hanging on gear to haul yourself up the cliff.)
In 2021, Hodgins was the third woman to free climb another iconic El Capitan route called Golden Gate — a 36-pitch route she completed in an eight-day push.
She is also an Association of Canadian Mountain Guides certified rock climbing guide, running specialized big-wall clinics and women’s-specific programming.
In addition to his professional climbing career, Cook is a mathematics professor at Quest University in Canada. Between gear, logistics, and managing vertical terrain, big-wall systems require a lot of problem solving, says Cook. “I’ve found that the math brain becomes really useful in those environments.”
The first time they both slept hanging off the side of a cliff, they were together in Utah’s Zion National Park. “We climbed a very famous line called Moonlight Buttress,” recalls Cook, “That was our first time [spending] the night on the wall in a portaledge.” Hodgins has since spent eight successive nights on a big wall, and Cook has spent seven.
Athletes sometimes sleep in the strangest ways. To get sleep in big-wall environments, “the goal is to make a horizontal platform in vertical terrain,” says Cook. To bed down, climbers deploy a portaledge — a collapsible platform that hangs off the wall, serving as a suspended cot.
When it’s time to make camp for the night, the aluminum and nylon contraption is taken out of its carrying bag, unrolled, and snapped together. (There is a rain fly you can use if the weather is stormy or cold.) It’s not that different from setting up a standard tent, but instead of being staked into the ground, it’s clipped to metal bolts, webbing, and other gear that has been secured to the cliff. A portaledge isn’t just a floating bed; it also doubles as a kitchen, bathroom, and living room during a climbing team’s time on the wall.
There’s no need for an enclosed shelter when the weather’s nice, so climbers sleep in the open air, instead of using the rain fly. They’ll sleep with a lightweight sleeping pad and sleeping bag for comfort and warmth, the same gear that most campers opt for when sleeping in a tent.