Carragee Consulting

In 2016 I started climbing with a guy from California who had a lot of baseline athleticism, but no background in the sport. He was learning everything I knew tremendously quickly and was excited to tell a friend back home about his new hobby.

Somehow the friend, with no experience had seen movie trailers for the Dawn Wall and suggested that we go out to Yosemite and do some big wall climbing. This is a classic example of the Dunning-Krueger effect, where the less you know the easier it is to over-estimate your capabilities.

The difference leading single sport pitched rated around 5.10c/d and the Dawn Wall is like the difference between a couch to 5k plan and running a marathon in the Olympics.

What’s interesting though is that even though people have been climbing and running forever, the most elite runners are still accomplishing new world records.

After Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson spent years scouting the route and taking multiple attempts to finally climb the Dawn Wall all their “beta” helped enable Adam Ondre to climb the route in a tiny fraction of the time.

As I had been trying to learn Data Science trolling around the internet for free courses and randomly reading various stats texts it was working okay, but I have to remember that you don’t have to deduce everything from first principles.

Its so valuable to have an experienced guide to help layout the map and show you what is possible. Adam Ondre still had to do the physical work to climb in the Dawn Wall himself, but the task was immeasurably easier after the first ascent had been accomplished and documented in detail.