Vertical Limits

How Anthony Teen turned his passion for extreme big wall climbing into a business that takes on projects others say are impossible.

- Karen Tee

In landscape photographer Ansel Adams’ 1956 snap, El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National Park is depicted as a majestic monolith serenely lit by the sun at dawn. Forty-three years later, Anthony Teen and his climbing partner would be hanging off cliff face on a portaledge, 2,000 ft above the ground, splitting what was left of a pack of M&M’s and contemplating their imminent death.

An unexpected bout of melting snow had left them stranded on the granite wall after a five-day climb. They were out of food and their position was too precarious for the rescue team to reach them. As the temperature dropped, the waterfall began to freeze and they had an equal chance of contracting hypothermia or getting trapped behind a wall of ice. “What happens in this kind of situation is that when the sun comes out the next day, the ice can break up and come down in chunks as big as a refrigerator, so you’re really in God’s hands,” says Teen. “We were sitting there thinking we might not make it.”

That’s when their last few pieces of candy saved the day. “We decided we couldn’t just let fate take its course,” he says, on their resolve to get off Capitan. “On more than one occasion, M&M’s have been used to stave off imminent tears.”

The duo slowly backtracked by abseiling down the wall, sometimes hanging off the cliff on ropes “like a shoelace” before they finally reached solid ground hours later. Adventure over, Teen hopped on a flight to conquer his next mountaineering challenge in Pakistan.