BURSTGripped reached out to Joe Evermore. The father of the family that climbs El Capitan together. In May, Joe and his two boys, Joey (7) and Sylvan (11), topped out on El Capitan. Mom (Ann) was watching from the Meadow.
Their accomplishments reach further. In August, 2025, Joe took his son, Sam, up The Matterhorn (Sam was 11 at the time). The family climb together frequently.
The Evermore’s have copped some criticism on their climbing; their logistics, their climbing support on El Capitan, Joe’s appropriation of risk. One American Magazine has posted multiple times a piece they compiled. The Evermore Family are obviously giving them mileage. Which brings about another point of contention, that Joe Evermore exploits his family for fame, that they somehow game the system. It could be said, likewise for the media.
Gripped provided Joe (and his family) some questions and we are sharing his replies with no running commentary. Joe answered. For the kids, question were answered through some videos.
We are all climbers and many of us are parents, you can think these through without being led. Our conversations wth Joe and his family have been cordial. They were delightful to work with. You can make your own mind up.
Joe, can you share with Gripped readers your early preparation for El Capitan? The mountain is never the destination. Formation is.
Every year, each of our boys over the age of five gets one mission. To be a true rite of passage, each mission has to seem really hard, something they have to work for and prepare for every day. It has to matter, require preparation, and be pursued carefully. Since we only pick one, we try to find something uniquely remarkable.
The preparation is often more valuable than the summit. Joey trained for El Cap for more than a year. He would jug a 30 foot rope five times a day, five days a week: jug up, change out his system, rappel down and repeat. At first it took an hour a day but by the end he’d be done in under 20 minutes. He also learned transitions, passing knots, lower-outs, backups and what to do when something went wrong.
We visualized the ascent before bed and talked through different challenges. We hung a portaledge from a tree in our backyard and slept in it. We took him up Lost Arrow Spire so he could experience a huge wall and we could see how he handled himself. He aced that. We hiked the Manitou Incline more times than I could count. Our boys do hanging exercises before bed, trade pull-ups for screen time, and we hit the local climbing gyms as much as we can.
I want my boys to discover early that extraordinary things are usually accomplished through a thousand very ordinary days of preparation. The success of each mission has more to do with the training than anything else.
Judgment: When they were little, my job was almost entirely to create the boundaries. As they get older, my job increasingly becomes teaching them to create their own.
Sam is becoming a real climber now. He confidently leads sport and trad, evaluates protection, thinks about weather and makes decisions where I deliberately don’t make every decision for him.
Sylvan has always been extraordinarily bold, so with him I’m sometimes teaching restraint rather than courage.
Joey is still seven. His independence looks different. It might be recognizing that something doesn’t look or feel right, checking his system and communicating what he needs.
The goal isn’t to raise fearless boys. It’s to raise men with strong character and good judgment.
Our first Matterhorn attempt is a great example. We had established a turnaround time and missed it by only five minutes. We had trained for a year, flown around the world and the weather was beautiful. We still turned around. Local guides had impressed upon us how seriously we needed to take our cutoff times, so we kept our commitment.
Turning back was hard and emotional. But we went home, trained for another year, came back and aced the mountain. We didn’t have to compromise the standard to accomplish the goal.
Meaningful Risk: Absolutely. We’ve turned back many times. There is no summit in the world worth one of my sons.
That’s one of the most important lessons mountains teach: courage isn’t always continuing upward. Sometimes it takes more courage to turn around, especially when everyone is cheering for you to keep going.
Our family has three rules for these missions:
It should be remarkable. It should require daily work. And you can’t die.
That last one sounds light hearted, but we’re serious about it.
The Climbing article: I fully understand why climbers care deeply about the distinction between leading El Cap and ascending El Cap on ropes. Of course Joey didn’t lead pitches on El Cap. He ascended approximately 3,000 vertical feet using jumars on ropes established by our climbing team over six days. I’ve learned how important it is to be precise about this. I have told every reporter that we climbed El Cap in the easiest and safest style we could devise for a child: an all-rope ascent.
Where I think the article went wrong was allowing one unhappy participant to shape the emotional picture of what happened. The picture of a father dragging terrified children up a mountain simply wasn’t true. Fortunately, we documented the entire ascent and there were several other witnesses.
The claim that Joey cried on every pitch is simply false. Joey cried about once a day. His nine year old brother Sylvan, who was on his second El Cap ascent, cried only once when dirt got in his eye.
Seven-year-olds cry. Grown men cry on El Cap. Crying is not a big deal, the boys are allowed to cry.
Joey also laughed, played, slept soundly, joked with his brother and me, and kept asking about the next pitch. He never once cried because he wanted to abandon his mission. He never asked to go down. He was committed 100 percent.
Rocco the participant quoted as the “anonymous whistleblowing pirate guide” alias “Paul” joined us at the last minute. He wasn’t even on the team. We met him at the base, where he offered to help move gear up the fixed lines. I hired him as a porter. In retrospect, bringing someone we didn’t really know onto the expedition was one of my biggest mistakes.
This guy was not cut out for wall climbing. We started struggling with him on the second day when he started swearing like a sailor around the kids. He kept using the F-word and bossing everyone around, and the smallest things would make him just fly off the handle.
And in a rage this guy almost accidently killed himself up there. At Camp Five we had three levels of portaledges and a fixed line that we used like an elevator between them. Rocco was in a full on tantrum at the time and when he went to descend he mistakenly attached his GriGri to an unsecured haul line rather than the fixed line.
And, Instead of weighting it before unclipping, something I’ve drilled into my own children…he committed his weight to it and suddenly dropped through our camp.
I dove across the ledge and grabbed the running rope with both hands. The friction burned my hands, but it was enough to slow his fall and he managed to grab a lower ledge. Had he gone past that ledge, the consequences could have been catastrophic. I thought this experience had humbled him but based on how he acted with the reporter, I guess not.
That incident scared everyone. It also reinforced something important for me: experience doesn’t excuse anyone from checking their system. Adults make mistakes too.
Rocco had very little interaction with the boys and no responsibility for their climbing systems. I gave Rocco a portaledge for $150 and he went to do another wall and took a gnarly ground fall. As far as I can tell he’s not cut out for wall climbing, and the negativity that he shared with Climbing Mag was not experienced by anyone else.
Climbing El Capitan with Joey was as good as it gets. He rose to every challenge that we faced. And we shared so many beautiful moments both in our camps and while jugging along.
I connected the reporter with other members of our team who could give their perspectives, but they weren’t interviewed. The Climbing article was written to make it seem like we were doing something shady up there, like we were hiding something that they needed to expose.
We thought it was fun that there was so much conspiracy around Joey’s ascent. Based on the comments from that post it turns out that this might have been the most talked about climbing ascent of the year. People can make judgments but I work to make sound decisions. It’s my family up there.
Why jugging? Having a six or seven year old lead El Cap would be absurd. Jugging allowed Joey to undertake something physically and mentally enormous while I could keep him continuously bolted to the wall.
And don’t confuse jugging 3,000 feet with being hauled up a mountain. Joey moved himself upward pitch after pitch, day after day, carrying his own backpack. He was never lifted up the wall.
He also had jobs at camp. He made every Mountain House meal, helped me set up camp and worked like everyone else.
The lesson wasn’t, Look what a great rock climber I am. The lesson was, I can do something that seems impossible. I can prepare for a year. I can be afraid and still function. I can depend on my brothers. And I can finish something enormous.
Jugging is a discipline within climbing. It’s certainly not as rad as free climbing, but for a seven year old, 3,000 feet of it is right at the edge of impossible. Plus, it comes with some amazing camping.
And remember: his nine-year-old brother volunteered to come back for his second El Cap ascent. I think that says something about what the experience actually felt like to the boys.
The idea that you can simply drag a child up El Cap isn’t realistic. They have to choose to keep moving upward.
Fear: This may be the most important distinction we’re trying to teach.
The other day Joey told a reporter, “Everyone who has courage is also afraid, you know.” That’s actually pretty profound. Why would you need courage if you weren’t afraid?
Sometimes fear says, “Pay attention. Something is wrong or unsafe.” We must listen to that. I’m not trying to put my children into mortal danger, and on a wall we build systems around keeping them attached at all times.
Other times fear says, “I’m tired. I’m uncomfortable. I don’t know if I can do this.” That’s where resilience can be formed.
If one of my boys is scared, my first question isn’t, “How do I make him stop crying?” It is,
“What is the fear telling us?”
I never want them to learn to ignore fear. I want them to learn to understand it.
What differences did you notice in the climbing community in the Alps versus Yosemite?
Yes, there are many. dramatically.
In the Alps, I felt like people understood what we were doing almost instinctively. There is a long tradition there of parents, guides and mentors bringing younger people into the mountains. Sam was treated with tremendous respect, but people were also very serious about conditions, competence and preparation.
Around El Cap, particularly online, the conversation became much more focused on whether the word “climb” was deserved, whether jugging counted and whether a child should be there at all.
Some of that criticism comes from something I actually respect about climbing culture: climbers care deeply about style and honesty.
I don’t want to fight that. I’ve learned from it. I want to be precise about how my boys ascended these mountains while also saying that what they accomplished was real.
Promotion: This is a criticism worth taking seriously. The boys aren’t a brand to me. They’re my sons.
If all the cameras disappeared tomorrow, we’d still go climbing. Long before anyone cared about our story, we were climbing together because these have become some of the richest days of our lives.
But we do share our adventures. Partly because they’re remarkable stories, and partly because I think our culture desperately needs a conversation about fathers intentionally forming their children.
I hope to inspire other dads off the couch and into the outback with their boys.
If our story makes a dad put his phone away, grab his son or daughter and go pursue something difficult together, sharing it was worth it.
Criticism: Here’s the the thing: if the climbing community can’t learn to celebrate one another, and can’t even find it in themselves to encourage a kindergartner who does something truly remarkable, what does it say about [the climbing community] us?
Attention isn’t something climbers are owed. Communities earn attention when they produce stories worth celebrating and have the generosity to celebrate them.
There are posts about people doing unbelievable athletic achievements that get no engagement. It’s sad that so many of our audience don’t celebrate one another and instead prefer the toxic environment that they create.
Fatherhood: I’m winning whenever my boys genuinely want to be together.
I’m still learning when to push and when to back off. I’m naturally an adventurer. Sometimes Ann sees danger or emotional exhaustion before I do, and I’ve learned that listening to her makes me a better father.
The moments that matter most aren’t actually the summits. They’re the conversations on the edge.
You spend hours tied to your son on a mountain and eventually you talk about fear, girls, God, courage, failure and what kind of man he wants to become.
Someday my boys won’t need me on the other end of the rope. That’s the point.
How much say do they have? A lot.
There’s an important difference between, I don’t want to do this anymore and patenting requires knowing your child well enough to hear the difference.
The boys have significant input in their missions. In fact, Joey’s original mission wasn’t El Cap. It evolved as his ability and ambition grew.
Climbing is a family sport in our home. It’s just part of life. It’s how we teach our boys so many things.
What I hope they carry into adulthood isn’t a list of summits. It’s the knowledge that hard things don’t have to scare them away, preparation matters, family shows up, and they’re capable of far more than they think.
Note: Joey was on the girl team for the baby reveal and that’s why he’s always wearing pink bandanas. He was so excited to hear that he’s getting a sister that he almost dumped our ledge.
The post “And You Can’t Die”: Father of Kids Who Climb El Capitan Responds to Critics appeared first on Gripped Magazine.