Half Dome the hard way: Man with cancer teams up with renowned Santa Rosa climber for iconic Yosemite ascent (2024)

“I need you to sit down,” the doctor told Kirk Keeler, a nature photographer who grew up in Sonoma County and is now living in Nevada City. Keeler had just had his first colonoscopy and was still foggy from the anesthesia.

“We found a tumor in your colon,” Keeler recalls the doctor saying. “He just kept on talking. But I just went into a kind of a shock. All his words sounded like echoes.”

It was Dec. 30, 2021. Over the next few months the news kept getting worse: “Tumors in your liver,” doctors told him, “metastasized, Stage 4.” The words reverberated through his mind, but the gravity of the news took a while to land.

Keeler got online and learned more about Stage 4 colon cancer. The five-year survival rate is less than 10% according to the National Institutes of Health.

For most of 2022 and 2023, Keeler, youthful and a lifelong athlete, endured brutal chemotherapy regimens hoping to quash the cancer. Round after round, like a boxer, “he just took it. He stayed strong,” said his wife, Anna Keeler.

In that period, on one of the few good days between chemo treatments, Kirk hatched an idea that harked back to his years exploring Yosemite National Park and the adventures that have drawn him to the outdoors since he was a kid.

“I was feeling good and thought, wouldn’t it be cool to do Half Dome,” he recalled during a recent interview.

Soon Keeler’s heart and mind were set on climbing Yosemite’s most seductive rock wall.

Not Half Dome’s cable route that about 300 people climb daily, which would be impressive enough. No, on Friday, Keeler will rope up with renowned Santa Rosa climber Kevin Jorgeson, famed for his first ascent of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall, and climb the edge of Half Dome’s imposing face.

Finding a project and purpose

“You know how you get ideas, good ideas, and then they go away? Well, this one just wouldn’t go away. It just kind of kept nagging at me.”

That’s how Keeler, 54, who had climbed in his 20s but never on big walls like Half Dome or El Capitan, explained the quest that has propelled him since 2022.

He and Jorgeson are looking to summit 8,842-foot Half Dome via a route called Snake Dike, which is moderate as big wall lines go, rated 5.7 on a scale where the hardest roped free climbs top out at a 5.15. The climb has eight pitches, or roped segments, and Keeler has been training hard for the past two years to get himself ready.

“I lost so much fitness. Chemo just ravages the body,” he said.

He was sitting in Jorgeson’s Santa Rosa climbing gym, Session, opened just two years ago and already a prized hub for the region’s climbing community.

The chemo did not vanquish the cancer. Keeler halted the treatments last February seeking to get strong enough pursue his goal of climbing Half Dome.

“I’ve been lengthening my life with all the chemo treatments, but I’m at the point where it’s just so hard. I can only take so much of that poison,” he said, noting he had an allergic reaction during one infusion.

“I just want to have quality. I want to be at my best.”

The larger purpose around the climb started to take shape after Keeler’s oncology team referred him to a Davis-based support group called Cancer Champions and he met with Jen Miramontes, the group’s founder.

Miramontes felt “an immediate connection.” Keeler’s “honesty and willingness to share his true feelings” made a deep impression.

Keeler told Miramontes he wanted his climb to have meaning beyond his goal of reaching the top of Half Dome.

His message: If you’re 45 or older, get screened for colon cancer, “because it's showing up in younger people now. I don’t want people to have to go through what I’ve had to go through.”

An estimated 153,000 people in the United States will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer this year, according to the American Cancer Society.

Since the mid-1980s, the rate has declined by about 1% annually because more people are getting screened, the ACS site says. But in people younger than 55, rates have been increasing by 1% to 2% a year since the mid-1990s.

According to the National Cancer Institute, colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the U.S., following breast, prostate and lung cancers.

Return to Half Dome

Keeler’s diagnosis came amid a budding new life with Anna, his wife of three years. They learned he had colon cancer just seven months after their wedding.

Anna and Kirk had planned to start a family, but in the initial months after the diagnosis they had to pivot from fertility treatments to chemotherapy infusions.

Kirk has remained “remarkably positive through all of this. It’s amazing. I think there were times when that positivity was keeping him going,” Anna said. “But he wasn't necessarily tapped into the full reality of what was going on. And that was hard.”

Anna, a reading specialist who teaches elementary school students in Nevada City, backs Kirk’s decision to stop chemotherapy. Asked how she’s coping, she answered with a single word that sounded like a question: “Therapy?”

“I've just been allowing myself moments to feel the feels when I've needed to. A lot of times, especially when this first started, it would be by myself in the shower where I could just cry.”

There were times in the past two years when Kirk was so sick he thought couldn’t even get off the couch. Miramontes would encourage him: “Just walk around the house — go outside — go to the end of the street. Do something!”

From 2010 to 2019, Keeler lived in Yosemite working as a photographer. Years before, he had ascended Half Dome via the cable route, which is steep and challenging but accessible to most strong and fit hikers.

“I haven't been on top of Half Dome since my 20s. I never went up there when I lived in Yosemite because … I was there for photography,” he said.

“But climbing was a big part of my life early on, and having climbing back in my life now in my 50s … The cable route doesn’t appeal to me. I want it a little harder. I want to work for my Half Dome now.”

In recent months, the Keelers have traveled to see family on the East Coast and climbed to blustery peaks. Kirk has been riding his mountain bike like a demon and training in gyms and on outdoor rock walls.

He’s not as fit as he was before cancer, but said last Friday he’s “surprisingly feeling really good about where I'm at. I feel on track. I’m feeling ready for this.”

Anna says his “bright light” is back on.

“This is the best I’ve seen you since pre-cancer,” she told him recently.

A life spent outdoors

Kirk grew up in the idyllic hamlet of Knight’s Valley near the Sonoma-Napa county line. He lived 7 miles from Calistoga and went to school there.

He wasn’t far from the base of Mount St. Helena and rode BMX bikes on the mountain’s slopes with his buddies as a kid, he said. “My playground was the mountain.”

After graduating from Calistoga High School in 1988, Keeler attended Sonoma State University, “where I kind of dabbled here and there in various majors.”

He didn’t graduate but later went to the Santa Rosa campus of New College and earned his humanities B.A. on “how music affects social change.”

A talented songwriter, guitarist and singer, Keeler’s senior project was arranging and recording a heartfelt album, titled “From the Underground.”

During the 1990s and 2000s, Keeler lived “all over the county” — Santa Rosa, Cotati, Sebastopol, Healdsburg — working in bicycle shops and riding mountain bikes.

In the 1990s, when Keeler was in his mid-20s, he joined Vertex Climbing Center on the day it opened.

A “little lanky guy” soon showed up and started making moves more deftly than some of the best climbers in the gym. That was Jorgeson, of course. “He was a young kid, but he could do these crazy problems,” Keeler said.

They didn’t get to know each other then, but a decade ago when Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell were preparing for their legendary 19-day climb of Yosemite’s Dawn Wall on El Capitan, they met through friends, and Jorgeson would often stay at Keeler’s place in Yosemite.

“We just really hit it off,” Keeler said. “Then we just kept the connection.”

Connecting with a climbing star

An artist at heart, Keeler moved to Yosemite in 2010 to hone his photography skills and see if he could go pro.

He worked at the Ansel Adams Gallery and led photography tours. Keeler would often shoulder a backpack full of camping and photography gear and go on solo multiday jaunts into Yosemite’s backcountry to create luminous images.

If he had time, he’d pick up some beer and meet Jorgeson when he came down from a climb as Jorgeson trained for the Dawn Wall.

That was in late 2014, Keeler said. Jorgeson and Caldwell completed their pioneering El Capitan ascent in January 2015, etching their names into rock-climbing history.

Keeler said that when it came time to choose a partner for Half Dome, it was Jorgeson who he trusted most.

“That’s who came into my brain,” he said. “Kevin’s the rope shark.”

Jorgeson said he’d seen a Facebook post about Keeler’s diagnosis that “just left me speechless.” Then Keeler called him “out of the blue.”

Keeler shared his dream of climbing Half Dome to encourage people to screen for cancer.

“Let’s do it!” Jorgeson said without hesitation. “It was an immediate yes.”

Keeler’s indomitable spirit and commitment to achieving his goals, Jorgeson said, make him the kind of person capable of the climb despite his illness.

The Snake Dike route will be hard, Jorgeson said, but “the hard stuff is what makes life fun. Like, we climb because it’s hard, not in spite of it being hard. It’s the whole point.”

To reach the base of Half Dome requires an arduous hike up the park’s Mist Trail to the top of Nevada Fall then past Lost Lake to Little Yosemite Valley. Keeler and Jorgeson plan to hike in on Thursday, then climb Half Dome on Friday.

“If there’s anyone that can do it, it’s Kirk,” Jorgeson said.

“Kirk just embraces the hardship and smiles right into it,” he said. “He can't wait, and I can't wait.”

Anna Keeler will hike with friends up the cable route on Friday so she can be at the top by midday, ahead of her husband’s planned arrival.

“He asked, and I said yes,” she said. “I definitely want to be there to support him however I can.”

Cancer as a teacher

Keeler has no illusions about the rough road ahead. His care team said that after stopping chemotherapy, he could live another year, “maybe less.”

“That's a number. I take that in. I hear that. Obviously, my team at UC Davis, they're pros. So they have some measure, I guess,” he said during our interview in Santa Rosa.

“All I know is that I have you in front of me right now in this moment,” he said “And that's what I'm aiming to do, have the best moments.”

His voice broke and he seemed to try to stanch the emotion; then he let the tears flow.

Keeler has come to view cancer as a teacher. He’s become more spiritual and devoted more time to meditation.

He texted a request for this story: “Rather than saying ‘battling’ cancer, could you say ‘living with’ Stage 4 cancer? Cancer, for me, has become a friendly adversary, teaching me much about myself.”

Anna said she’s “really proud” of Kirk for “having the vision of climbing Half Dome for cancer screening. That bigger purpose has been really helpful as it’s given him something to focus on. I'm excited for him.”

She’s concerned about the risk but said she trusts his ability and skill. “He will use caution as well. He’s got a great team, and I think that’s what it really comes down to.”

With a Stage 4 diagnosis, Kirk said, “it's a little tough to be naive about what’s going to happen. I just want to live out whatever's left to the best of my ability. And this climb is a way to live to the fullest.”

Yosemite has been “an inspiration to me from early on and continues to be,” he said. “If it (the Half Dome climb) is the last big thing I do in my life, it’ll be awesome to be in the park and do the climb with the people helping or doing it with me.”

Michael Shapiro’s adventure and travel writing appears in National Geographic, Afar, Sierra, and The Explorer’s Journal. He writes about performing arts for The Press Democrat. Contact him at: www.michaelshapiro.net.