He Fell Off A Hundred-Foot Cliff And Later Climbed El Capitan

A hundred-foot fall at 12,500 feet. A freezing night without shelter. Storms, thin air, and two helicopters fighting for lift. That’s where Mark Wellman's story begins—and somehow not where it ends. We sat down with Mark at the Abilities Expo in Dallas to trace the path from a Sierra accident in 1982 to an ascent of El Capitan seven years later built on 7,000 pull-ups, custom gear, and a mindset that refuses to stall.

Mark walks us through the mechanics of survival and the reality of rehab—seven months in hospital back then versus the compressed timelines many face today. He shares how PNF-based therapy rebuilt confidence, how depression tried to fill the gaps when therapy stopped, and why adaptive sports like wheelchair tennis and swimming became a lifeline. From there, we step into Yosemite: ranger days in the Valley, the culture of big walls, and the nuts-and-cams vocabulary of modern climbing. Mark breaks down aid systems, fall factors, dynamic ropes, and the dreaded zipper effect with the clarity of a coach who’s been on the sharp end and lived to translate it.

The ingenuity is as compelling as the grit. With his late partner Mike Corbett, Mark stitched “rock chaps” from canvas and leather to protect insensate skin during multi-day ascents. He explains chest-mounted ascenders and the way peregrine falcons sound like jets when the canyon turns into an echo chamber. We also get candid about the disability community: the balance between hope and acceptance, the legacy of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, and why community programs and expos matter for turning curiosity into action.

If resilience had a blueprint, this conversation sketches it—practical, honest, and grounded in systems you can use. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs fuel for a hard climb, and leave a review with the one challenge you’re ready to face next.

Transcript

Cold Night On The Mountain

SPEAKER_02 0:00

How did you get like rescued?

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Well, my partner had to hike out the 20 miles all night and then tell the forest service the bad news. Oh, he had to leave me, yeah, absolutely. Uh yeah, I was petrified.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

What's up, guys? It's Squadfather and Life 2 Max. And we're back at you again at the Ability Soxpo, because it's done in Dallas. Please enjoy this Life 2 Max PK.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Just a couple of cards not trying to get back. A couple of teams not trying to go back. Don't live it twice.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Welcome back to another episode of Life to the Hex Podcast. This will be my final episode of day one at the Apellies Expo in Dallas, Texas. And of course, I say it's the best for last. Today I have Mark Weldon. Mark Weldon has a terrific story. I can't wait for you guys to hear it. Um Mark, say hi to the people.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Hey people, how are you doing out there?

SPEAKER_02 1:10

Alright, so tell me your story, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

So, man, 43 years ago, I was uh able-bodied climber climbing uh seven gables, and it's one of the many 13,000-foot peaks in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. And uh we had made the climb. We actually we had to hike in 15 miles into the backcountry and set up a base camp at 10,000 feet. Then we climbed a 13,000 foot peak. You know, it was scrambling, but there were some technical parts of the climb too. Made it to the summit kind of late in the afternoon.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Is this with cables?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

So this is no, we we we had some climbing ropes and protections, okay, but we mainly you're you're scrambling up a steep, you know, like a 45 degree angle scree field. So we get to the top and we decided to go down the backside, which is a little easier, less steep, and I slipped on some scree and rolled off a hundred foot cliff.

SPEAKER_03 2:17

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

At 13, well, the the seven gables is thirteen thousand approximately, so I fell at like twelve five. So 500 feet from the top.

SPEAKER_02 2:31

And uh how did you get like rescued?

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Well, my partner had to hike out the 20 miles all night and then tell the Forest Service the bad news. Yeah, he had to leave me, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 2:45

Were you scared?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Uh yeah, I was petrified.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

I can't imagine.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

You know, paralyzed from the the waist down, T11, T12. You know, I didn't know at the time that that what even a spinal cord injury was, right? I just knew I had numbness in my legs and I was cut up from uh rolling down the the cliff surface.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

And uh what is so what did that that that shock factor feel like when like it just completely like disconnected, like your waist down.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Uh, you know, the night was the longest night of my life. And not having Bivy gear, a sleeping bag, it was even in at August 19th, 1982, you get freezing temperatures at that elevation, and I really couldn't wait until uh the sun came up. And uh, you know, when the rays would finally hit you and warm up. And then, you know, got into the afternoon and I started going, Well, where I'm gonna hear some helicopters or something, hopefully. Because I knew that's what had how they were gonna get me off. And it turned out to be a CHP, California Highway Patrol helicopter, that flew in and they found me. So I heard this coming up the canyon and uh, you know, made eye contact with the the pilot, and then they just flew away. And a half hour later, a second helicopter came in from LaMore Navy Base, uh, military. So, you know, you were part of the military trying to become a ranger, you're telling me. And uh it was uh the best sound of my life. They lowered uh a medic, several medics down, a Stokes litter, got me back up into the ship, and then uh, you know, bad weather came in. And those helicopters they don't fly well at that elevation. It was a Huey, it was a double engine, and at 13,000 feet, the the pilot actually contacted me and uh several years ago and said it was a very difficult hairball kind of rescue. He had to bring the rotors in several feet from the cliff surface, and uh thunder bumpers were coming in with lightning. So they had to actually leave the two medics up with me, and they landed the ship back down into uh a meadow, and they they pulled some of the seats out and made it lighter. And when the storm in the evening, the storm kind of subsides a little bit, and they got back up there, got us off, and uh we ended up actually not having enough fuel, so they had to do an emergency landing, and that CHP helicopter came, picked me up, and took me down to uh a trauma center in Fresno, California.

SPEAKER_02 5:41

What year was this?

SPEAKER_01 5:43

1982. Jeez, I was 22 years old.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

That is god, that was probably the worst feeling. 22. I didn't think I mean similar. I was 20 when I got in my car accident. So I mean, like similar, like I I felt like I lost my 20s. What was it? Like like the and like the 80s, it's like a time to like dance and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

So when your uh your uh when your your accident happened, what year?

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Uh 2016.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

2016, yeah, there you go.

Hospital Stays Then And Now

SPEAKER_02 6:15

Almost 10 years, man. Tw uh I was uh I I was finishing up at base and I brought my friend with for the first time. First time I ever brought a friend with and uh because I usually drive alone. Drove halfway and I switched seats, uh sleep came in, wake me up when we get to Chicago, and I woke up three days later in the hospital. Wow, wow, paralyzed. It's uh it's a crazy feeling.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:50

So what was um 82?

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Check this out. I'm thinking, yeah, as we're talking here, I'm thinking I got hurt in 1982, you got hurt in 2016, you said so. I I was in the hospital. My hospitalization from trauma surgery to being on a striker frame, they rotated you uh to going into recovery and into rehab was a period of seven months. And now people are re you know, I I met a guy today that was basically in the hospital for about a month.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

So we actually have a similarity. I was in the hospital for a year, right, right. Yeah, that's it's tough.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

But now a lot of quads. Well, of course, you're military, so you went through the VA system, correct?

SPEAKER_02 7:42

No, I actually stayed at Rehabilitation Institute Chicago in uh in Chicago, Illinois. That's where I'm from.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

On the lake, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:52

On the lake. It was amazing, yes.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Well, it wasn't that's well, that's a famous rehab, man, you know.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

I mean, that's where Christopher Reeds went.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

And Christopher Reed's on the other side of the booth of us, too.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

Yeah, they they said they want to do a collab a collaboration with me. I'm super excited about that. But uh let's let's get back to your stream. We're all over the place. Uh so yeah, so was rehab rehab like what was it, pretty strenuous?

Rehab Grind And Adaptive Sports

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Yeah, the rehab was uh Kaiser Vallejo was known for something called P and F. And it's sort of like this isolated kind of movement of stretching. So a lot of people that get strokes and things can actually, you know, get a lot of return and end up walking again with a limp or whatever the problem is. So they were kind of known for that, and uh I did a lot of, I think, I think I did like five or six hours of PT a day, you know, and and of course OT, occupational therapy. And then when I got out of there, uh finally, you know, I I was at home, and really I kind of kind of the depression of what had happened to me was starting to set in. And uh God, I I got, you know, luckily I I went to Deanza College. They had a wheelchair tennis team and swimming and weightlifting, so I got involved more in uh adaptive sports in the beginning of tennis, and a beginning of some of these adaptive sports, and uh then I I went to another junior college and got a uh park management certificate and became a ranger in Yosemite National Park.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

Very similar rangers.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Yeah, the ranger in Yosemite. So got a job there, and then uh, of course, was in the Mecca of big wall climbing, uh Yosemite Valley, and uh El Capitan is one of the features, half foam.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

That's Yosemite Falls. That's one of the hardest mountains to climb in, like a flat.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

It's a sheer cliff, you know. It's it's the largest unbroken granite cliff in North America, El Cap.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

El Cap, yeah. Uh there's I watched a whole documentary on a guy named Alex something. Alex Honnell. Yeah, that dude's crazy. Who the hell would climb? El Capitan without with without like a free flight, a free climb. What's it called?

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Uh free solo. Free solo. Free solo. So there's different ways of climbing. You can aid climb when you put in a piece of protection. In the old days, we actually use pitons. It's a spike you you you pound into the into the crack. Nowadays they tend to be a cleaner type climbing where you jam something called a nut or a a friend. A friend is like a camming device, it opens up in a crack.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

So you place this gear and you you're free climbing is you're going above your protection. So let's say you climb, you know, you put in a piece of protection into the rock, yeah, and you climb up five feet above it. If you take a fall, how far are you gonna fall? Ten feet. So you're gonna be five feet above that protection. If you fall, you're gonna fall five feet below. So that's a 10-foot fall.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Aren't you still gonna get hurt? Like, probably like in your waist.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Usually you don't. You have that climbing harness on. The rope has a little elasticity to it. Okay. It's called a dynamic rope. Okay. So the rope stretches. So the worst case scenario is let's say you put in 20 pieces of pro, and you take that fall, and all of a sudden you start popping that pro as you go down. That's called the zipper effect. And you don't want that to happen. That's how you that's how you can get hurt. You know, the bigger the fall, the more the hurt. Have you uh have you ever fell besides like the you know, uh nowadays I'm doing aid climbing, so I would if if I was climbing El Capitan, and and you know, now I'm you know, I climbed El Capitan back in 1989, I was 29 years old, and uh took us eight days.

From Ranger Life To Yosemite Big Walls

SPEAKER_02 12:26

Wait, wait, you you climbed El Capitan as a paraplegic.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Yeah. Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So so basically uh you take a rope ascending device that's a someone that repels into a into a cave needs to go back up the rope out of the cave, and they use rope ascenders. And ascenders, they they attach onto the rope and you push them up with your hand, then you use your feet. You have uh a piece of nylon webbing called a you put your feet into them, so you weight that piece of protection and it locks off onto the rope. So my legs don't work, so I'm I couldn't do that. So I had a second ascender on a chest harness. So when I do a pull-up, the second ascender on the chest harness locks the rope off, and that if you push the ascender up, if you don't have tension on it, you can just push it up. So I push it up and then do another pull-up that locks off here. Yeah, you go up a rope doing pull-up after pull-up. So when I climbed El Cap, I did 7,000 pull-ups in eight days.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

So like I I I was curious, like, with the feet, like here's your legs, like who were they dangling?

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Or like so I developed something called rock chaps. And the rock chaps, we made the first pair actually out of canvas and leather, and my climbing partner who now passed away, Mike Corbett. He passed away uh a couple years ago from either a massive heart attack or stroke, I don't know. I mean, a good way to go, but he was 68 years old, pretty young. Miss him dearly. But he went down to a uh a place that sells leather and canvas in Fresno, California, where the helicopter flew down and I went to the hospital in Fresno, kind of ironic. But uh he came back up with these materials. We used a speedy stitcher and we stitched these chaps. You know, if you imagine what a cowboy wear, that you know, cowboy chaps, that was kind of what these were looked like that. They strapped around my legs and we called them rock chaps because uh they reminded us of what a cowboy wears. And that as I'm dragging myself up, you need to protect your skin and areas that you don't feel. Yeah, you can't get a sore on you, right? You know, that could turn into a huge nightmare.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

So it's like do you have to like bring your do you have to like grab your arm and like put the the leg above like like when you're climbing? So like are you pulling your other leg up and then your other leg?

How Adaptive Climbing Works

SPEAKER_01 15:15

No, your your legs just dangle below you. Oh, okay. And they're and they have and they have these rock chaps on. The rock chaps, okay. And then you're you're doing a pull-up. I should have brought this ascender with me because I I developed the pull-up bar. I actually sell them for other adaptive climbers. And uh for aid climbing. So a lot of adaptive climbing now with with somebody that's a paraplegic that has you know a strong upper body that's pretty fit, they might do free climbing or top roping. So they have a rope on them and they're just using their upper body strength to do something called campusing, like on a c on an artificial climbing wall. Like, and we have one of those here today at the uh Abilities Expo where we're doing this telecast with you, or the podcast, excuse me. And uh, you can try adaptive climbing right here. If you have a disability, we can facilitate that dream.

SPEAKER_02 16:17

Yeah, I've seen the the rock climbing wall. I always see it in uh at the Chicago uh million section. But like I think it's crazy that you said uh, yeah, I got hurt uh in 82, but fuck it, I'm climbing it in 89.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Yeah, in 1989, I was uh so I got hurt when I was 22. I was 29 years old. Yeah, we spent eight days, 250 pounds of gear, 100 pounds of water. Uh you sleep on a hammock that you attach to the rock, and uh it has a rigid frame, so that's kind of like your bed, your bunk.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

And uh you're crazy, man. Like what made you think about doing that? How do you think?

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Well, you know, I like hanging it out there. It's just you know, it's not for everybody, uh, but it's you're in a in an area where gravity is your enemy.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

And you're up there, views of the valley, you you're you're seeing things that the average visitor that comes to Yosemite doesn't get to experience. And there's wildlife up there. I've seen a squirrel jump out of a crack that was a thousand, we were a thousand feet above the deck, and the squirrel took the plunge of death down the the rock face. Or or we're up there with an endangered species, uh uh paragon falcon. And they're like jet jets up there because they're the they the air goes over their wings, and you hear this and it's it kind of echoes on the side of the wall. Yeah, and one of the coolest things on on L Cap at night is laying on your back on a portal edge, and you see the earth. So you have you know, L Cap is this huge plane up in the air, and you feel the earth actually moving in that plane as you're trying to sleep at night. If so you're you're tripping out on that.

SPEAKER_02 18:26

That's gnarly, man. Hey, dude, I I wish I could have you on a little longer. Maybe we could do a full uh episode uh at my studio in Chicago. I don't know, it's up to you. Uh but uh it's been great.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

Well, we'll be at all the abilities expo shows. We'll be there all of them uh next year. We'll be in Chicago for sure. Love to come by the studio. We could do uh, you know, talk about uh lighting the per the Paralympic torch in Atlanta, skiing across the Sierra with my arms.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

You lit the Paralympics horse?

SPEAKER_01 19:02

I did.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

Wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Muhammad Ali lit the uh the big show, the Olympics and the Paralympics. And Christopher Reeve, speaking of him, we talked about him earlier. He was uh the speaker, he was so fresh though, dude. It was kind of not the the message that he was he was saying was he was gonna walk again, and I you know I'm gonna come back from this because he had just gotten out of rehab, right? He hadn't really uh yeah, I don't, you know, you don't accept anything, but at some point you gotta say this is how it is.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

We're like the same people, so like I I don't Dabtal, like you know, depression and uh uh anger, all that stuff. Like I refuse to accept this. Refuse. Like I'll I can tolerate it. That's the word.

Rock Chaps, Gear, And 7,000 Pull-Ups

SPEAKER_01 19:56

So it's dab to but his message when he was giving his message to the the sports community in the Paralympics were people that were born with their disability, right? They don't want to hear about walking again. This is this is how it is, and uh it was it was a you know, he was a famous guy, but he hadn't he hadn't paid his dues in the community yet because he was so fresh. He's fresh made you know but but you think about you know the Christopher and Dana Reed Foundation, what they've done, it's remarkable, man.

SPEAKER_02 20:38

You know, oh I I I hope I pray and hope that they want to do a collaboration with me. I I spoke to one of the there you go. It would be amazing.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Uh you need the sponsors, man. You always gotta have the sponsors going for the show to keep the show alive, man. That's how it is.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Definitely all right. Well, maybe one day I'll climb L Cap with you. That's it, man.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Ciao, brother. We'll see you the next time.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

Yeah. Uh is there anything you would like to say to the people out there?

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Hey, never give up. Always, always, always put it out there. Follow your dreams, love life. It's a wonderful thing.

SPEAKER_02 21:19

If you enjoy this content, please like, comment, and subscribe. That is always take a breath from me. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

Never really trippin', try my best to stay focused. Try to keep it cool while you lame to be focused.