Snow day, high school 2009. Caleb called. “What are we doing?”
Bring your skis over, I said, and a waterski rope. I had a plan. By noon we had built a kicker of a jump on one side of a road and a landing ramp on the other. I fired up my family’s snow machine and packed out a runway. As usual, Caleb volunteered to be the guinea pig.
With Caleb in tow, I lined up the snowmobile and opened the throttle. At the last second, I swerved the machine, and all 6 feet 4 inches of Caleb hucked off the jump, cleared the gap and landed flawlessly on the other side.
A car drove by, and Caleb’s light-blue eyes lit up from under his oversized hat. A few minutes later my Subaru (not his, he insisted, “because your car is shorter”) was parked under the jump.
“Just go faster this time,” Caleb said—and cleared the roof rack.
Caleb Edward Ladue entered this world on April 18, 1992. Early on, his parents, Mary Anne and Winslow, instilled in him a deep love for the mountains and adventure. Caleb was on skis before he was 2. He and his older brother, Arlin—his greatest hero—grew up on the edge of Lake Champlain in Charlotte, Vermont, where they spent their summers on the water and their winters on the slopes.
Caleb ski raced in high school, but despite being one of the best on the team, he preferred the backcountry, where he could make his own decisions on where to turn. He played Ultimate Frisbee and in 2010 was named Vermont Ultimate Frisbee Player of the Year. In high school he also found rock climbing, in the gym at first and then at local crags.
Caleb would go on to summit El Cap and Denali; to climb alpine routes across South America from Bolivia to the Fitz Roy massif; and to earn his AMGA level two certifications in rock climbing, alpine climbing and backcountry skiing.
As with most activities he tried, Caleb made academics seem almost effortless. Despite the occasional missed school day to crag at Rumney or deep-water solo on the cliffs of Lake Champlain, and almost every powder day, he maintained straight A’s throughout high school, earning a coveted free ski pass all four years. When he graduated from Champlain Valley Union High School in 2010, he went off to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Back in Vermont over the first college vacation, he told me, “College is actually kind of hard. I mean, I had to teach myself how to take notes.” Apparently, he had breezed through high school without them.
In 2014 Caleb graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in neuroscience, and gave himself a five-year plan. He would try to make it as a climbing guide, and if that didn’t work, he’d enroll in med school. In the next three years, he reached lead guide status for the prestigious Rainier Mountain Institute (RMI) in Washington, summited Rainier 36 times, and guided clients internationally from Denali to Aconcagua to the Fitz Roy massif. Between trips, he climbed or skied in Yosemite Valley, Jackson Hole and across Colorado with his adventure and life partner, Audrey Sherman.
On October 22, Caleb Ladue took his last run. He had broken trail that day up Cerro Cortaderas(17,050 feet) near Santiago, Chile—his and a partner’s first of many ice and ski objectives in the central Andes. But when his partner felt signs of altitude sickness and the conditions worsened below the summit, the team, which included three Chilean guides whom they had befriended, decided to turn around. Caleb also led the ski descent. Near base camp, he disappeared into a crevasse.
“I’m quite familiar with missing Caleb. If I were to draw our trajectories over the last four years, our two lines would look random,” Audrey said at the celebration of Caleb’s life. “And there was—and is—so much to miss. The ease of his smile, his smelly clothes, his unwavering confidence and competitiveness, his romantic side, the bottomless appetite, his emotional support, and his love of life.
“[H]e radiated with energy and gratitude. He would let childlike yippees tumble out over simple things …. In ordinary moments, Caleb would turn to me and say, ‘I love my life. It’s just so fun.’”
Caleb wanted to do, see and experience everything he could, and to improve himself every day. He really did live his dream—he created it. More than anything, he inspired those around him to do the same. He taught us to get up and go even if the conditions sucked, to stay hungry, and never to pass up a full moon. He believed in us when often we did not believe in ourselves.
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Originally published in Rock and Ice - Climbers We Lost 2017
