An elite rock climber lost his vision, then found a way to climb blind

TAFRAOUTE, Morocco - Molly Thompson craned her neck so she could make out the man climbing the tower of red rock. Squinting into the desert sun, she tried to identify a crack he could grab on to or a ledge wide enough for his foot.

The climber, struggling to keep his grip, was her husband, Jesse Dufton. His left arm trembled from the effort. His foot probed for a more secure hold, but found nothing.

“A little bit higher there should be a foothold,” Molly said into a headset.

When Jesse extended his foot again, it missed the tiny outcropping. He returned his foot to its original position and tiptoed on three millimeters of quartzite, 200 feet above the ground. He did not look down. He did not look anywhere.

Jesse has advanced rod-cone dystrophy. Put another way: He is completely blind. And another: He is one of the world’s few elite blind rock-climbers.

Jesse, 38, is a “trad climber,” which means he ascends bare rock faces without permanent bolts. Instead, he places removable metal anchors into cracks in the mountain and attaches his rope to them. If he places those anchors poorly and falls, he could die. It is a sport in which one’s vision - the ability to spot minor fractures or grooves in the rock - is considered vital.

Molly’s words were meant to conjure the smallest nooks from the darkness so that Jesse’s hands and feet could find them.

During his climb in Morocco, bits of debris came loose under his fingers, ricocheting down the mountain. Molly could hear him struggling to catch his breath.

If he fell, she knew, it would be partly her fault.

Molly spoke again. Jesse listened on his headset.

His face was inches from the rock. He tried to visualize the location of the hold from Molly’s description.

“If you move your hand higher and to the right,” she said, and by then, Jesse was already shifting his weight.

Lifelong climbers have watched Jesse in disbelief. They have asked if his lack of eyesight makes it easier to ignore the sheer heights (it does not). Or if he can see enough to make out variations in the rock (he cannot).

It is his partnership with Molly, 40, that allows Jesse to be a world-class climber.

Jesse, an Englishman who uses a cane to navigate the London Tube, has stacked up achievements. He climbed the formidable Old Man of Hoy, the spire of rock rising off the coast of Scotland. He was the first person to climb a 300-foot route in Morocco, which he named “Eye Disappear.”

And here he was, back in Morocco’s Anti-Atlas Mountains, at a soaring block of rock in a desert inhabited by a few goatherders.

Jesse was extending his arm like a windmill, brushing his hand along the rock’s surface, feeling for something to grab.

“I think that’s the hold,” he said, and he sprang for it.

Unspoken love

There are two ways to tell the story of Jesse Dufton. One is the tale of a talented rock climber with a degenerative eye condition who learned how to climb some of the world’s toughest crags without his eyesight. Man vs. nature, man vs. his disability. Jesse knows that version, and all the ways it’s wrong.

The other story - the more complete one - is a love story.

Jesse and Molly met in college. She walked onto a bus that the university rock-climbing team had rented for a weekend trip. And there was Jesse - a tall, broad-shouldered guy with long hair and a beard that made him look older than his 18 years.

“He did look kind of old,” she said.

When they got to the crag, she watched as Jesse climbed slowly but expertly, his face perhaps a little close to the rock. Then she watched as he tripped on his way back to the car, which she also explained away.

“On uneven terrain, it’s quite easy to stumble around, so it was nothing that obvious,” she said.

What she didn’t know was that by then, Jesse had about 20 percent of his vision left. He was determined that no one - especially the pretty brunette - would notice.

It was a version of the effort he had made his whole life. Jesse was born with a condition in which the light-sensing cells of his retina gradually deteriorated. As a child, he had only a fraction of normal vision. He knew it would continue to get worse as he aged.

But before the diagnosis, his parents were taking him on climbing trips.

At age 2, he was bouldering.

By 5, he was securing his own harness and ropes.

Jesse’s vision was rarely a subject of family conversation. He went to a normal public school. He continued climbing higher and harder crags.

He did not want assistance, or to be seen as different. He had just enough sight left to find workarounds. He refused to learn braille, and after years of climbing, his hands were too calloused to make out the characters anyway.

Even once he and Molly had become friends and regular climbing partners, she didn’t realize that his vision was so limited. He rode behind her on a bicycle, albeit cautiously. He aced engineering courses that required lab work. When he read climbing guides by stuffing his face into the book, his eyes millimeters from the text, Molly thought, “Okay, so he’s nearsighted.”

Then two things happened simultaneously. Jesse and Molly began falling in love. And he lost the rest of his vision.

The love was unspoken. Instead, they talked about climbing, about ways to increase strength in their fingers and forearms, about unclimbed peaks that they could attempt.

But the sudden vision loss was impossible to hide. Jesse felt he had been plunged into total darkness. Even the dim light and shadows he had used to guide himself were gone.

Jesse was 24 and Molly was 26. He was in the first year of a PhD program. She had taken a job with the local water utility after graduating, mostly to be close to Jesse. But she would never tell him that.

They said almost nothing about their feelings for each other. Jesse didn’t say what he wanted, which was to spend the rest of his life with Molly. But he could ask her if she was up for a climb. The sport became an excuse to be together, without talking about being together. The idea of stopping after Jesse lost his vision was unthinkable.

They knew it would be much harder than before. Jesse would need to get stronger because it would take him more time to identify his routes, meaning he would need to hold each position longer.

And he would have to rely on Molly. Which he hated. He would need to hold her hand or her hiking pole when they walked to the crag. He would need her to choose his routes, to describe the rock formations, to double-check that he had the right gear clipped to his harness.

At the beginning, when Jesse still had a sliver of his vision, Molly used a laser pointer to direct him. He could make out the light dimly enough to spot holds. But that, too, was swallowed by darkness.

Some of their friends wondered aloud if they were continuing a passion that would eventually lead to his death. Even Molly had her doubts.

She had never met a blind person before. She thought of the men and women she’d seen with their canes making their way down the street or trailing a Labrador through the airport. She couldn’t help but associate their impairment with fragility.

There was no rubric for ascending high-level crags without vision. There was no one to ask for tips. What Jesse and Molly were attempting was considered impossible.

The first time he walked to a crag after his vision had gone, Jesse couldn’t tell where the rock began. He reached out, feeling around in the air. One step closer. There it was.

Finding Molly

Jesse first kissed Molly at a university Halloween party.

He had wanted to kiss her for months, maybe longer. But the right moment never presented itself. It’s not like he was going to make a move at the base of a crag, he thought, as Molly scouted her route to the top.

And then, as his vision dissipated, a logistical challenge got in the way: How would he know when to lean in if he couldn’t see her face? If he couldn’t even find her?

Molly had no idea what he was planning. He had invited her on trip after trip - including one to France with his parents - without hinting at any romantic feelings. Maybe she was imagining a connection that wasn’t there, she thought. Maybe they were just friends. She hated to think that was the case.

He had concealed his loss of vision from her and, without realizing it, he had also masked the fact of his love.

The Halloween party was at a nightclub, and Jesse could see nothing at all. There was no way to find Molly. He hated asking for help, but he made a request of his best friend.

“When you see Molly, push me in her direction.”

“Push you?” his friend responded, confused.

“Yes.”

Which is how Jesse ended up falling into Molly’s arms in a nightclub that smelled of sweat and stale beer. He was dressed as a werewolf and she was dressed as a devil. He leaned in. There was nothing. He leaned in farther. And there she was.

Conjuring the rock

During their first climbs after Jesse’s vision vanished, Molly would walk him to the base of a crag and look up. She’d consider how to describe the rock. Where should she start?

She would look at the limestone or quartz or granite riven by a glacier some millennia ago - she could begin with the hue, or the spiderweb of cracks, or the knobs and shelves and overhangs.

Molly had grown up swimming competitively, narrowly missing a spot on the British Olympic team. But climbing was the thing she loved most. She moved quickly and gracefully up the crag without dwelling on the sequence of moves, until she was far above the ground and the only thing she could hear was her own breathing.

For her to help Jesse, her relationship with the rock would need to change completely. She wanted him to understand the beauty of the thing he was climbing, the way a spire of granite reached upward or an arch soared overhead like an architectural flourish.

But those details seemed extraneous to Jesse’s goal, which was, among other things, not dying.

“There’s a practical purpose here, you know?” he would remind her.

So Molly described the route that would get him to the top, a series of handholds and footholds, a rock described so it could be climbed, not admired. She knew that milliseconds - a slightly more concise or vivid description that would allow Jesse to move faster - could prevent a fall. She knew that if he fell, people would blame her. She would blame herself.

At first, she would yell her instructions at him while he clung to the rock: “THERE’S A HOLD JUST BENEATH YOUR KNEE.”

Other climbers would turn to her menacingly, not realizing that she was directing a blind climber.

They tried another approach. Jesse would climb with his cellphone. Molly would call him and begin describing the rock. But it worked only if they had cellphone service.

Eventually, they landed on the two-way radio and wraparound headphones.

Molly speaks into the microphone in a near-whisper, constructing an image of the rock that draws on the climbing guidebook and what she can see as Jesse moves, explaining where he should reach next with his hands and his feet.

She needs to remain calm - to exude calmness - even if she worries he might fall. Her own nerves, she knows, could trigger his. Sometimes, when she can’t make out a hold, she pretends to see one, offering just enough broad guidance to keep Jesse from freezing up. Her feigned confidence conceals terror.

Perilous maneuvers

Fifty years ago, the idea of a blind person competing in almost any sport was inconceivable. There wasn’t a category for blind athletes in the Paralympics until 1976. Even then, they were only invited to play goalball, a sport specifically designed for vision-impaired athletes that uses a ball filled with bells. When Jesse was 3, in 1988, judo was added as a second sport.

In his lifetime, it’s been mountain sports where blind athletes have made some of their greatest advances. In 2001, Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind person to summit Everest. Now, paraclimbing competitions have several categories for blind athletes, depending on how much of their vision remains.

Jesse competes in the B1 category, for athletes who have no vision at all. The sport is still just a hobby for him. He’s a full-time engineer working on a fuel-cell technology. His colleagues had no idea how serious a climber he was until a documentary on one of his ascents aired in Britain. The day after it premiered, they approached him at the office with a mixture of awe and confusion.

“Are you crazy?” one colleague asked.

Molly still works for the local water utility. She and Jesse climb every evening from 7 to 10 at the local gym. They plan climbing trips for weekends and vacations. When he’s bored, Jesse does pull-ups on a wooden board that has tiny finger grips.

There are some parts of the sport that he has become startlingly good at - better than almost anyone with perfect vision. Jesse sometimes climbs with a small group of British climbers who follow behind him. The second climber gets an up-close look at how Jesse has placed his gear in the rock - and how secure it is.

“It’s remarkable how good his placement is,” said Georgina Bough, a British pediatric surgeon who is part of the climbing group. “Better than almost anyone else.”

The reason, Jesse believes, is that he has a different relationship with the rock than a sighted climber.

He is forced to pay more attention to its subtleties.

Imagining him climb doesn’t make sense until you see his hand on the rock. The way he studies the surface with the tips of his fingers, the way he can support his body weight with his pinkie in a hairline crack.

He traces the rock, looking for the outcropping or indentation Molly described. He has become used to accepting her help, the thing that once made him feel weak.

Now her voice feels like another critical tool, like a harness or a rope. He has tried to climb with other guides. It often feels disorienting, like trying to make sense of a foreign language.

Even with her help, he sometimes misses a hold that would have been obvious to a sighted climber. Instead, he improvises a series of perilous maneuvers. Watching him, Molly freezes, unable to breathe.

Reaching Jesse

It was midday in Morocco when Jesse grasped his way to a more stable position on the crag - his right arm finding a nook and then pulling his body to a tiny shelf where his feet could support him.

He could feel the sun on the back of his neck. He could hear a donkey bray somewhere beneath him. He felt a faint gust of wind pass between him and the mountain. Then Molly’s voice crackled through his headphones.

“You okay?”

She could hear him breathing. When she didn’t hear his voice for long stretches, worry crept in.

She knew that if Jesse fell, he would almost definitely be caught by the rope that was attached to the gear he inserted into the rock. He would bounce and sway and then hang until he could find another hold.

But she had seen climbers fall to their deaths. And she had made mistakes that might have cost Jesse his life.

A few months before the Morocco trip, Molly had chosen a route for Jesse that she thought was achievable. But watching him climb, she suddenly realized that she was wrong. The series of moves was too difficult for a blind climber. But it was too late. She tried to remain calm until Jesse somehow made it to the top.

She thought: “That was my fault. That was completely my fault.”

This time, looking up at the Moroccan quartzite, she saw that Jesse was once again moving confidently.

She could tell when he’d found his groove. He didn’t even wait for her descriptions.

It was as if he could predict the next move without seeing it.

He was in that zone now.

When he reached the top, it would be Molly’s turn to climb. He would fix a running rope for her from the summit so that if she slipped, his weight would keep her from free-falling, her life now in his hands.

But Molly never slips. She is an elegant climber, more agile than almost anyone else on the crag. Jesse sometimes teases her for not knowing the extent of her own ability.

“She gets scared,” he said. “She doesn’t realize how good she is.”

But it’s not just fear.

There’s a defiance, missing in her own climb, that comes from guiding Jesse.

He’s doing something assumed impossible. They both are.

A few minutes passed and Jesse swung his right leg over the top of the crag, out of Molly’s line of sight.

Then he waited for her to join him at the summit, so she could describe the view.