‘Giving fate the middle finger’: How blind climber Jesse Dufton scaled a 500-foot monolith

As he climbed up the 500-foot rockface El Matador, wedging small pieces of metal into the rock in the hope they would catch his fall, Jesse Dufton was almost entirely alone.

As he climbed up the 500-foot rockface El Matador, wedging small pieces of metal into the rock in the hope they would catch his fall, Jesse Dufton was almost entirely alone. Over his own labored breathing, panting and frustrated cursing, Dufton could hear the crackle in his ear of his wife and climbing partner, Molly Dufton, offering assurance and crucial guidance from the ground below. “I got you. Go on buddy, c’mon,” she calmly said through a headset. Calves burning, fingers pulsing, heart in his chest, up Dufton went, scrambling onto tiny handholds and jamming his legs in cracks to move up the sheer wall. Born with a degenerative eye condition called cone-rod dystrophy, Dufton is blind, able to see no more than a “bunch of flashing lights” if he were to hold his own hand in front of his face. But that’s not to say he wasn’t aware of how high he was free climbing on the imposing El Matador on the aptly named Devil’s Tower in Wyoming – the “whizzing” of birds flying underneath his feet and the gusts of wind underneath him provided telling clues, he tells CNN Sport. “On El Matador … I wouldn’t say that I was utterly terrified. Exhausted? Yes. Terrified? Not particularly,” he explains.