Rock Climbers Abducted | Over the Edge with Climber and Author Greg Child | 5
35:32 Share

From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds.

Over the last four episodes, we've told the story of four young climbers who journeyed across the world to ascend the granite walls of Kyrgyzstan's Karasu Valley. Early one morning, while camping on a rock face, the group awoke to gunfire and were taken hostage by rebel insurgents. Six days later, fearing for their lives, they escaped their captors and climbed to safety.

Today, I'm speaking with mountaineer and author Greg Child. Greg has reached the summit of K2 and Everest. His writing has appeared in Outside, National Geographic, and Climbing magazines. For his book, Over the Edge, Greg interviewed all four of the abducted climbers. In 2001, he returned to Kyrgyzstan with two of them to face one of the men who held them captive. The man was serving a life sentence in prison.

Greg Child, welcome to Against the Odds. Hello, and thanks for having me. I want to talk about the journey of these four climbers you so vividly captured in your book. But first, I'm curious how you discovered your love for climbing.

I started climbing as a teenager. I grew up in Australia. It's not a place with any mountains in it, but there's lots and lots of cliffs and rocks. And I saw some climbers in action around Sydney. I just immediately thought, oh, I want to try that. That was back in the early 70s. There wasn't much in the way of a climbing scene at all back then. In the late 70s, I found myself in Yosemite Valley. The biggest cliffs that you can climb are really there.

And it was then and is now an incredibly good place to go as a climber. Can you take us back to one of those early summits or experiences you had on a rock face? Is there one that stands out? There's a million, really. Yeah, I bet. But climbing K2 in 1990 was maybe the peak of my career as a mountain climber.

You know, K2 is the second highest mountain in the world. There's no one who's ever climbed K2 said it was a piece of cake, that's for sure. It's really a mountain that takes everything you got. On top, we were watching a storm form around us and the clouds came in and it became a whiteout on the summit and we descended in a storm. How did it feel to be out there in the elements when you had this huge storm coming down at you? You feel very small when that's happening.

The odds of things going wrong are high. The cold, the weather, the wind. The winds can be just jet stream type winds up there. And if you're caught in those, you will not survive. You'll literally be blown off the mountain. And we were coming down from the summit when the whole weather story just went to hell.

You know, we were not sure that we'd make it out alive, actually. You kind of carry this risk factor in your head all the time when you're climbing. You don't want to die, but you have to be kind of prepared to get into hot water. It's mental gymnastics as much as physical gymnastics.

I can relate to that, a little tiny touch, having gone to North Korea on my own and just kind of having to accept my fate in a way. And I can't imagine climbing a mountain like K2. That was a big goal to me. I went to K2 three times before I climbed it. Once the goal had been reached, it was like, oh, now what? Of course, there's a million things you can do in climbing. And I just found more, more things I wanted to do, more challenges.

So how did you make that transition from climbing to then writing about climbing? I always wanted to be a writer ever since, you know, high school. The climbing experiences I had just give you something to write about. You know, it's that whole adventure journalism kind of world. A lot of it's to do with the people you're with. Over the many years I've been climbing, I've climbed and met really interesting people.

In our fast-paced, screen-filled world, it can be all too easy to lose that sense of imagination and wonder. If you're looking for new ways to ignite your creativity and open your mind to fresh perspectives, then let Audible be your guide. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, or any genre you love,

you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, and new ways of thinking. There's more to imagine when you listen. Plus, as an Audible member, you'll get one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. If you're into mythology, then I recommend the title Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. He's an amazing storyteller that narrates this unique version of the Norse myths.

Listen along. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash the odds or text the odds to 500-500. That's audible.com slash the odds or text the odds to 500-500. Against the Odds is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive?

Drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average, and auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Multitask right now. Quote today at Progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations.

When did you first hear about the abduction of Tommy, Beth, Jason and John? Well, people started to see the news of it after it was all over. Because while it was going on, they were running around in the middle of nowhere and no one knew what was going on.

And all these names were familiar to me, and I'd met some of them through the various connections we all had in the climbing world. You know, just the initial story was kidnapped by terrorists, running around the mountains, people shooting at them. It sounded like another one of these crazy adventure stories. I thought maybe I should give a shot at seeing if I could get a hold of this story. And I made some phone calls while these guys were still in Kyrgyzstan and got a hold of them.

One thing led to another. I ended up writing a magazine article for Outside Magazine about that. And then a book came out of that.

Wow. And how did you know where to find them in Kyrgyzstan? There's only a few places that travelers would be staying. And I called around until I found the hotel they were at. And lo and behold, I did talk to Jason and he was very kind of just brimming with the chaos and excitement and I guess terror of what he just experienced.

And he was quite willing to talk for quite a while on the phone. I actually called him up just to really see how he was doing and see if he'd later on sit down and talk to me for a story. And he spilled out the story practically right then in my ear as I was on the phone. What was his mental state like at the time? I imagine the experience was still pretty raw. The experience was very raw.

But he was very clear-headed. And as time went on and I got access to speak and meet all of them, you know, I found they each had a different way of reacting to what had just happened to them. Tommy was really, I'd say, scarred by it. Beth was a bit the same. John Dickey was pretty eloquent himself. But it was a brutal experience that they went through and hard on them all.

So Greg, you climbed in Kyrgyzstan in the Karasu Valley in 1995, just five years before the abduction. Can you describe the region for our listeners? What makes it such a magical place to climb? Well, in 1995, when I was there, it was an idyllic place. There was no sense that any bad thing could happen to you.

It's a series of valleys that look a bit like Yosemite Valley. A river runs through this beautiful green meadowed valley. Giant cliffs flank the valley. Exactly what climbers are looking for. It's granite. It's good granite. The walls are a couple thousand, 3,000 feet or more. And just a few shepherds with sheep and yaks and things like that live up there.

There was nothing in 1995 to hint that there was unrest anywhere. You know, don't forget that 1995 and even when Beth and Tommy and Jason and John were there, 9-11 had not happened. It was a very peaceful place. And we just climbed. We just enjoyed the beauty of the landscape. And it was idyllic.

But the Karasu Valley is also pretty remote. At least at the time, there weren't a lot of maps. And there must have been an element of going into the unknown, right? Exploring, that's definitely part of it. Like you might want to climb a cliff or a mountain, but you have to find out how to get there. We didn't have access to maps very easily. In the case of where we went, we rented a gigantic MiG helicopter,

And we all climbed into it with all of our gear. And in two hours from one city, Uzbekistan, we ended up in the mountains. The post-Soviet world was that there were these giant military helicopters sitting around and you pay the right guy the right amount of money and you're on a helicopter.

At the time, the four climbers were all pretty young. Beth Rodden was 20, and at 25, John Dickey was the oldest. What were your impressions of them at the time? Where were they at in their lives and climbing careers? Well, they were very young, that's for sure. Their climbing careers were the center point of their lives. They were all really into climbing and the climbing lifestyle.

In the case of Tommy and Beth, they were absolutely fanatical about climbing. They were very good at it and they loved it. Tommy has gone on, unstoppable, to become one of the most prolific free climbers in the world. He's climbed numerous routes all free on things like El Capitan and every other big rock face ever.

you can think of. Dawn Wall, yeah. Yeah. He's famous for the Dawn Wall. It's kind of like the thing in his life that put him on the map, if you don't consider being kidnapped in Kyrgyzstan the thing that put him on the map. But climbing is everything and probably still is to most of these guys.

There was that criticism in the media that the group was naive to go off climbing in that part of the world at the time. What's your take on that? With being young and focused on climbing the way they were, would I say they were naive? Of course. I was naive at 20. You weren't real. A lot of people would say you're naive to go climbing in the first place. You're sort of foolish or something.

The criticism consisted that at the time that they went, there were bulletins from the State Department outlining some strife from sort of unspecified insurgent activities going on in remote parts of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan.

Now, I would say that almost nobody ever looks at the State Department bulletins about international travel. You might now, but I didn't actually even know there was such a thing to look at. There's some validity to criticism about this sort of stuff, but at the same time, you can say that the world was a much more innocent place before 9-11. We were all a lot more trusting of the world in general.

Don't forget that the valleys that we're talking about in Kyrgyzstan, there was a long history of climbers, including my own group of climbers that went there in 1995. We only had good things to say about the place. They hadn't had any experience of an insurgent army crossing over the mountain range and flooding into the valleys and turning it into a living hell. It just hadn't ever happened.

So even before the abduction, the book describes some early warning signs that this could be a dangerous place to be. In talking with the group, how concerned were they? And were there any thoughts of turning back? Well, in the days before they were kidnapped, they'd had some mysterious encounters with what turned out to be the insurgents, some of the very same people that took them captive. And they didn't understand what was going on.

these insurgents were sort of casing the place out. What they did not know was that the Kyrgyz military soldiers, some of whom they had met previously, a few days after they met them, they were ambushed and many of them were murdered by this insurgent band. You could call these things warning signs. They were filling them with a slight amount of dread, but they didn't know what to expect and they ended up being up on the climb.

In some ways, to them, the safest place to be was up on the big cliffs. Yeah. Did they describe to you a specific moment when it all became real to them, that they had become hostages and were now in a fight for their lives? Initially, they are sleeping in portal edges several hundred feet up a cliff, and they hear the crack of bullets. And I don't think they really understood what was going on. Again, they didn't know that these people were

were killers, had a political military motive in mind and that they were going to be used as human shields and perhaps ransom. The phrase deer in the headlights kind of comes up in my mind. They were young, they didn't understand what was happening and what ticked them off to understand the peril they were in when they all came down after being shot at and saw these heavily armed guys dressed in camo looking pretty rough

They realized that they were now captives, that they were hostages. And certainly within a couple of days of this starting, they were surrounded by a running battle as the Kyrgyz soldiers and the insurgents were shooting it out with them in the middle of it. I can't imagine the fear they must have been going through. Just terrifying. Yeah.

So we've talked a bit about the climbers, and I'm wondering what you can tell us about their captors. Who were these men? The guys who took them captive, they were members of something that still exists. It's called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Its origins are they have a beef with the leadership in Uzbekistan. The beef is that Muslims persecuted by that government. So they've taken to arms,

At the time, they were training and being equipped out of Afghanistan. They were in close alliance with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda movement.

They traveled across mountain ranges from Afghanistan and through Tajikistan into Kyrgyzstan. And their intention was to cross Kyrgyzstan and get to Uzbekistan and raise hell in Uzbekistan, a jihad. But these guys were kind of like commandos, really. They were well-trained and well-armed.

and very brutal. They ambushed and killed numerous Kyrgyz soldiers who were just not expecting anything like this to happen. They were unaware that their borders had been infiltrated. These guys were serious, serious bad people.

Some of these insurgents were kids themselves. Abdul, one of the climbers' captors, was 19. I'm curious, what was your reaction to learning that detail? You look at the recruiting process for people who are recruited for a jihad. They have a gripe and they take arms up to fight it. It's nearly always young men. They're recruited from circumstances that are pretty unglamorous. They're usually poor, rural men.

And that's how they're recruited. They're just offered a mission of glory, a mission that rings true to their religious beliefs. They're maybe offered money and excitement. These are folks that come from dismal cities and poor villages, and they take that bait. These guys were very young. I think some of them may have been like 16 years old actually.

When you're hiring, time is of the essence. That's why more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide use Indeed to find exceptional talent fast. Indeed's powerful matching engine works quickly. So quickly that, according to Indeed data worldwide, every minute 23 hires are made on Indeed.

But it doesn't stop there, because Indeed also helps you hire better. 93% of employers agree Indeed delivers the highest quality matches compared to other job sites, according to a recent Indeed survey. That's because their matching engine is always learning from your preference. So the more you use Indeed, the better it gets.

So let Indeed be your go-to for making great hires quickly and easily. And listeners of the show, get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash the odds. Just go to Indeed.com slash the odds right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash the odds. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed.

These days, it feels like we're all just on the hunt for ways to optimize our health and feel our absolute best. The only problem is, with all these supplements out there, it can be really tough to know which ones are actually worth your time and money. That's where today's sponsor Symbiotica comes in. Symbiotica is a premium supplement brand that's raising the bar when it comes to purity, potency, and efficacy. Their supplements are formulated with high-quality ingredients. That's why their formulas don't have any seed oils, preservatives,

toxins, artificial additives, or natural flavors. Plus, while most supplements can taste chalky or sulfuric, Symbiotica's supplements have amazing flavors like citrus lime, vanilla chai, or wild berry. I've been loving the magnesium supplement from Symbiotica. Being low in magnesium, I've made it a priority lately to take it consistently. I love how I can take it on the go and ensure I'm never missing a dose. Feel more energized, alert, and balanced with high-quality supplements that work.

Head over to Symbiotica.com and use code ODDS for 20% off and free shipping on your subscription order. There was another hostage, a Kyrgyz soldier named Turat. At one point during a firefight with the Kyrgyz army, the rebels execute him.

Did that moment change the climbers' outlook on their predicament? That is probably the most horrible part of the story. He was one of a group that had been, his other companions had been killed by the insurgents during a battle between the Kyrgyz military and the insurgents.

They realized it just wasn't in their interest to keep Turat alive anymore, and they summarily executed him in front of the kids. I call them kids. They're only 20-something, right? But they're all grown up now. But in front of these young Americans, they witnessed this Kyrgyz soldier taken away, and he didn't come back. He was shot around the back of a boulder.

I think that for each of them, they understood the situation they were in finally was very clear to them. Why wouldn't they think that that fate would come to them as well? It was just probably such a degree of terror that maybe they couldn't even actually register it because that sort of terror could make most people just crumple into, you know, you wouldn't be able to deal with existence anymore.

Yet they did. Yeah. When I, when I was reading that, I was, you know, I was just like, how, how do you not lose all hope when you, when you see that happen right in front of you? Yeah.

For Beth Rodden as the lone female of the group, there were some real fears that she's written about in the years since. I know from my own experience in traveling every country in the world, there were some moments where I had to be cautious for my own safety. When I was in Afghanistan, I decided to wear a fake wedding ring just to make traveling alone as a woman a bit easier and safer. Beth had said that they tried to give the rebels the impression that her and Tommy were married at the time. Were these things that came up in your conversation with Beth?

With Beth, she was perhaps the most reticent and reluctant to speak because I think she had maybe a special set of fears of what could happen to her. No need to describe what those sorts of fears are. She's a prisoner of a ragtag bunch of murderous men, basically. They did cook up a plan to make it look like Beth and Tommy were married. I think that was a wise plan.

because anyone who has the slightest knowledge of these kinds of bands of Taliban and ISIS fighters regard a single Western woman

It's not in a very favorable light. And being married is a sort of protection against being regarded as, frankly, as just a slave. Yeah. So she spoke a little to me about this. But as you say, it's in the years since that she's come to terms with the way she felt about all these things.

that she's divulged a lot more thoughts than she was ready to do when I interviewed her. I want to ask you about the escape. At different times during the six days, the climbers had contemplated overpowering their captors. What ultimately led Tommy to push Sue over the edge? They realized that this crazy journey that they were on was not going to end well.

They'd been going for days, dodging the Kyrgyz soldiers, helicopters, foot patrols, and the insurgents were trying to get them up and over a mountain range into another country where they could actually stash them away as hostages and hold them for ransom or whatever, whatever the plan may be. They were literally starting to starve, probably very dehydrated. They'd never found enough water.

They just thought maybe we should try and take matters into our own hands. At first they all thought this is crazy, you know, these guys have guns. But as circumstances turned out, life was hard for these insurgent guys as well. They were weakening too, and they were also fragmenting into different groups. The opportunity presented itself one evening when they were just with one of the insurgents, and they were trying to negotiate a very steep mountain ridge

they all had talked about throwing one of these guys off a cliff and the moment presented itself and Tommy saw the moment, seized the action and he literally just grabbed the guy and pushed him sideways and he went off a cliff into the dark and off they went. They just took off running and they ran fast

practically headlonging to a military patrol a few miles away. At that point, they were in the hands of the Kyrgyz military and were safe.

But Tommy had a very hard time coming to terms with the fact that it looked like he just killed a guy by throwing him off a cliff. It sounds like Tommy was immediately haunted by his decision. What did he say about it to you? Well, when I started talking to them for the purposes of the story, they had all banded together in a sort of, call it three musketeers, all for one and one for all kind of a pact.

Because Tommy was so horrified by the idea that he's killed someone, they'd all say that they all had a hand on the guy and threw him off the cliff, sort of all shared. They didn't know, like, what's the legality of doing something like that? What defines murder versus self-defense? You know, they didn't know.

And they came up with this story, which I wasn't quite sure if I bought that they all had a hand on the guy at once and tossed him off a mountain. And as time went on, right before publication of the magazine article, Tommy decided that he should just tell it like it was. And I think Tommy rests okay with that today.

Well, the decision paid off and the group climbed to safety. How ultimately do you think they were able to survive this whole experience? Well, a lot of people probably wouldn't have been able to have the endurance and stamina to just run around in the mountains like that. The fact that they were climbers and were quite fit and fit in rough terrain, you know, their sort of fitness isn't... We're not talking track and field athletics. We're talking...

The ability to run around and climb up rocks and hop over boulders and stuff like that and get cold and not just perish because you're too cold. They had a sort of training, an outdoor athlete kind of training. And that's clearly what got them through a week of stomping around at night in the mountains with no food. You know, climbing is something where you have to deal with hardship. Hardship is basically part and parcel of a lot of climbing.

And that's definitely part of what allowed them to get through. And the mental and emotional stamina too, right? Did that skill set come to the rescue here? Yeah, I think having mental stamina too. I mean, when you're climbing these big things, they're always operating when they're tired, when it's inconvenient, when they're hungry, when they're cold. That's the sort of skill that climbers have. It's being able to cope with discomfort sometimes.

They were actually possibly even more built for that sort of arduous lifestyle than the insurgents were. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first call your parents to say I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. So what was the aftermath of the experience like for these four young climbers? Well, the immediate aftermath was the story hits the media and everyone

you know, the story has the element of they pushed a guy off a cliff. Turns out the guy didn't die. The guy was later captured wandering around in the mountains. He was captured by the Kyrgyz military. So it turns out that Tommy didn't kill anyone. But the media actually initially wanted to try and poke holes in the story to see if it was made up. It just sounded too good to be true. So they started trying to

dig holes into the story. Just as today we're fairly used to, call it alternative streams of opinion, of thinking, of journalism. Like you can have a fact and then you can have people who do everything they can to say the fact is a lie. Well, that happened with this story. There was a cluster of people who just wanted to say, no, this never happened. They made it all up.

Well, when I was writing the book, that's why I went back to Kyrgyzstan to do some more reporting for the book. What Beth and Tommy and John and Jason said is point for point exactly correct. They had this experience and there's no doubt about it, but there was a period when

Doubts were just flying all over the place. You returned to the region in the spring of 2001 with two of the climbers, Jason Singer-Smith and John Dickey. And it turned out that the man Sue, who Tommy pushed over the edge, had survived and was now in prison. How did you find him? Right around the time that everyone thought that Tommy had pushed Sue off a cliff and killed him, the word got out that he wasn't dead. He'd been captured by the Kyrgyz military.

He'd been pushed off the cliff and had fallen not far enough to be killed. He staggered around in the valley and was picked up by a patrol of soldiers. He was in jail in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan. So when I went over there, one of the things I wanted to do was to meet in prison with this guy. And I figured if there was any doubt to this story, an encounter with this guy would clear it up somehow.

So in Kyrgyzstan, I set about bothering as many people as possible the way journalists, you know, pester people until they get what they want. I kept getting told, no, that's impossible. And then finally, one day I was with Jason and John. We get a message from some military officer that, yep, get ready. You're allowed to see the prisoner now. We went to a prison, led into a prison room, just like a concrete cubicle about the size of your living room.

There was a couple of interpreter kind of guys around, a couple of soldiers, one holding a gun hidden by, he had a newspaper folded over his pistol. And in walks Sue, whose real name, Ravshan Sharapov. Young guy, pretty scared. But as soon as the meeting happened, John Dickey and Jason Singer-Smith and Sharapov all triangulated together.

And the recognition was clear. He admitted, yep, I know these guys. I've met them. It was a very surreal moment because you're meeting with a guy who, at the very least, is an accessory to mass murder. They killed a lot of Kyrgyz soldiers that they'd captured. Jason and John, like me, were just stunned. Like, here's this moment where we're meeting one of the key people in the story.

And pretty much everyone's just staring stunned and failing to come up with much in the way of questions. Did Sue express remorse to Jason and John? No. Wow. Initially, Sue wanted to try and say, I wasn't part of anything. And then he did eventually recognize that, yes, they knew each other.

Much later, he admitted to Kyrgyz journalists that he'd absolutely been part of the whole insurgency and he was a captor of the Americans. Wow. So as we discussed, the kidnapping took place in 2000. And of course, 9-11 happened the next year. What was your reaction?

When 9-11 happened, I was actually in the middle of sitting at my desk working on the books. And I was writing about the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan. Don't forget that before 9-11, very few Americans had ever heard of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban for that matter. And suddenly on the TV, as the trade centers are collapsing and the people announcing what's going on on TV, are starting to use the word Osama bin Laden.

And I realized, wow, this whole thing I've been researching is now staring me in the face in a terrible way. That guy's name was on the lips of everybody for decades after that. I guess everything changed from that moment. The world was a different place. But I know that all the four climbers who'd been kidnapped

absolutely terrified by what had happened at 9-11. I remember getting a phone call from Jason and he was beside himself because he's more or less saying, look, we've been telling you this would happen. They sort of saw the potential for this sort of insurgency to spill out into other parts of the world. If this is what these kinds of people are willing to go to if they have a grievance over politics in Uzbekistan,

well, they'll come after whoever they're aggrieved by. They literally, I think I'm saying exactly what they thought. They literally thought that these bad people were coming for them. Yeah, it was hard for them. They had, why wouldn't you believe that

someone's going to creep into your home one night and get revenge for what you did to them. Yeah, exactly. It might seem irrational, but why wouldn't it happen? Well, how did 9-11 impact the climbing community? Did it change people's approach to going out to these remote spots to climb? Well, if you remember, post-9-11, nothing was the same in terms of flying to another country.

the era of relaxed travel was over. For a long time, going to Asia, places like Pakistan, where there's lots and lots of climbing that foreigners go and do, pretty much anywhere in the third world was shut down for a long time. So mountaineering and certainly going to the valleys that

the four Americans went to, that was shut down for a long time, obviously. Going to the Himalayas and the Karakoram Mountains was shut down for a while. The big impact was the impact on local people who rely on foreign trekking and tourism and

mountain climbing expeditions. That business was stopped. And so the people who ran the little hotels or were the porters and rented you pack animals and yaks to get into the mountains, they didn't have the business anymore. It was very hard on them.

Ultimately, what do you think we can learn from this story? What do you take home from it? I guess in retrospect, I look at the book Over the Edge as really about the loss of innocence. It's about the world's loss of innocence. Really, it's about pre-911 versus post-911. Loss of innocence of four young climbers who start on that expedition to climb big cliffs in Kyrgyzstan. They start out as one kind of people and come back

How do you think the experience changed them as a whole? 20 years have passed since it happened. I think they've taken that many years to really think about it, to put it in its place, to examine who they were then and what they are now.

Almost no one ever has an experience remotely like that unless you're actually in action in a war. Most people who I know who've seen action in war experiences, they talk about the whole thing as if it's a terribly stressful thing that takes half a lifetime to come to terms with. Well, same for them, I think.

What's climbing like in these regions today? Well, probably about 10 years ago, word got out that the region, the Karasu Valley areas, was safe again. And climbers from different countries started going there. And I've met a number of Americans, a number of British, French, quite a number of nationalities have gone back and climbed happily and peacefully again.

And I'm sure the borders are more heavily policed. So I think climbing is happening again in the Karasu area. I'd love to go back personally. I think it's one of the most beautiful climbing places I ever visited.

Stepping back, I'm curious, why do people climb? And what are you searching for when you're out there? It's the hardest question you can ask a climber. And I would say almost any answer that has been given is quite lacking because it's such an abstract thing that you do. For most people, it makes no sense. They can't make sense out of climbing. And they'd probably be amused to learn that climbers find it hard to make sense of climbing.

Like I can't make sense of golf, but I don't doubt that people love golf. So climbers just, there's something in them that it makes sense to climb a rock. Yeah. To master the movement challenges, to get fit enough.

to stomp up a mountain. You're actually kind of celebrating the physical side of yourself when you become a climber. But you have to hone a mental skill set too, where you actually have to be fairly adept at suffering, putting up with cold, getting tired, that sort of thing. And in Poland, they've actually refined it to a little phrase that basically says that climbing is the art of suffering.

And it sounds a bit glib, but that's about the best I can come up with. I know you live in Utah these days. Are you still climbing? I do. I still climb. I'm more recreational in my climbing than I used to be. I still love to climb. I don't think I'll ever stop climbing of my own accord. Well, Greg Child, thank you so much for being here today. Well, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.

This is the final episode of our series, Rock Climbers Abducted. If you'd like to learn more about this event, we highly recommend the book Over the Edge by Greg Child. I'm your host, Cassie DePeckel. This episode was produced by Peter Arcuni. Brian White is our associate producer. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our senior producer is Andy Herman.

Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agar.

So here's how this show is going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery+, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.