By Michael Shapiro
20th Annual Solas Awards Gold Winner in the Most Unforgettable Character category
I. BELOW
“I need you to sit down,” the doctor told Kirk Keeler, a nature photographer who was born and raised in Sonoma County and is now living in Nevada City, the Gold Rush town on the California side of the Sierra Nevada. Keeler had just had his first colonoscopy and was still foggy from the anesthesia.
“We found a tumor in your colon,” Keeler recalls the doctor saying. “He just kept on talking. But I just went into a kind of a shock. All his words sounded like echoes.” It felt like dropping into the abyss.
The date was December 30, 2021. Over the next few months the news kept getting worse: “Tumors in your liver,” doctors told him, “metastasized, Stage 4.” The words reverberated through his mind, but the gravity of the news took a while to land.
Keeler got online and learned more about Stage 4 colon cancer. The five-year survival rate is “less than 10%” according to the National Institutes of Health — but as an athletic and youthful 52-year-old, he knew he had lots of life left to live. For most of 2022 and 2023, Keeler endured brutal chemotherapy regimens hoping to quash the cancer. Round after round, like a boxer, “he just took it. He stayed strong,” said his wife, Anna Keeler.
Now 54, Kirk has remained “remarkably positive through all of this. It’s amazing. I think there were times when that positivity was keeping him going,” she said. “But he wasn’t necessarily tapped into the full reality of what was going on. And that was hard.”
The Keelers had planned to start a family when Kirk learned of his cancer. Abruptly, they pivoted from IVF treatments to chemotherapy infusions. Asked how she’s coping, Anna answered with a single word that sounded like a question: “Therapy?”
She added: “I’ve just been allowing myself moments to feel the feels when I’ve needed to. A lot of times, especially when this first started, it would be by myself in the shower where I could just cry.”
The cancer has not been vanquished. “I’ve been lengthening my life with all the chemo treatments, but I’m at the point where it’s just so hard,” Kirk Keeler said, noting he had an allergic reaction during one infusion. “I can only take so much of that poison.” He has quit chemotherapy and worked to get back in shape. “I just want to have quality,” he said. “I want to be at my best.”
He wants to climb Yosemite’s most seductive rock wall, Half Dome. Not the cable route that about 300 people traverse daily, which would be impressive enough. No, Keeler will rope up with renowned climber Kevin Jorgeson, famed for his first ascent of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall, and climb the vertiginous Snake Dike route on the edge of Half Dome’s face.
* * *
The idea of climbing Half Dome, elevation 8,842 feet, hatched in 2022 during one of Keeler’s few good days between chemo treatments. “I was feeling good (and thought), wouldn’t it be cool to do Half Dome,” Keeler recalled during a conversation at Session climbing gym in Santa Rosa, California.
“You know how you get ideas, good ideas, and then they go away? Well, this one just wouldn’t go away,” he said. “It just kind of kept nagging at me.” There was one thing Keeler could do to escape the abyss: climb up, climb out.
Around this time, Keeler connected with a Davis-based support group called Cancer Champions and met Jen Miramontes, the group’s founder. Miramontes felt “an immediate connection.” Keeler’s “honesty and willingness to share his true feelings” made a deep impression.
Keeler told Miramontes he wanted “to show what a guy with Stage 4 cancer can accomplish,” he said, but he had a “bigger message” to share: If you’re 45 or older, get screened for colon cancer, “because it’s showing up in younger people now.” When Keeler was so sick from the chemo that he felt he couldn’t get off the couch, Miramontes would encourage him: “Just walk around the house – go outside – go to the end of the street. Do something!”
Even when walking a block felt impossible, Keeler dreamed of scaling Half Dome to raise awareness for cancer screening. One day he shared that dream with Miramontes, who said to him: “You know, you just put that out into the universe, right?”
“Yeah,” Keeler said, “I did.” In that moment Miramontes became confident about Kirk’s aspirations: “He’s going to do this,” she thought. “This is going to happen.”
What makes Keeler’s story even more remarkable is that he’s not a big-wall climber. Snake Dike, though not the toughest route up Half Dome — it’s eight pitches (roped segments) and rated or 5.7 — will be the most challenging climb he’s ever attempted.
Keeler is doing the climb at age 54 while living with colon cancer, with a body that’s endured more hell than most people could imagine. “I was parked on the couch for many, many months,” he said. “I lost so much fitness. Chemo ravages the body.”
Now he’s “surprisingly feeling really good about where I’m at. I feel on track,” he said a week before the climb. It’s just like eight pitches of low-angle stuff. The crux is the first pitch. After that, it’s apparently this incredibly beautiful granite dike that just goes vertically up the dome. All the holds are there. I’m feeling ready for this.”
* * *
Keeler grew up in the idyllic hamlet of Knight’s Valley in rural Sonoma County just 7 miles from Calistoga, where he went to school. He wasn’t far from the base of Mount St. Helena and rode BMX bikes there with his buddies as a kid. “My playground was the mountain,” he said.
After graduating from Calistoga High School in 1988, Keeler attended Sonoma State, where he “kind of dabbled here and there in various majors.” He didn’t graduate but later went to the Santa Rosa campus of New College and earned his humanities B.A. on “how music affects social change.”
A talented songwriter, guitarist and singer, Keeler’s senior project was arranging and recording a heartfelt album, titled “From the Underground.” During the 1990s and 2000s, Keeler lived “all over” Sonoma County working in bicycle shops and riding mountain bikes.
A personal note: I met Kirk in 1996 when a friend brought him to my “Name That Tune” party for my 33 1/3 birthday, a riff on the rotation speed of the vinyl albums we still loved to play, even in the CD era. Deeply versed in music and competitive to the core, Kirk tied for first place that night. We didn’t visit one another that often but were the kind of friends who could go years without seeing each other and pick up right where we left off.
In the 1990s, when Keeler was in his mid-twenties, he joined Vertex Climbing Center on the day it opened. A “little lanky guy” showed up and started making moves more deftly than some of the best climbers in the gym. That was Jorgeson. “He was a young kid, but he could do (solve) these crazy (climbing) problems,” Keeler recalled.
They didn’t get to know each other, but a decade ago when Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell were preparing for the Dawn Wall climb, they met through friends, and Jorgeson would often stay at Keeler’s place in Yosemite. “We just really hit it off,” Keeler said. “Then we just kept the connection.”
* * *
An artist at heart, Keeler moved to Yosemite in 2010 to hone his photography skills and see if he could go pro. He worked at the Ansel Adams Gallery and led weeklong photography workshops in the park. Keeler would often go on solo jaunts into Yosemite’s backcountry, with more photography gear than camping equipment, to create luminous images.
In summer 2015, my wife, Jackie, and I visited Keeler at his place in Yosemite, sharing a king salmon that I’d caught in Alaska and frozen a couple of weeks earlier. A natural connector, Kirk introduced us to his photographer friends and gave us a tour of the Ansel Adams Gallery, showing us some rare prints made by the legendary photographer.
When it came time to choose a climbing partner for the 2024 Half Dome ascent “who I would trust the most,” Keeler said Jorgeson is “who came into my brain. Kevin’s the rope shark.”
Jorgeson said he’d seen a Facebook post about Keeler’s diagnosis that “just left me speechless” and that Keeler called him “out of the blue.” Keeler shared his “dream” of climbing Half Dome to encourage people to screen for cancer. “Let’s do it!” Jorgeson said without hesitation. “It was an immediate yes.”
Jorgeson knows what Keeler has been through during the past two and a half years, yet he also has a keen sense of his indomitable spirit and commitment to achieving his goals. “If there’s anyone that can do it, it’s Kirk,” Jorgeson said. To reach the base of Half Dome requires an arduous hike up the Mist Trail to the top of Nevada Fall then past Lost Lake to Little Yosemite Valley.
Anna Keeler plans to hike with friends up the cable route on Friday so she can reach the top by midday, ahead of her husband’s arrival. “He asked, and I said yes,” she said. “I definitely want to be there to support him however I can.”
A reading specialist who teaches elementary school students in Nevada City, Anna started dating Kirk in May, 2019. She backs his decision to halt chemotherapy. Kirk’s “bright light” is back, she said. “This is the best I’ve seen you,” she told him, “since pre-cancer.”
In recent months, Kirk and Anna have traveled to see family on the East Coast and climbed to blustery summits. Kirk has been riding his mountain bike like a demon and training for Half Dome in gyms and on outdoor rock walls.
The Snake Dike climb will be hard, Jorgeson said, but “the hard stuff is what makes life fun. We climb because it’s hard, not in spite of it being hard. It’s the whole point. Kirk embraces the hardship and smiles right into it. He’s just a great spirit. It’s infectious to be around. He can’t wait, and I can’t wait.”
* * *
John Muir called Half Dome “the most beautiful and sublime of all the wonderful Yosemite rocks.” In the 1860s, the California Geological Society deemed Half Dome “a perfectly inaccessible [peak] which never has been, and never will be, trodden by human foot.” In 1875 it was climbed for the first time.
The Snake Dike route on Half Dome’s southwest face is “totally iconic,” Jorgeson said. “It’s this undulating spine up the side of Half Dome.” Though not a sheer face, “it’s much steeper than what you’d experience on the cables.”
Climbers rely “on the friction of your foot placements and your intuition and your skill and your judgment to move over stone,” he said. “It’s really dangerous. There are certain pitches where there’s no protection. You’re hanging at the anchor, and you climb for 200 feet until you get to the next bolt or anchor. So you’re looking at a 400-foot fall, if you fell at the anchor of the next pitch.”
To be clear, no one is free soloing (climbing without a rope), but the distance between anchors means a climber could sustain grave injuries. Jorgeson will lead the entire climb, mitigating the risk of a serious fall for Keeler. Jorgeson will also be setting a rope for filmmaker Kaare Iverson who is making a documentary about Keeler’s climb.
After traveling from Nevada City to Yosemite, Keeler plans to set out with Jorgeson before dawn and hike to the base of Half Dome. The climbers hope to begin the eight-pitch ascent by 8 in the morning and complete the climb by early afternoon, before it gets too hot. The forecast is for temperatures in the mid-80s, but when the sun beats on exposed stone it gets much hotter on the rock. The Snake Dike route faces southwest so it will be in the sun during most of the climb.
“We’ll do it in a day,” Jorgeson said. “The faster, the better. It’s just really a matter of our fitness and ropes not getting stuck.”
Given the heat, risk and difficulty, Jorgeson said the climb will “Type 2 fun.” For those not familiar with the adventure fun scale, Type 1 fun is a good time while it’s happening: a relaxing walk on a sunny beach, rowing a boat on a placid lake, an easy hike through a cool forest.
Type 2 fun can be miserable, painful, or extremely challenging in the moment. Think kayaking into a stiff wind and cold rain, navigating the roaring and life-threatening rapids of Lava Falls on the Colorado River, or an excruciating climb up a sheer rock wall on a blistering hot day.
Not fun in the moment, but days, months or years later, when recounted around a campfire with a cold beer in hand and prefaced by the phrase, “No shit, there we were,” well, that’s next-level fun. “We’re going to top out and forget about how dehydrated we were,” Jorgeson said, “and just remember what a cool experience it was.”
* * *
Keeler isn’t the first climber to try to overcome physical limitations on Yosemite’s sheer rock faces. In 1982 when he was 22, Mark Wellman fractured his spine. A paraplegic after the accident, he became a ranger at Yosemite and met climber Mark Corbett who encouraged Wellman to rekindle his dream of climbing El Capitan.
Climbing with Corbett in 1989, Wellman, then in his late twenties, essentially pulled himself 3,000 feet (the height of a 30-story building) up the face of El Cap. Climbing magazine said it was like doing “7,000 pull-ups.”
In 2016, Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind person to climb El Cap in a day (24 hours or less). Others have climbed for a cause. Keeler doesn’t feel any competition with other climbers. For him it’s all about bringing out his best as an athlete and human being, and raising awareness that cancer screening can save your life.
He hopes to reach the summit of Half Dome, but that’s not his definition of success. “I think success would be my entire team, which includes everybody supporting us, having an amazing experience. Not just me, everyone,” he said. “Maybe that means that we all agree that we had to bail because it was too hot or because a storm was coming. And that’s success because we listened to nature and our bodies.”
What would it mean to get to the top? “I haven’t been on top of Half Dome since my twenties. I never went up there when I lived in Yosemite because … I was there for photography,” Keeler said.
“I was there to be immersed in the beauty of the place and to maybe at my best capture that beauty in my unique, artful way. I did that, and I can still do that. But climbing was a big part of my life early on, and having climbing back in my life now in my 50s, … the cable route doesn’t appeal to me. I want it a little harder. I want to work for my Half Dome now.”
* * *
Keeler has no illusions that he has a rough road ahead. But unlike many people with cancer, he views the disease as a teacher. He had a request: “Rather than saying I’m ‘battling’ cancer, could you say ‘living with’ Stage 4 cancer? Cancer, for me, has become a friendly adversary, teaching me much about myself.”
Keeler’s diagnosis came amid a budding life with Anna, his wife of three years. They learned he had colon cancer just seven months after their wedding. During the interview Kirk said he “sees cancer as a gift that has allowed me to be a better and more loving husband.”
Anna Keeler said she’s “really proud” of Kirk for “having the vision of climbing Half Dome for cancer screening. That bigger purpose has been really helpful as it’s given him something to focus on. I’m excited for him.” She’s concerned about the risk but trusts his ability and skill. “He will use caution as well. He’s got a great team, and that’s what it really comes down to.”
Keeler’s care team said that after stopping chemotherapy, he could live another year, “maybe less.”
“That’s a number. I take that in,” Keeler said. “I hear that. Obviously, my team at U.C. Davis, they’re pros. So they have some measure, I guess. All I know is that I have you in front of me right now in this moment. And that’s what I’m aiming to do, have the best moments.” Keeler’s voice broke and he seemed to try to stanch the emotion; then he let the tears flow.
Composing himself, he said he’s immersed himself in “meditation and spirituality like I never have before.” Yosemite has been “an inspiration to me from early on and continues to be. If it (the Half Dome climb) is the last big thing I do in my life, it’ll be awesome to be in the park and do the climb with the people helping or doing it with me.”
Typical for Keeler, it’s about those who surround him: his climbing partners, his longtime friends, and most of all Anna, the love of his life. She will make the 8-mile trek up Half Dome’s cable route to greet her husband atop Yosemite’s signature rock feature as he (if all goes well) summits Half Dome and celebrates his triumph. Or as Kirk sees it, their triumph.
With a Stage 4 diagnosis, “it’s a little tough to be naive about what’s going to happen,” he said. “I just want to live out whatever’s left to the best of my ability. And this climb is a way to live to the fullest.”
II. ABOVE
Kirk Keeler surveyed the scene from a vantage point he hadn’t reached since his twenties: To the north he saw the flattened granite of Clouds Rest and in the distance the jagged pyramid of Cathedral Peak, to the east the craggy Mt. Lyell, the highest point in Yosemite National Park. Far below lay Yosemite Valley.
After nearly two years of training, Keeler ascended the Snake Dike route with legendary climber Kevin Jorgeson. Five and a half hours of strenuous climbing brought the pair to the top of Half Dome.
Fifteen minutes after reaching the summit in the crisp breezy air 8,842 feet above sea level, Keeler spoke about the successful ascent. “I’m just full of adrenaline right now!” he told me by phone (yes, there’s cell service on Half Dome). “There was a moment when the wind kicked up, and it got kind of dark. I think we were all a little nervous, but we were already committed. We were more than halfway through the climb, the pitches, so we didn’t even talk about it (going back). We just kept going.”
Exhilarated and ecstatic, Keeler said: “Even two years ago, when I thought up this thing, or three years ago when I wasn’t even diagnosed, I had no idea that I’d even try to climb something like this. So to accomplish it is awesome,” he said breathlessly.
“Hopefully people will get enthusiastic and think, ‘Hey, this guy did this for a reason.’ Whether it’s for colon cancer, breast cancer or prostate cancer, go get screened. I really want to say to the people who believe they’re healthy — athletes who are in that 45-year-old range, cancer may the last thing on their mind — but I’m hoping that my climb will help them put it first in their mind and that they’ll get screened.”
* * *
Keeler and Jorgeson, accompanied by Santa Rosa filmmaker Kaare Iverson, had hoped to climb Friday but decided to wait a day due to the threat of rain. Keeler texted me about the change of plan and when I thanked him for the update he said, “Yah man. You’re part of the team too!” I asked how he felt after the long hike Friday to the base of Half Dome and he texted: “Dude, better than expected! The body feels good. The feet hurt, but no blisters.”
On Saturday, the climbers got up at 4 in the morning and started hiking toward Half Dome before 5 a.m. They got to the base of Yosemite’s signature rock face around 7:30. Some light sprinkles during the morning concerned them, but the rock remained dry enough to climb safely. At 1:29 p.m., Kirk texted me: “We’re here! Got a sec” for the interview?
“Miraculously, it cleared up for a lot of the morning; then clouds came in,” Keeler said on the summit. “It looked threatening, and I got a little nervous. But then it blew over and the sun came out again, and now it’s absolutely stunning.”
On the hike to the base of Half Dome, Keeler seemed a bit anxious due to the exposure and risk, Iverson said. “It’s steep and if you slipped you would definitely get very, very hurt,” he said, so he thought Keeler might move slowly up Half Dome. “But once we started climbing, he was so fast — and so focused. His fitness was mind-boggling.”
Jorgeson, who owns Session climbing gym in Santa Rosa, California, was dazzled by Keeler’s agility and endurance. Asked what impressed him, Jorgeson said, “How easy he made it look. It was awesome — he just embodies why we climb. I think he needs a harder project.”
Atop Half Dome as they put away their ropes, Jorgeson looked at Keeler and made a suggestion: “So, the Northwest Face?” Those routes on Half Dome range from 5.9 or 5.12 on the climbing difficulty scale, compared to Snake Dike which is rated 5.7.
“All right, let’s do it!” Keeler said. “Let’s have that goal.”
On Saturday, Anna Keeler and several friends hiked up the cable route to the top of Half Dome to meet Kirk, Kevin and Kaare. But before they summitted, Anna’s group saw a storm on the horizon and, for safety, elected to descend about 1,000 vertical feet to Sub Dome on Half Dome’s shoulder. “They did the right thing,” Kirk said, noting that the descent can get treacherous when wet and slick.
From Sub Dome, Anna watched Kirk hike down from the peak, marveling at how quickly the three climbers descended. “Seeing him come down, I felt full of joy and pride,” she said. “I was so stoked to see him.”
After a celebratory jambalaya feast that night, Anna spoke about what Yosemite means to her husband. “Kirk lived here for so long and knows this place so well,” she said. “I felt through this trip that his soul really remembered him at his best.”
III. BEYOND
In late August 2024, exactly four weeks after he summitted Half Dome, Kirk and I shared a Sunday brunch of bagels and cream cheese piled high with smoked salmon. Kirk recalled the king salmon I’d caught in Alaska that we’d grilled in Yosemite nearly a decade before.
A coffee enthusiast, Kirk made us precisely-measured cups of cappuccino at the home he shared with Anna in a forested area a few miles from Nevada City. That afternoon, joined by Anna, we hiked a couple of miles along the Yuba River then descended a serpentine trail for a swim. We lay on boulders in the middle of the river, our cares evaporating like drops of water on the warm rocks.
That September, Kirk, with Anna, completed a 10-kilometer run/walk near Sacramento, a fundraiser for Cancer Champions, the group that supported the Half Dome climb. Kirk still hoped he could try a more challenging ascent, shifting his attention to El Capitan, but later in September he broke his hip falling from his mountain bike, so he wasn’t able to make the attempt.
In February 2025, Iverson’s documentary, “Half Life,” premiered at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City. An audience of about 200 people sat on folding chairs in the musty, cavernous Odd Fellows lodge. “Nature is really core to me,” Kirk says in the film. “I grew up in an area that was stunning,” at the base of a mountain that was more than 4,000 feet high. “Things that are important in life: my relationship with my wife, that’s my primary, my relationship with my family and friends, and my relationship with my body,” he says in “Half Life.”
Kirk was present and received a standing ovation at the film’s conclusion. It had been 12 months since doctors had told him that he’d live at most a year without chemo, and he was still going strong, fueled by positivity and purpose.
That night my wife and I joined 20 of Kirk’s friends to celebrate his birthday at a Nevada City restaurant called Lola, in the National Exchange Hotel, that dates to the Gold Rush heyday of the 1850s. Kirk raised his glass and toasted us all.
* * *
In early July, we received an invitation from Anna titled: “A Celebration of Kirk’s Life and Love While He’s Still Here With Us.” It read: “As Kirk walks this final chapter with courage and grace, we want to gather together to celebrate the beautiful life he’s lived, to share laughter and memories, and to surround him with love while he’s still here to receive it. This is not a goodbye. It’s a time to honor a life deeply lived, relationships dearly held, and the imprint Kirk has left on each of our hearts.”
Propped up in a high-back outdoor chair, his skin pale, almost translucent, and tightly drawn, Kirk welcomed us all. He couldn’t move easily, but he could take in the appreciation, the stories, the tears.
In Anna and Kirk’s living room, an old friend screened a video of Kirk playing guitar and harmonica to the friend’s two-and-a-half-year-old son in 2002. Kirk called one song “Tow Truck Driver” with the refrain, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it all.” He was making up lyrics on the fly about the boy’s trucks and cars as the kid clapped and jumped for joy. The friend said his son, now in his mid-twenties, became a drummer.
The celebration, ending with a campfire circle under a moonless sky glittering with brilliant stars, was a powerful affirmation of how deeply Kirk was loved and how many lives he’d touched — and how he continued to inspire us all.
The following weekend, while my wife and I were in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for a Dead & Company concert, I got a text from Anna. “Thank you so much for your care and support,” she wrote. “Kirk is needing significantly more rest and privacy as he moves deeper into hospice care. … We are entering a more quiet and tender phase, and I kindly ask for your understanding as we prioritize his comfort and peace.”
* * *
In mid-August, I came across the Mary Oliver poem, “When Death Comes” and had a strong feeling that I should text it to Anna. I hadn’t heard that Kirk had died two days earlier.
“I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular … and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth,” Oliver’s poem reads. “When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. … I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
Kirk Keeler did so much more than visit this world. He fully inhabited the planet; he wrapped his arms around Mother Earth and embraced so many of us who had the privilege to call him a friend. By being himself, he showed us how to become better people.
The day after I sent the poem to Anna, she announced Kirk’s passing on social media. “He was my love, my partner, and the most gentle soul I’ve ever known,” she wrote under a photo from their wedding. “I am grateful for every moment we had together. May his spirit live on in the love he gave so freely.”
Author and Grateful Dead enthusiast Steve Silberman said about life: “If this is all there is, then make it fucking count!” Kirk believed in an afterlife, that this is not all there is. He was deeply spiritual, a seeker, but he certainly did not wait for the next life to live fully.
Kirk was just 55 when he died. Yet he made every era of his life — from his boyhood dirt-bike rides around Mount St. Helena to his songwriting and guitar-playing days, from his multi-day photography treks all over Yosemite to his exultant summit of Half Dome — fucking count.
~ ~ ~
Michael Shapiro writes about travel, music, and environmental issues, and is known for his long-form interviews. A longtime newspaper reporter and editor, he’s the author of The Creative Spark and A Sense of Place. He has reported from more than 20 countries for stories appearing in National Geographic, AFAR, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. An avid whitewater raft guide and long-distance cyclist, he lives in Sonoma County with his wife and two cats.