John Middendorf

John Middendorf (April 13, 1959 – June 21, 2024) was an American big wall climber and designer of climbing equipment.

In the 1980s, he climbed the hardest walls of Yosemite, including El Capitan and Half Dome, and in 1992 he climbed the largest rock wall in the world, Great Trango Tower. Also in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he pioneered numerous difficult big wall routes in Zion National Park. He was also a renowned portaledge designer and writer.

Great Trango new route
Middendorf achieved worldwide recognition in the climbing world in 1992 when he climbed the East Face of Great Trango Tower (6286 m a.s.l.) in Karakoram, Pakistan, with Xaver Bongard. As a lightweight, two-man team, they were the first to climb the largest rock face involving big wall climbing of Great Trango Tower to its summit and make it down alive. The East Face of Great Trango was climbed in 1984 via neighbor route, Norwegian Pillar, by the team of the finest Norwegian climbers, but the summiters died on the descent; the next two ascents of this route did not continue to the true top of the wall, the East Summit of Great Trango Tower.

The Grand Voyage ascends the 1350 metre vertical and overhanging rock wall of Great Trango to the East Summit of Great Trango Tower at 6231 metres. Over 2000 metres of climbing is involved from the Dungee Glacier. Along with the Norwegian Pillar on the same face, the routes have been noted as "perhaps the hardest big-wall climbs in the world" (see Trango Towers). The 1992 new route required 15 days and nights to climb and three days to descend, using portaledges designed and constructed by Middendorf in his outdoor equipment company, A5 Adventures, Inc.



Equipment maker
Middendorf, a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer, founded a company, A5 Adventures Inc., in 1986 to design and manufacture portaledges. A failure of a portaledge during a climb of Half Dome nearly led to the death of Middendorf and his companions Steve Bosque and Mike Corbett, and Middendorf became interested in better designs. A5 portaledges were made of highly weatherproof fabrics and were engineered to be structurally strong and stable; they were the first ones that could withstand the severe weather of high alpine regions, including the Himalayas and Karakoram. A5 went on to design and manufacture a variety of big-wall climbing gear, including aiders, slings, haul bags and packs, climbing protection hardware, and other items. A5 Adventures Inc. was acquired by The North Face in 1997, where he worked as a Senior Product Manager for several years and continued designing and manufacturing the equipment under its "A5" brand. The designs were later transferred to Black Diamond, including his well-known “Cliff Cabana” design, first made in 1995.

In 2017, while employed as a high school mathematics, science, and robotics teacher in the Tasmanian school system, he began a three-year redesign of portaledges, cumulating in the two-person D4 Delta2p design and the three-person D4 Delta3p design, the first “foot-out” portaledge designs. He also built a number of other designs, including the D4 Trapezium, a small compact shelter that he personally tested in high winds and extreme weather in the forests of Tasmania as part of protests against the denuding of Tasmanian temperate rainforests. After building over a hundred portaledges and networking with the world’s best bigwall climbers, he considered the design “mature” — meaning completely patterned and tested in the field with successive prototype batches — and made all his design work open-source, with all construction and engineering details available on his Web site, Bigwalls.net.

Researcher and writer
Middendorf wrote extensively on climbing and activism topics, with many published articles and books dating to 1987. Between 2021 and 2023, he completed a two-volume history of climbing tools and techniques dating back several centuries. As reviewed by the American Alpine Club's newsletter: "John Middendorf’s Mechanical Advantage: Tools for the Wild Vertical is a passionately researched and heavily illustrated history of early gear for climbing and alpinism. One sample of Middendorf’s work appeared in AAJ 2022, for which he wrote a biography of Tita Piaz (sic; https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tita_Piaz), the ground-breaking Italian climber of the early 20th century — just a smattering of the fascinating material he has uncovered. The two-volume Mechanical Advantage is available in several print and digital formats" (November 2023, https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2023/11/27/the-line-november-2023).

Death
Middendorf died in his sleep on June 21, 2024 while on a family visit. He was 65.