In 2022, Thomas Bukowski took a risk that felt personal and professional by applying to The North Face athlete development program and pitching himself as a climber worth betting on. As a queer athlete from Hong Kong who found climbing later than most, he has long carried the feeling of being an outsider, then watched that narrative shift when he earned a place on The North Face climbing team. Since then, he has chased fear into major climbs in Argentina, Alaska, and Pakistan, and in 2024 he pushed into trail running by running the 211 mile John Muir Trail in four days.
In 2022, Thomas Bukowski took a risk that felt personal and professional by applying to The North Face athlete development program and pitching himself as a climber worth betting on. As a queer athlete from Hong Kong who found climbing later than most, he has long carried the feeling of being an outsider, then watched that narrative shift when he earned a place on The North Face climbing team. Since then, he has chased fear into major climbs in Argentina, Alaska, and Pakistan, and in 2024 he pushed into trail running by running the 211 mile John Muir Trail in four days.
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Thomas Bukowski:
I have to say, the first couple of years climbing, I feel like I really had to work on fear management. I really had to be like, "Okay. That was cool, but gosh, I was just terrified most of the day, and if I keep staying terrified most of the day, I'm just not going to have that great of a time." And so, for me, it's really important to be like, "Why am I doing this? Am I excited to do this? Am I not too tired?" Whatever it is. And when I'm like, "Okay, I'm really excited to do this," then I think you can push through a lot of discomfort or fear, and also you can rationalize and go, "Okay. This is a bit scary, or whatever, but I have this goal that I'm working towards."
Shelby Stanger:
In 2022, Thomas Bukowski had a wild idea, to apply for a spot in the North Face' s athlete development program. Pitching himself was scary, but Thomas has built a career around facing his fear head on. As a queer person from Hong Kong who started climbing relatively late in life, Thomas has always felt like an outsider in the industry, but the pitch worked, and two years later, Thomas was offered a spot on the North Face's prestigious climbing team. Since then, he's faced his fears on some incredibly challenging routes in Argentina, Alaska, and Pakistan. Thomas's desire to push himself out of his comfort zone has spilled into the rest of his life too. In 2024, he brought it to the sport of trail running, when he ran the 211-mile John Muir Trail, which usually takes people two to three weeks, in just four days.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
Thomas Bukowski, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You've done a lot of things. You run, you climb. You're a North Face athlete. How did you get into climbing?
Thomas Bukowski:
Yeah. I didn't grow up very athletic. I think the stereotype probably I fit was kind of the nerd on a computer, kind of thing, but I had this kind of wild opportunity to go to a boarding school in Norway. While at that school, I became really good friends with the physics teacher there. It turns out he was one of the best climbers in Britain in the '80s. There's old guidebooks of him putting up the hardest route in Sheffield, and then had kids and settled down, and he ended up teaching physics at school, but sort of any good lifelong climber, he cleaned the cliff that was nearby the school, bolted it, and got the school to buy a bunch of harnesses and shoes and everything. He taught me how to climb, and he was really my mentor. Yeah, so I basically started climbing in high school.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you remember any of those early days when you went climbing?
Thomas Bukowski:
I think I was mostly really scared to be off the ground and being like, "Oh. I'm going to trust this rope and these little, metal, bolt things in the rock and everything." It was also really exciting. But yeah, I have to say, the dominant thing I was trying to do was manage my fear those first couple of years.
Shelby Stanger:
Were you also just naturally good at it?
Thomas Bukowski:
I think I was all right. Maybe I was a little bit above average, but I certainly wasn't one of those natural talents where they start climbing. Even now, I think I see folks getting into climbing, friends that sort of have been climbing for much less time than I have. I'm like, "Wow. They got really good really fast," and sometimes there can be a little jealousy or envy there, of course, but then I was like, "Oh, okay. That's what talent looks like, actually," and I feel like I've had to sort of really work my way up the grades and the kinds of climbing and things like that, which is totally fine. That's the fun of it all, but I don't know if I naturally have that much of a pre-disposition. For sure, at least the fear thing is really not helpful.
Shelby Stanger:
So, that's really interesting. This school in Norway sounds incredible, and I'm curious, you could have also picked up soccer, you could have picked up running, you could have picked up so many different sports, but climbing hit something within you. What do you think happened?
Thomas Bukowski:
Yeah. I'm not sure, really. I mean, sometimes I think when you're an impressionable teenager, you kind of pick up the thing you end up picking up, and that's what you end up doing. The only way I've been able to, because I've asked this question a lot, I'm like, "Why am I spending so much of my life and time and effort and money and all that kind of stuff, and risk, going climbing?" Because sometimes I'm like, "Oh. If I'm not a climber, life would be a lot easier."
But the only thing I've found is that I do like sort of going up to the top of the hill in the park and being like, "I wonder what it looks like from up there." It feels a little instinctual, like I'm instinctively kind of curious about that. Even when I find myself in a new place, wherever you happen to be in a new city somewhere, I often end up kind of on a little knoll somewhere to be like, "Oh. Let's see what it looks like from up here," so there's clearly some subconscious, I think, interest or curiosity there. I think that lines up well with climbing. Really, climbing is just learning increasingly more complicated ways to get up to the top of things, right?
Shelby Stanger:
For Thomas, climbing has always been about more than the physical challenge. He loves being up high and seeing things from a different angle. In Norway, Thomas thrived. He was climbing, doing well in school, and he still had time to explore other interests. But after he graduated and moved to the US, the culture shock hit. He was studying computer science and was overwhelmed by the workload, which made it a lot harder to get out into nature. So, you find climbing in high school, and it opens your perspective, and then you go to the United States for college. You said it was not easy.
Thomas Bukowski:
It was not easy, yeah. I went to Dartmouth, which is a bit of a preppy, New England college, and I think I was just very different from the people there. I think, also, I think at that time I was starting to figure out my sexuality a little bit more, and I think that also was tricky, but there's also some more practical things. I didn't know how to drive. No one drives in Hong Kong, so it was really hard to get around, especially in a place that was a little more rural, so there's just a lot of practical things that's like, "Cool. I'm in the US now, but how do I find my place in this giant, crazy country?"
Shelby Stanger:
Wow. They appreciate you sharing this. I could see how Dartmouth would've been a bit of a shock. I went to Emory in Atlanta, Georgia, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. I'm from the United States, so I can imagine coming from Hong Kong and then this diverse school in Norway, and going to this kind of preppy East Coast, really academically rigorous school. Did you finish school or did you just-
Thomas Bukowski:
I didn't. I never finished. No, I just dropped out.
Shelby Stanger:
So, you just dropped out. You're like the modern tech entrepreneur.
Thomas Bukowski:
I don't know about that, but I think, academically, I wasn't doing great, and socially, I wasn't doing great either, so it was just kind of a rough time. I was kind of like, "Wow." It was a lot of like, "What am I doing here?" and I think that was one of the first times I really developed this like, "Okay. If I'm going to do something that's hard, I have to really understand why I'm doing it and what I'm doing, and if I can't, all the little moments of doubt, kind of come up with a phrase or a really know inside me why I'm doing this and what I'm trying to go towards, then I'm just not going to make it."
Shelby Stanger:
After dropping out of school, Thomas moved to San Francisco. It was the perfect home base. There was a booming tech scene where he could apply his computer science studies, and there was a thriving LGBTQ community where he could fully be himself. When he arrived in the Bay Area, Thomas joined a climbing gym, and it wasn't long before he went to Yosemite for the first time.
Thomas Bukowski:
Some friends I met at the climbing room were like, "Oh. We're going to Yosemite."
I was like, "Cool. I hear this good climbing there."
Then, I go there, and I'm like, "Wow. This place is crazy. That's really hard. It's really scary. It's trad climbing," which I didn't really know how to do. I'd mostly been a sport climber."
Shelby Stanger:
Yosemite is a mecca for climbers. The landscape features endless granite walls and long technical routes. Thomas was so enamored with the challenge and natural beauty, that he became the ultimate weekend warrior. One year he spent a whopping 42 weekends in the park. Eventually, his day job started to wear on him, and he decided to go all in on the classic dirt bag lifestyle. In 2017, Thomas moved into a van and spent the next seven and a half years living in and around Yosemite, pursuing climbing full-time. Explain how you're funding your climbing career.
Thomas Bukowski:
Some of it was, for sure, having some savings from just working a tech job for years. Some of it was guiding. You kind of just piece it together, and it's a much more uncertain and unstable approach. You have more money but less time, or you have lots more time, but then you're kind of always a bit stressed, being like, "Hmm. I might run out of money."
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious how you ended up with the North Face. I'm sure they found you in San Francisco. That used to be where they were.
Thomas Bukowski:
Yeah. At that point, I was not in SF as much anymore. I was mostly out in the van, and long story short, they were running this program called the Athlete Development Program. This was in 2022, I think, and basically, it was an open call for folks to apply to be an athlete, which is, I think, their attempt at trying to be like, "How can we diversify it a little bit, but also open it up a little bit?" There's always the people you can find who are in the scene, and they feel like they're the up and coming folks. Then, there's always these folks just not quite in that same scene, but they could also be doing really interesting things, right? So, it's another way to also just broaden the aperture a little bit.
I applied. 2500 people also applied, and they picked 17 people across climbing, trail running, and snow sports, and they picked me and that ended up being a two-year program. Then, after that, they offered me a proper contract on a team. Definitely, I think by living in the city and living in San Francisco, and I think not growing up in a mountain town or parents who are also climbers or mountain guys and things like that, I never was that plugged into the cool kids, essentially, right? The sponsored athletes. Also, it just took me a long time to get good at climbing, so I think without the program, I really wouldn't have had this kind of opportunity to sort of be in this world at all.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that though, because you pitched yourself, and I think that if you don't ask, you don't get. I think that's all good things in life. They're like, "If you really want to go do them, sure, there's a lot of people who get lucky and they're in the right circles and they grow up, and their parents are who they are and their friends are who they are," and then there's these people that pitch themselves. So, good on the North Face for opening the door, and good on you for pitching yourself. I think that's really cool.
Thomas Bukowski:
I think it was something I wasn't very good at doing for many years. I found it scary and overwhelming to pitch yourself, but also for many, many years, I was like, "Oh. Well, I can never be a North Face athlete, so why even bother apply?" But it was quite a sort of ingrained way of thinking, and I think around when that program happened and when I put myself in for something like that, I was starting to be like, "Oh. Maybe I can just try," and I think I was not always like that at all. I was mostly the opposite of that. I mostly didn't put myself into these things, and I really kind of, over time, recognized, "Oh. Maybe I am holding myself back."
Maybe I am thinking this way, where I'm like, "Oh. I'm never going to be someone who can do that or go to this place to climb or whatever it is, and that's maybe holding me back as much as, oh, maybe I need some more skills to climb there." You can sit here and think about, "Oh. I need to be better at glacier travel to go climb this peak," but it's like, are you going to try and get better at glacier travel, or are you just going to be like, "Well, that's not me"? I don't know. It's just a truism, right? "Oh. If you don't try, you won't get it," but I think often we don't even realize we're not trying. That, certainly, was the case for me.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. I'm wondering if climbing helped you with that. In climbing, you try and you fail all day. Climbing is just failure over and over, but trying again.
Thomas Bukowski:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, and we could do a whole nother podcast on climbing and how it sort of is this kind of arena for trying something, failing, that being okay, and how that's maybe a good way to retrain nervous systems and all that kind of stuff, but I think in a very basic way, you just go to any climbing gym and there's some climbs that you'll be able to do and some climbs you won't be able to do, and it's going to be there, staring at you.
You can really think about like, "Oh. Do I think I can't hold onto that next hold, or have I tried and I'm falling off?" If you've tried and you're falling off, you can be like, "Well, why am I falling off? Do I need a little more chalk because my hands are sweaty? Is the hold a little too small? Do I need to be a little stronger? Maybe I should just need to move my hip a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right." It's like at least half of it is how you're thinking about it. Did you even try to climb the route? If you don't try it, you definitely won't get to the top.
Shelby Stanger:
Climber, Thomas Bukowski, has always been the kind of person who wants to see what's around the next corner or the view from the next peak. That curiosity has led him to visit some of the most dramatic landscapes around the world. Last summer, Thomas spent six weeks climbing in Kyrgyzstan. The area is dominated by two mountain ranges, and everywhere you look, there are high altitude routes and granite cliffs. It's basically a giant playground for an athlete like Thomas.
You just got back from Kyrgyzstan, climbing?
Thomas Bukowski:
Yeah. I just had a really great trip, actually, almost a perfect trip. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you tell me about that? That's a wild idea in itself.
Thomas Bukowski:
Yeah. It's funny. It's a little bit of a forgotten part of the world, right? I think that the western end of the Soviet block has gotten a lot of attention, but it turns out there's Everest and the Himalaya, which are very famous, and then they kind of stretch west a bit more and that's the Karakorum. Then, it kind of wraps up north, and there's a whole bunch of mountains up there, sort of around west and north of Xinjiang and sort of in central southern Russia. There's an amazing climbing there, amazing rock climbing, amazing sort of Alpine climbing, and also, historically, has mostly been sort of the Soviet center of Alpinism.
The valley that I went to, they used to hold Soviet Alpine climbing competitions there. That was back in the 80s, I think? Yeah. It was a great trip. It was a trip to go do this big wall. The route's called the American Way on this peak called Sleslova and the Axio Valley. I think, long story short, it's kind of roughly a route that's about the same height and difficulty as Free Rider on El Capitan in Yosemite, which of course is so famous, because Alex Honnold free soloed it. So, it's a roughly, similarly difficult route, but I climbed it with ropes, which was very necessary because I fell many times, but that was most of the trip, but we also did some other climbs in the area too, and it was a really successful trip.
Shelby Stanger:
The American way was one of the hardest routes Thomas has ever climbed, and it was a huge milestone for him. Prior to his trip, he had spent hours training in the gym, working on his general fitness. To help him with his endurance, Thomas took up trail running. In 2024, he ran all 211 miles of the John Muir Trail in just over four days. I want to shift gears to running. I'm a runner. It sounds like you're a trail runner.
Thomas Bukowski:
It turns out I am a trail runner. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Have you always been? I mean...
Thomas Bukowski:
No. I always had pretty bad cardio. I always felt, anyway, and I was always the last person up to the bottom of the climb, and I would be so winded and I was just like, "Wow, I'm just destroyed by this 45-minute hike up the hill," and I was just like, "I should try to get a little more fit," but I was like, "Running is good for getting fitter, right?" I mean, this is maybe a good illustration of this desire to go stand on top of a hill or whatever, but instead of running on the flatbits, which is what most people do when they're like, "Let's go running," I was like, "Well, the nearest hill is Bernal [Heights], so let's go run up to Bernal."
Of course, running up a hill, especially when you're not much of a runner, is brutal, and so I just started doing that. The first couple dozen times was like, "Whoa, this is not good. I'm going to explode." It can be quite a rude feeling, I feel like, running sometimes, but also, with running, if you just keep doing it a little bit, you eventually get a little better, and your aerobic capacity develops and your aerobic base gets a little stronger, and then running up the hill is not quite as bad, and then it escalates rapidly from there.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that you said it was a rude feeling.
Thomas Bukowski:
It's not very nice. You're like, "Oh, God. I need to stop right now. This is a terrible idea." That's how it feels to me.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, but only last year you had this really badass wild idea where you ran the John Muir trail. It's 211 miles from Yosemite Valley to the submit of Mount Whitney. Usually it takes people like three weeks. You ran it in four and a half days.
Thomas Bukowski:
Yeah. It's an interesting story. So, this running thing escalated over the years. I was running up those three and a half miles to Burnout, and then I'd do the six miles to go and get [inaudible 00:18:50], and I'd do the 13 miles to the ocean and back. I ran a marathon, and then ran a 50K and so on. Then, eventually, I ran my first 100 mile, and it was just a blistering experience, both literally and figuratively. It actually was my friend's idea. She was turning 40, and she had gone a couple hundred miles under her belt too, and she was like, "For my 40 birthday, I want to run the John Muir Trail."
I was like, "That seems crazy. I could never do that, but I'm happy to support you in that," and I was like, "Well, maybe I can run half of it with you. I've run 100 miles, so I feel I could run 100 miles," but I think one thing I keep relearning about myself, I think, around this topic of fear, is that I never really could say to myself, "My goal, this summer, is to run the John Muir Trail," because it was just too scary. I mean, it's funny, because when I look back now, I'm like, "I was aiming to do it. I started with her. I was kind of like, "Let's run the John Muir Trail." So, her and I ended up starting the run, and she's always kind of had some issues at altitude of being able to keep things down and eating, and basically about one and a half, two days in, she was pretty nauseous, so she was like, "Okay. This is it. I'm going to hike out from here."
I kind of just really had this moment where I was like, "Oh, no. So, do I keep going by myself now?" And I almost didn't do it. I was like, "Okay. Well, I'll just go through the motions. I'll pack the bag. I'll set the alarm for the time that I should probably wake up and start running," and so I did all that, and I was kind of like, "Okay. I guess I start running now," and it's all mental. I mean, of course I was tired, but I was like, "All right. You can start running or not start running." I somehow managed to start running, and the first couple of miles, I almost turned around and was like, "I could still turn around. I don't have to do this," but then I got through it, and the sun rose.
Then, I was like, "Oh. Actually, it's really nice out here. It's quite pretty, having quite a good time, actually, feeling pretty good at that moment anyway," but it really took someone else being like, "I'm going to do it," and took sneaking up on the goal from the side to really get going on it. I mean, I learned a lot of things obviously from running for 200 something miles, but I think one of the things I, for sure, learned about myself was these things are still really scary and really hard and really overwhelming, and my ability to try them, to commit to them is still mostly sort of guarded by fear, right? Okay, so that's something I should try and focus on and work on, because I don't want to be always needing someone else to set the goal for me. I want to be able to do that myself. There's lots of things I want to do.
Shelby Stanger:
After Thomas finished running the John Muir Trail, his head was in a different place. Climbing was still a huge part of the picture, but suddenly he was craving something else, community.
Thomas Bukowski:
After many years in the wilderness, living in the van, and all that, I think I just got to a point where I wanted to be in a little more queer community. There are a bunch of people in Yosemite for sure, but it's not a place where there's a lot of queer community, in the same way that I think a lot of small towns don't have a lot of queer community. I feel like this is a central struggle of my life. I've looked high and low, and thought a lot about, "Should I move here? Should I move there?" And I think I ended up coming back to San Francisco, for better and for worse. It's not so bad. Yosemite's not so far away. The trail running here is incredible. The queer community here is incredible. San Francisco is also an incredible city.
Shelby Stanger:
The food is incredible.
Thomas Bukowski:
The food is incredible. There's lots of things to like. I think it feels like a better balance for me right now to be in a place where I can have a little more queer community than being kind of absolute in that climbing life and in the mountains 100 percent of the time.
Shelby Stanger:
I think a lot of us are craving community right now, and I think sometimes it's hard to find your community, especially if you're someone like you or I, who for me, I want to just go live on an island and surf perfect waves, but that requires being away from humans. You want to go climb these rocks, but a lot of these outdoor places don't have a lot of diversity or humans, in general, as well.
Thomas Bukowski:
Totally.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious how you figure that out.
Thomas Bukowski:
I think, for many years, I had this running joke with my friends where I was like, "Let me know if you hear of another gay climber in Yosemite. I'm here all the time." These were friends that lived in Yosemite and were way more plugged in than I was. I realized, "Wait a minute. How would someone find out that I was a gay climber?" Not that you need to shout out from the rooftops necessarily, but I certainly wasn't claws of it, but I also wasn't quite that out either, because it's kind of scary to be out. You also don't necessarily want to lead with your sexuality all the time, so I was kind of like, "Hm. Maybe I'm also contributing to this problem of there being "no" climbers by just also being kind of a quiet climber," so I think then I tried to be a little more public about it. If only just to be like, "Okay. Well, then at least people know that this is a thing that exists," because I'm sure there's other people just like me that are like, "I wonder where all the queer climbers are.
Shelby Stanger:
What's your vision for climbing? Because you're a queer climber who's also just broadening the landscape for others, and I'm curious what that looks like for you.
Thomas Bukowski:
Oh, gosh. I mean, I would say climbing's incredible for me, but I just wish that there were more people that could get into it, and those that really like it have as an encumbered of an experience of doing it and exploring it for themselves. It's not about sexuality, gender, or things like that, right? It's an incredible tool to think through and manage your own fear, learn about yourself. You end up processing a lot of things, because it is this arena where you can try and fail safely and everyone should give it a go. Hopefully it does something for them like it did for me.
Shelby Stanger:
If you want to keep up with Thomas and see more of his climbing adventures, you can find him on Instagram at neodude. That's N-E-O-D-U-D-E. He also has a rock climbing guidebook about the Tualame Meadows, a region in Yosemite Park. You can find the link to get a copy for yourself in his Instagram profile. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce Knitsberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Pelo Motola and Joe Crosby. Thanks again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen, and remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.