Coronado Celebrates Local Hero Steve Wampler

Local celebrity Steve Wampler gave Coronado an unexpected surprise when he appeared at Tuesday's City Council meeting. Wampler recently became the first person with cerebral palsy to climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. His feat has been heralded by news organizations across the country, including  ABC World News.

In honor of Wampler's achievement, Mayor Casey Tanaka declared Oct. 4–8 "Steve Wampler Week." The announcement came unbeknown to many, including Wampler. "I'm overwhelmed," he said. "I didn't know this was happening."

The idea for a Steve Wampler Week came by way of a young citizen who approached Mayor Tanaka at Café 1134.  "Why don't we have a Steve Wampler day?" she asked. The mayor embraced the idea and extended it to a week.

Wampler, 42, trained for a year in preparation for his climb. He spent five hours a day doing 85-pound pull-downs. The face of El Capitan is 3,000 feet high—twice the height of the Empire State Building. The climb would require roughly 22,000 pull-downs, at four to eight inches per pull.

It was a daunting and grueling quest. Battling dehydration, fatigue and fear, Wampler spent six consecutive days hoisting his own body weight up the mountain—inch by inch. When he reached the summit on Sept. 17, Wampler became the first person with cerebral palsy to successfully scale El Capitan.     

Wampler's goal was to inspire those with physical disabilities and to show children with or without disabilities that "if you have a goal in mind, you can reach it no matter what."

Wampler, his wife, Elizabeth, and their two children are longtime residents of Coronado. Most people in the community know the Wampler family, and many wore and sold "Rock On Steve!" bracelets to raise funds for Wampler's climb.

"There's no place like Coronado and its people," Elizabeth said Tuesday. "We appreciate you more than you'll ever know."

Wampler's love of adventure and the outdoors has been a lifelong passion. Together, he and his wife founded the Stephen J. Wampler Foundation, which supports a wilderness camp for children with physical disabilities. The camp is now called Camp WAMP (Wheelchair Adventure Mountain Programs). 

The mayor said Tuesday, "Steven Wampler is not your ordinary kind of man in that he doesn't let his limitations define who he is, but rather, Steven Wampler is the type of man who takes inventory of the challenges in his way and then overcomes them."