Navy SEAL, Scientist and a Cigarette at 12,000 Feet: The Unlikely Climbers Behind 'Nobody & Goliath'

Somewhere near the end of a 32-mile ridgeline in California's Sierra Nevada, two exhausted climbers lit up cigarettes at 12,000 feet — despite neither being a smoker. That scene, from the new adventure film Nobody & Goliath, says a lot about Tanner Wanish and Michael Vaill: they're not the polished, lifelong prodigies who usually star in climbing documentaries, and that's exactly the point.

The film, directed by Joshua Noll and touring US theaters in 2026, follows a duo who reached the top of Yosemite big wall climbing in record time despite starting late. Wanish, a former Navy SEAL from South Carolina, had been climbing for less than five years when he made history. Vaill, a 34-year-old with a PhD in biomedical sciences from Georgia, touched rock for the first time on Christmas Day 2016. Before that, both describe their twenties as revolving around college football, bars and study rather than vertical granite.

Their results, though, are anything but amateur. In October 2024 they completed the Yosemite Triple — El Capitan, Half Dome and Mount Watkins — in 17 hours and 55 minutes, the fastest time ever, beating marks set by Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell, Dean Potter and Timmy O'Neil, and other legends. A week later they went bigger, repeating the triple and adding the south face of Washington Column in a first-ever "Yosemite Quad."

The catch, as the film makes clear, is that neither is a technical virtuoso. While stars like Adam Ondra climb routes graded 5.15, Wanish and Vaill max out around 5.11 or 5.12. Their edge is each other. They met through a Mountain Project message board, went from San Diego-area crags to El Capitan within a year, and developed a partnership Vaill calls a "cheat code": when one fades, the other pushes on, and neither suggests bailing. That mutual commitment lets them climb walls that take most teams three or four days in as little as five hours.

The second half of the film follows their attempt on the Goliath Traverse, a punishing eight-day ridgeline over more than 60 Sierra summits, which only Vitaliy Musiyenko had completed before them, in 2021. Unlike the single-minded obsession typical of the genre — think Emily Harrington or Honnold — the pair come across as normal guys who joke through the misery, manage injuries and strength imbalances, and finish because of their friendship rather than a lifelong fixation.

For travellers and outdoor fans, this is a refreshing take: an adventure story about ordinary late starters who committed fully. It's also a nudge toward the places themselves — Yosemite's big walls and the High Sierra backcountry, where speed records are being rewritten by people who only found climbing as adults. Whether you climb or just watch, Nobody & Goliath makes a decent case that you don't need to be a prodigy to attempt something enormous. You just need the right partner and the willingness to go all-in.