ESTES PARK, Colo. — Beth Rodden and Tommy Caldwell just wanted time to heal after a harrowing week as captives of Islamic militants in central Asia.

What the young climbers found when they came home, though, was a barrage of attention and a jarring twist to their story. Then Caldwell suffered a career-threatening injury, severing a finger with a saw.

Rodden, 23, and Caldwell, 24, say they emerged from it all with a fiery passion for their sport, a profound gratitude for friends and a new perspective on what matters most.

“Climbing’s not life,” Rodden said recently in the small, sunny cabin they share in this mountain town. “I think Tommy and I totally value time with friends and family now. We realize there’s way more important things than climbing.”

In August 2000, Rodden and Caldwell went to the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan with climbers Jason Smith and John Dickey to scale the towering rock walls of its southern mountains.

Climbing new routes there would be another impressive achievement for Rodden and Caldwell, professional climbers who were already stars in the sport.

Seventeen days into the expedition, the four Americans were captured by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, whose fighters were trying to establish an Islamic state by force. Many had trained with al-Qaida and later fought with the Taliban, U.S. officials say.

The hostages were marched away at gunpoint, with little food and scant protection against the mountain cold. Their captors executed a fifth hostage, a Kyrgyz army sergeant.

The climbers decided their only hope might be to kill a guard and escape.

On the sixth night, Caldwell shoved a guard over a cliff. The climbers bolted and eventually stumbled into a Kyrgyz army outpost.

They returned home emotionally drained, longing for time with friends and family, but were bombarded with requests for interviews. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re such heroes, we love you — give us your story!’ ” Rodden said.

The attention subsided when they gave their story to author Greg Childs, who recounted their ordeal in the book, “Over the Edge.”

Smith and Dickey went their separate ways. Caldwell plunged into climbing as a kind of therapy.

He was racked by guilt, convinced he had killed the guard, though friends told him he had probably saved his companions’ lives. Climbing helped reconcile his feelings.

Rodden quit climbing. Nightmares hounded her, and mountains brought only fear.

After 14 months, climbing prodigy Scott Cory, 11, asked her to scale California’s El Capitan with him as a fund-raiser for the victims of Sept. 11. She agreed, and Scott’s excitement rekindled her own.

“That kind of showed me that I can do good stuff with climbing,” she said.

While Rodden was struggling, questions surfaced about the climbers’ story. The man Caldwell pushed off the cliff, Ravshan Sharipov, turned up alive, a prisoner of the Kyrgyz army.

The climbers were stunned. Sharipov compounded the shock by giving conflicting accounts, sometimes saying the climbers pushed him, other times that they drugged him.

The climbers stuck by their version. Months later, Sharipov testified in court that he was pushed. He was convicted in the climbers’ kidnapping and the deaths of 12 soldiers. He was sentenced to die and awaits execution.

In November, Caldwell and Rodden were jolted again: Caldwell cut off part of his left index finger on a table saw while remodeling their cabin.

Reattachment failed. Caldwell was determined to keep climbing, but his first attempts were painful and difficult.

Just six months after the accident, he astounded the climbing world by scaling El Capitan in 19 1/2 hours with no mechanical climbing aids. He used protective hardware only to stop any falls.

Only once before had anyone managed such a climb of El Capitan in less than 24 hours. Caldwell told himself, “OK, I’ve kind of beaten this finger injury.”

He and Rodden said they now climb with the same passion and energy they had before Kyrgyzstan, only tempered by a new perspective.

“I think we both see things on a grander scale,” Caldwell said.

“We still go for it as much as we ever did but maybe aren’t quite as bummed if we don’t succeed right away. We realize we still have a lot of life left ahead of us.”

Friendship also seems more dear.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A15.