The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  As we scrabbled our way down the gully, still determined to ascend the cliff, I noticed a horizontal break that offered a potential traverse out onto the main face. We followed it, scrambling sideways, clawing our way hand over hand through bushes to reach a small ledge about two hundred feet above the deck, with sweeping walls of clean granite surrounding it in every direction. Still tied together with the clothesline, each with some extra coils over our shoulders, we sat side by side, taking in the bird’s-eye view of the valley far below us. We gave each other a knowing look. We had taken Crazy Kids of America to a whole new level, and it felt so right.

  Our reverie was cut short by a jangly metallic sound, and a few seconds later a hand appeared at the lip below our feet, followed by a man who hauled himself onto our ledge. What followed was a moment of mutual disbelief as the two climbing parties took each other in. He was probably in his twenties, bearded, with calloused fingers and taut arms all muscle and sinew. I stared at his collection of space-age-looking gadgets, which hung from snap links on a bandolier over his shoulder. His rope—unlike ours, which was comprised of three lumpy braids—had a smooth sheath decorated in an Indian print of yellow and black geometric patterns.

  “Wow, that’s some nice-looking gear you’ve got,” I said.

  The fit man stared back at us, his face all surprise, and said something like, “How the hell did you two jackasses get up here?”

  Jeff and I scooted out of his way and observed with rapt attention as he secured himself to some bolts in the wall with a couple of snap links he unhooked from his harness. “We should get our hands on some of those for next time,” I said to Jeff.

  When the climber’s partner arrived and saw us sitting side by side next to his friend, he was equally bewildered. But the climbers wasted no time feeding their ropes through some rings in the wall and setting up what I would learn was a rappel. I keenly observed their every move, secretly hoping that our new friends might have a word of advice for our descent or, better, help us get down. Lowering yourself down on a rope looked like a great option, but as I observed them set up their gear, it was obvious that it would be tricky without harnesses, their snap links, or those fancy figure-eight thingies they were now feeding their ropes into. At the very least I wanted some props from them, a word or two acknowledging that we men were all cut from the same cloth.

  But instead, as nonchalant about our fate as my dad had been that morning, they stepped off the edge onto the steep, smooth rock wall below. They slid down their ropes, leaving us kids alone on the ledge to figure out our own way down.

  After they hit the ground below, they pulled their ropes out of the anchor by our heads, leaving them empty. So we fed our clothesline through the rings, just like we’d seen them do. Since we didn’t have any gear other than the rope, the only option was a Batman-style bare-handed rappel, which worked for me until I reached the end of the rope and found myself dangling in the middle of a blank wall, still a hundred feet above the ground. Thankfully, using my feet to push off, I was able to pendulum swing over into the gully. Jeff followed suit. From there it was an easy climb back to terra firma.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS A CLIMBER NOW, which meant it was time to begin a proper apprenticeship. So I was thrilled to discover that the Wellesley Free Library had a climbing and mountaineering section. I’d been rooting around in this library since I was a little kid, and all those years this treasure trove had been sitting right under my nose: The Vertical World of Yosemite by Galen Rowell, Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills by the Mountaineers, Climbing Ice by Yvon Chouinard, The White Spider by Heinrich Harrer, Blank on the Map by Eric Shipton, Annapurna by Maurice Herzog, and The Shining Mountain by Peter Boardman. I signed them out and greedily read them in quick succession. These books and others opened my eyes to a hitherto unknown world of high adventure, to a time frame the authors referred to as “the golden age” of climbing and exploration. The golden age, from what I read, was a time when there were still blanks on the map, when all the great mountains of the world were unclimbed, and any man or woman who had the courage, the resolve, the tenacity, could go stick a flag in a place on planet Earth where no person had ever been.

  In the photo insert of The Shining Mountain was a picture of a bearded Joe Tasker hanging in a hammock suspended on the side of a frozen vertical wall of white Himalayan granite called Changabang, a glacier thousands of dizzying feet below. I stared at that picture for days until I could just about feel the cold granite against my back, the nylon pinching my shoulders, a cold wind frosting my face. Far more than the summit, I became enthralled with the idea of the bivouac, the part of these epic climbs when you get to relax, when maybe you’d had a decent meal and were warmly ensconced in your sleeping bag, comfy and secure in the midst of a thin-aired, cold, cold world of rock and ice.

  There was one mountain that stood out like a beacon among all the rest—the Trango Tower. I first gazed upon its otherworldliness while ensconced at a carrel desk in a back room of the library. This ethereal spire rising into the mist knitted perfectly with my vision of what a mountain should be. One day . . .

  While my new heroes may not have come right out and said it in so many words, I knew that the golden age of mountaineering was the greatest time in human history. And I had missed it. Here I was, a hyperactive kid, desperate to find something that could give meaning and direction to my life. Then, just as I discovered heroes to lead the way, they quashed my delusions of grandeur. Why couldn’t I have been born a generation sooner?

  I sulked about it for a week or so, until it struck me: What if the golden age wasn’t completely over? What if there still were some obscure blanks on the map that hadn’t yet been filled in? What if I could find some random mountain that no one had ever heard of, a mountain that my heroes had overlooked?

  And there, in the musty reading room of the local library, a trajectory was firmly set.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Vision of the Stonemasters’ Lightning

  Alex Honnold was screwed.

  He had climbed hundreds of feet up the frozen gully, lured in by the initial low angle and the softness of the snow. But as he ascended, kicking steps with the REI snowshoes he had found in his dad’s closet the day before, the gully had gradually narrowed and steepened until he found himself clawing the boilerplate ice in front of him with his bare fingers. If he’d had any idea how to climb snow and ice, the snowshoes would have long been stowed away on his pack in favor of crampons with steel toe spikes. But Alex didn’t own crampons or an ice ax. It was his first winter hike. And he was alone.

  A more experienced mountaineer might still have saved himself by retreating down the staircase of tiny toeholds the same way one descends a ladder. Instead, when Alex realized he had no choice but to retreat, he turned around to get an eye on the steep slope below him, like a skier sizing up his run. A second later, he was on his back, careening down the mountain. As he picked up speed, Alex looked down and saw a field of angular granite blocks at the bottom of the slope. His last thought before he slammed into the talus was I’m going to die.

  * * *

  —

  DIERDRE WAS MAKING TEA at the kitchen counter when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “Alexandre?” It sounded like Alex, but something wasn’t right. His voice was muffled, like his mouth was stuffed with cotton balls.

  “Where am I? Why am I all covered in blood?”

  Dierdre rushed into the bedroom in back; woke up her daughter, Stasia, who is two years older than Alex; and handed her the phone. “Keep him talking,” she said. “I’m going to call 911.”

  The dispatcher at the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office told Dierdre to ask Alex what he could see. Were there any landmarks they could use to determine where he was? She grabbed the phone back from Stasia.

  �
��What do you see?”

  Silence. Did he pass out? “Alex, Alex, are you there? Are you awake?”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Mom.”

  “Well, what are you speaking English for?” replied Alex, sounding annoyed. “I thought you were somebody else.”

  Indeed, it was the first time in nineteen years since Alex’s birth that Dierdre, a professor who taught French, Spanish, and English as a second language, had spoken to her son in English. She wanted to raise her children in a bilingual household. Alex mostly replied in English, his way of letting his mom know he thought the whole thing was kind of stupid.

  “Ne bouge pas, les secours arrivent” (Sit tight, help is on its way), she said, switching to French.

  * * *

  —

  HE’D OWNED THE CELL PHONE for less than twenty-four hours. His mom had given it to him for Christmas. She had almost returned it because Verizon had given her the wrong one, the fancy model with the built-in camera. But it was the camera that had made Alex think to bring it with him that day. Luckily, it survived his tumble down the hill.

  He faded in and out of consciousness. In his more lucid moments, he gazed to the north toward Lake Tahoe, which he vaguely recognized. But he still didn’t know why he was lying in a pile of rocks at the base of a snowfield. There was a streak of blood on the slope above him. He looked down at his shredded hands. His right thumb had been degloved and felt broken. The side of his head was raw and swollen. There was a hole in his cheek, and his chest hurt like hell whenever he breathed in. His puffy jacket looked as though a tiger had attacked it. Down stuck to the blood all over his body, as if he’d been tarred and feathered. The more he probed his body, the more hurt parts he found.

  The first helicopter, an Airbus H135, located Alex but couldn’t land due to high winds. The pilot radioed his position back to the sheriff’s office, which told Dierdre they would have to send in a team on foot. This was going to take hours, and a powerful storm was developing over the Sierra Nevada. He’s going to freeze to death, thought Dierdre. Then she got some good news. A smaller chopper operated by the California Highway Patrol had made a gutsy landing at the base of the southeast chute. As they packaged Alex for the evacuation, he lost consciousness again.

  Alex’s mom took him home from the hospital in Reno late that night. He had stitches in his hand and face, a punctured sinus, chipped teeth, a broken right hand, and a serious concussion. The next day, lying in bed, his eyes nearly swollen shut, Alex recorded the ordeal in the diary he had started a month earlier. With his left hand (he was a righty), he neatly scribed the following:

  Tallac

  Fell, broke hand. . . . airlifted.

  Should have stayed more calm and walked off. Pussy

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL MONTHS, Alex recuperated at home in Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento. A new video game had just come out called World of Warcraft, set in an alien world called Azeroth inhabited by zombies, werewolves, and gryphons. The object of the game is to complete quests that reward the player with points and currency that can be used to buy weapons and superpowers. Alex escaped to Azeroth for hours every day. In the game, he could lose himself in a fantasy world and forget about his own life, which hadn’t been going so well lately.

  His grandfather, with whom he was close, had died the year before. The route Alex used to ride his bike to the climbing gym went past his grandfather’s house, so he would often stop by to play cribbage and chess with the old man. Several months later, after Alex graduated from high school, his parents announced they were divorcing, though Alex and his sister already knew, because they’d been reading their mom’s e-mails on the family computer. Charlie Honnold moved out of the family home that summer. Not long afterward, Alex enrolled at UC Berkeley, thinking he might major in civil engineering. He lived off campus in the apartment of a family friend. Alex skulked around in sweatpants and an oversize sweatshirt, usually with the hood up. He had always been socially reserved, but now, without the support of his childhood best friend Ben Smalley or his girlfriend, Elizabeth, he withdrew into his own private world, a place with which he was already deeply acquainted.

  According to Ben, Alex had a lot of social anxiety in high school. He never went to a single party or made the slightest effort to try to fit in and be popular. At lunch, while the cool crowd gathered in their exclusive section of the cafeteria, Alex retreated to the algebra room to “hang out with all the losers.”

  “If something made him uncomfortable or he was nervous about it, he would just avoid it,” says Smalley. “He would sometimes make offhanded comments about the shiny, happy people, but it was never like, ‘Oh, I wish I was one of them, I wish they liked me.’ It was more like an acknowledgment that they exist, and he wasn’t one of them. He was so far from being like them that he decided he wasn’t going to bother even trying to get there.”

  But although Alex was a confirmed geek, people still respected him, says Ben, because he was so intelligent. He was a top student in the school’s International Baccalaureate program, despite having no real passion for academics. He did the bare minimum to get by. Alex’s mom was a member of Mensa, a society for people with high IQs. Alex also took their test and passed. According to Mensa, his intelligence puts him in at least the top two percent of the general population.

  At UC Berkeley, Alex was surrounded by more shiny people than he’d ever seen in his life, but he was so shy and socially timid that he sometimes went months without communicating face-to-face with anyone. He claims that he never made a single friend that entire year. His second semester he started cutting classes to go rock climbing. His favorite spot was Indian Rock in the Berkeley Hills, two miles north of campus. He’d ride up there on his bike and spend hours traversing back and forth on the volcanic outcropping. Between climbs he’d sit on top of the rocks next to the acorn-grinding pits carved by Native Americans, eat plain bread, and stare out past the houses toward campus to the south. To the north, he could see San Francisco Bay, which was often blanketed in fog, only the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge rising above the mist.

  Climbing was his one salvation, and he hardly ever missed a day. When he wasn’t hitting the gym, Indian Rock, or the stone-clad buildings on campus, he sat around in his boxers playing video games and doing pull-ups on the doorframe of his room. His classmates, who had little to no awareness of his existence, had no way of knowing that the quiet genius who was flying under everyone’s radar was slowly transforming himself into a climber the likes of which the world had never seen.

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST HONNOLD blip on the climbing world’s radar was in July 2004, after his first year at Berkeley, at the National Climbing Championships. The competition was held at Pipeworks in Sacramento, a gym where Alex had been training since it opened in 2000. Feeding off the energy of the hometown crowd, Alex delivered an inspired performance and took second place in the youth division (ages fourteen to nineteen). This qualified him for the world championships in Scotland, which would take place two months later. Shortly after the nationals, Alex’s father, who had served as his one-man support crew over the past eight years, driving him to competitions all over California and holding his rope for countless hours, died from a heart attack while hustling to catch a flight at the Phoenix airport. He was fifty-five years old.

  At the world championships in September, Alex couldn’t muster any motivation or enthusiasm for the event. He placed thirty-ninth.

  The thought of another year at UC Berkeley filled Alex with dread, so he asked his mom if he could drop out. Knowing how miserable he had been—he had described the college experience as “heinous”—she agreed. Then, the day after Christmas 2004, Alex nearly killed himself on Mount Tallac.

  * * *

  —

  FOR SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER THE ACCIDENT, Ale
x sat around his mom’s house feeling sorry for himself. He would later call it his “blue period.” He describes himself during this time as a “gangly-looking” dude with a bad complexion who was “just not cool at all, with, like, no real prospects, no real future.” Smalley visited Alex that winter and grew concerned about the way his friend was handling the death of his father, which was to act as though nothing had happened.

  “I remember explicitly asking him, ‘Why aren’t you grieving more?’” says Smalley.

  Alex explained it away, telling Smalley, “Dad and I weren’t super close. All he really did was take me climbing—it’s all we shared. We didn’t talk. He just sort of ghosted through the house. It’s hard to miss someone who wasn’t really there.”

  When Smalley pressed, explaining to Alex that it was important for his emotional health to go through the grieving process, Alex replied, “You don’t understand. Your family is normal and wholesome, and my family is weird and fucked up.”

  Alex would later tell me that his dad’s death had been somewhat surreal. One day, he came home and found his mom sitting on the edge of their pool with her legs dangling in the water. She was crying. “Your dad died,” she said.

  “I never actually saw the body or went to a funeral or anything like that,” said Alex. “There was no closure. And I remember thinking that there was no real verification that he was actually dead.” Alex also told me, in retrospect, that his father’s death was especially tragic because Charlie had been in the process of transforming himself after the divorce. It was like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, and the taciturn, reserved man who hardly spoke was showing a whole new side to his personality. He started traveling again, which had been his passion before Stasia and Alex had come along. He had plans to see the world. He would go to all the countries still on his list and buy more souvenir masks to add to his collection. Alex had heard about this alter ego from members of his dad’s family, but now he was seeing it for the first time. He was excited to get to know this new person. Then suddenly he was gone.