The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  As an accomplished BASE jumper, Potter took to sometimes free soloing with a parachute, a sport entirely of his own invention, which he called freeBASE. This allowed him to push his free soloing out to the edge of his climbing ability. His most notable freeBASE took place in 2008, when he climbed the 1,000-foot-long 5.12+ Deep Blue Sea on the north face of the Eiger (13,025 feet elevation) in Switzerland.

  As a speed climber, free soloist, highliner, and wingsuit BASE jumper, Potter was without peer. He rampaged around the world practicing what he called his “arts,” perhaps in acknowledgment of the Wizard moniker. By the mid-2000s, he was one of the most recognized and respected outdoor athletes in the world. He and his wife, Steph Davis, a top female climber, were the power couple of climbing. Thanks to lucrative contracts with companies like Patagonia and Black Diamond, they made a nice living and owned homes in Yosemite and Moab.

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  IN THE EARLY MORNING LIGHT on May 7, 2006, Potter started up the slender east leg of a sandstone formation called Delicate Arch. The forty-six-foot-tall arch is the centerpiece of Arches National Park in Moab, Utah, and appears on the state’s license plate. Potter had decided that he would free solo the formation as way to “commune with nature.” It was also a chance to get some footage for a documentary film about his life called Aerialist. As he climbed upward past an overhanging bulge in the soft sandstone, two cameramen dangled from ropes above him. When he got to the top, he put on a harness he had previously stashed on the summit and rappelled back to the ground. He reportedly soloed the arch a total of six times that morning.

  It was well-known that the arch was off-limits to climbing, but Potter, having carefully parsed the exact wording of the regulation, decided that it didn’t strictly prohibit someone from free soloing the formation. That afternoon, Potter sent the footage to Patagonia, where a woman in the marketing department released it to various news outlets. When the story broke in The Salt Lake Tribune the next day, the condemnation was swift and furious.

  Utahans were livid that some daredevil had violated a revered and fragile symbol of their state’s natural wonders. The climbing community was even more disappointed; not because Potter had climbed the arch—climbers have never been known as rule followers—but because one of their heroes, a man who had always preached about the spirituality that drove his climbing, had the hubris to brag about something that he should have kept to himself.

  The park service moved quickly to close the loophole that prevented it from charging Potter with breaking the law, and then it went a step further and drafted a new regulation prohibiting slacklining and the establishment of any new fixed anchors in the park. Thanks to Potter, the opportunity to establish new routes in Arches National Park was now severely limited. In one morning of climbing, he had done more damage to the climbing community’s relationship with land managers than anyone in the history of the sport.

  Outside magazine and the Access Fund, a nonprofit that protects access to climbing areas, sent people to the park to inspect Delicate Arch. Using spotting scopes and telephoto lenses, they documented the existence of deep grooves that had been worn into the rock on the summit of the formation—the kind of grooves that form when ropes saw back and forth on sandstone. Potter claimed that his crew had not created the grooves, but he refused to disclose how he got a rope on top of the formation to begin with. An old trick used by desert climbers was to shoot a string over the top using a bow and arrow. I later heard from a friend who was there that day that they used a tennis racket to hit a ball with a line attached to it over the top. Potter and his crew were not the first people to stand on top of Delicate Arch, and the grooves in the rock were likely from numerous previous ascents and rappels, but since the others were anonymous, he was the one left holding the bag.

  Patagonia, which had built its brand on an ethos of conserving the environment, was horrified. The poster boy for their company had just desecrated one of the most sacred landmarks in the country. Initially, they stood behind Potter but told him he had to apologize, which he did, in an open letter to the outdoor-climbing community.

  Around the same time that Patagonia released Potter’s statement, I received an e-mail from him. The subject line read “I NEED HELP!” Though I never knew Potter well enough to consider him a buddy, I was in his larger circle of friends and associates. The e-mail ended with a plea to call or write Patagonia’s CEO, Casey Sheahan. Potter even suggested the wording I could use in his defense:

  I object to the criticism of Dean’s climb of Delicate Arch. It was not illegal. No harm was done to the rock. It is unfair and libelous to criticize Dean on the basis of inaccurate reports and unsubstantiated opinions. I respect Dean’s no-impact climbing style, and I think it is completely in line with Patagonia’s strong environmental ethics. Thank you for supporting Dean.

  Hundreds of people did call and write Patagonia to defend Potter, but in the end it didn’t matter. Within a few weeks of the incident, Patagonia terminated its contracts with Dean and Steph. Not long afterward, Potter free soloed Heaven.

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  CEDAR WRIGHT, AKA “MR. MAGOO,” inhaled deeply, tilted back his head, and barked, “Oughh, Oughh.” His guttural cry, meant to sound like a monkey’s call but closer to that made by an old dog with worn-out vocal chords, floated up the orange shield of rock that loomed above him high on the west face of El Capitan. Someone was up there rappelling down the wall, and if it was a fellow Stone Monkey, he’d return the call. But whoever it was didn’t reply.

  “Holy shit, it’s that Honnold kid,” Cedar called to his partner, Nick Martino, when Alex came into view. Martino was fifty feet to the side of where Cedar was hanging at the belay for pitch 24 of Freerider. It was the pair’s third day on the wall, and they were hoping to top out that evening. Neither of them knew Alex, but they certainly knew of him. For the past two weeks, the Monkeys had been all atwitter, as if a cobra had just slid into their nest, because some kid had come out of nowhere and free soloed two of the burliest routes in Yosemite—Astroman and the Rostrum—back-to-back in the same day. Only one other person had ever done this—Peter Croft, twenty years before, in 1987.

  Croft’s feat had stunned the climbing world and shifted the paradigm of what people thought possible, just as Bachar’s boldest free solos had a decade earlier. By 2007, Croft was a revered fixture in Yosemite, universally held in high esteem. He was quiet—taciturn, even—but had an easy, winning smile and was always friendly when approached. He went about his business with little fanfare, a rarity for someone in his league. Unlike so many other sports, climbing has no arena; there are no grandstands at the base of the cliff. Nor is there a scoreboard or official results. If a climber wants his exploits known, he or his partner often just has to tell someone. Climbers call it “spraying,” and for really good climbers, the ones with sponsorships and endorsement contracts, it’s generally seen as a necessary evil. And yet there’s no getting around the unseemly fact that it’s bragging, and every climber knows it in his heart. Consequently, many climbers struggle to affect a low-key demeanor while letting it slip that they just did such and such hard route and the crux was wet and they were already tired from doing such and such other hard route.

  But no one denied that Peter Croft was a genuinely humble hard-man. While other elite climbers of his era parlayed their exploits into a comfortable living, what little Croft had in the way of sponsorships or endorsements he supplemented by working unglamorously as a guide. And he did so to fund the simplest of lifestyles, living in a small house with his wife, driving a beater hatchback, and climbing every day.

  Word might never have gotten out about Croft’s Astroman-Rostrum linkup if it weren’t for a chance encounter Croft had with Bachar that day. By Bachar’s account, Croft’s hands were covered in chalk and he had the unmistakable look in his eyes that said he’d just been to another planet and back. Bachar knew the
feeling, knew Croft had just done something big. He asked Croft what he had been up to. Croft dodged the question by taking a big bite of his sandwich. But Bachar wasn’t going to let him off the hook until he’d spilled it, which Croft eventually did, sheepishly.

  Bachar was floored. The 1,000-foot Astroman represented the next level in free soloing, a climb that calls for every club in a Yosemite climber’s bag, from thin, delicate face climbing to wide cracks, like the infamous Harding Slot. The moves entering the slot, where the crack flares from two inches to a foot wide, are horribly insecure. Bachar had made the route’s first free ascent in 1975. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine free soloing it. The Rostrum was a shorter, slightly easier climb downvalley, but it was still above Bachar’s free-solo pay grade. He had considered soloing it when he was in his prime but never quite mustered up the gumption.

  Now, the first person to repeat Croft’s masterpiece, and only the third to free solo Astroman, was a dorky kid from Sacramento no one had heard of. The word circulating among the Monkeys was that he had been climbing outdoors for only three years. It wasn’t unusual for a gym rat to transfer onto real rock and start pulling down big numbers at a crag like Jailhouse, where the movement is similar to indoor climbing. Gym climbing had been exploding in popularity. With tens of thousands of young kids getting into the sport, it was inevitable that the overall level of climbing would rise accordingly. In the 1990s, there were only a handful of people capable of climbing the rarefied grade of 5.14. Ten years later, you could go to the local gym in any big city and probably find young kids climbing that hard. But no one had just shown up in Yosemite Valley and almost immediately mastered the vast repertoire of crack-climbing techniques needed to do a route like Astroman, let alone free solo it.

  The Monkeys had seen the kid around; a few had spoken to him and climbed with him. But he was standoffish, which rubbed some people the wrong way. Rumor also had it that he drove his white Ford E-150, which someone had nicknamed the “Pedophile Van,” down Highway 140 every night to a pullout just outside the park boundary. The Monkeys took pride in their outlaw status, sleeping illegally under boulders, on ledges at the base of El Capitan, or in their vehicles in unoccupied campsites. But this Honnold kid actually followed the rules. Who does that? wondered Cedar.

  It was a serendipitous place to meet for the first time, nearly half a mile off the deck on the side of El Capitan, because at that moment Martino was stuck. He’d been trying to lead a pitch known as the traverse to Round Table Ledge, which goes straight sideways for eighty feet. Martino fell near the end of the pitch and now hung fifteen feet below the horizontal crack system. He wanted to try again from the beginning, do it in proper traditional style, but since the pitch was a horizontal traverse, there was no way to rappel back to the anchor. But maybe now this Honnold dude could throw him the end of his rope. Alex obliged, and a few minutes later Martino was pendulum swinging across the cliff, jerking Alex around like a marionette controlled by a mad puppeteer.

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  JUST LIKE IN HIGH SCHOOL, Alex made no effort to try to fit in with the eclectic posse of misfits who called themselves the Stone Monkeys. Cedar, who soon became a close friend of Alex’s, says that Alex thought the whole Stone Monkey scene—the pot smoking, the drinking, the ape calls, the ridiculous singing and strumming around the campfire at night—was “stupid.”

  James “Peaches” Lucas was one of the few Stone Monkeys who could call Alex a friend in 2007. They had met the year before in Squamish and had climbed together a bit. “He was kind of an outlier,” says Lucas, “because he didn’t smoke or drink. He didn’t know a lot of people, so he didn’t hang out that much.”

  Lucas was the one who reported Alex’s Astroman-Rostrum free solo linkup on SuperTopo.com, an Internet forum that is like Facebook for Yosemite climbers. The post didn’t appear until six days after the event. In the interim, Alex had kept it under his hat.

  Last week, (Wednesday I think—which ever day NPS did the big controlled burn in the Valley) Alex Honold free soloed Astroman. Honold climbed the route doing the boulder problem pitch as well as the 11b variation higher. Later in the day he soloed the Regular North Face of the Rostrum using the unprotected 5.10 variation at the second pitch (there was a party on the 11a) Honold has also onsight free-soloed Pipeline (A Squamish Offwidth testpiece), the Lighning Bolt Cracks on the North Six Shooter, and soloed Chud a 13a at Rifle. Just wanted to send some props out to Alex. He’s pretty modest so I figured I’d spray for him. Good job man.

  “It was kind of a surprise to a lot of people that you could come to the valley and not hang out and be social and just rock climb and treat it as a serious sport,” says Lucas. “When you do that, and you’re not spending all this time spraying, you get a lot more done. He’s a really good example of someone who followed the textbook of what to do if you want to get good at climbing.”

  The new kid had some similarities to Peter Croft. When Croft made his first road trip to the valley from his home in British Columbia in the late 1970s, “he was like Huckleberry Finn or the Jungle Boy,” said Jo Whitford, Croft’s first wife, in an article in Climbing magazine. “He wore these old corduroy shorts, all jagged, that he’d cut off with a Swiss Army knife. He’d go out soloing all day, come down and hang out by himself, and sleep in the dirt. He didn’t even own a sleeping bag.” Her husband, she said, had a hard time interacting with people he didn’t know well. “He thinks about things. He likes to find out about the truth.”

  Young Alex was seeking his own truth.

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  AT FIRST, everyone thought it was an April Fools’ Day joke. The rumor bouncing around the climbing community on April 1, 2008, was that Alex Honnold had free soloed the Moonlight Buttress. It was not the kind of route that anyone would ever solo. It’s a 1,200-foot monolith in southwest Utah’s Zion National Park capped with a vertical headwall whose only weakness is a finger-width crack that cleaves the orange sandstone like an expansion joint in the wall of a parking garage. In 2008, it was still impressive when someone climbed the route roped up without falling. The idea of anyone topping it without a rope was ludicrous.

  At first, neither Climbing, nor Rock and Ice, nor Alpinist magazine reported the climb on their websites, verifying in most people’s minds that it was a hoax. Then, on April 8, all three published stories confirming the free solo with firsthand accounts from Alex. Among other things, Alex said he didn’t know that it was April Fools’ the day he had done it. He was living in his van and climbing every day, so one day blurred into the next, and he almost never knew the day of the week, let alone the date.

  Astroman and the Rostrum—impressive as they were—one could understand being climbed without a rope. It had been done before. Both are rated 5.11c, and Honnold’s best climb to date had been 5.14b. But the Moonlight Buttress is rated 5.12d, which (in the strange risk calculus climbers employ) trims the cushion, the margin for error, down to a grade and a half. Yes, people had shaved it this close before. Potter shaved it much closer on Heaven, but that route is a short, forty-foot-long single-pitch climb. Potter spent less than two minutes in the death zone. Moonlight Buttress, on the other hand, has one pitch of 5.11c and six consecutive pitches—almost seven hundred feet—of 5.12. Honnold had just annihilated everyone’s notion of what a ropeless rock climber could do.

  Alex had spent two days practicing the route on a solo toprope, hiking to the top and fixing down the wall. There were a couple of sections that he wanted to make sure he had fully dialed in. One was a face-climbing move on pitch 5 where the climber surmounts a feature called the Rocker Blocker. It’s a five-by-three-foot loose block that teeters a few inches when you climb over it. Above the block is a long reach past a blank section to a secure hold shaped like an elephant ear. When Alex did the move, he looked down to see if he might land on the Rocker Blocker if he slipped when he was free soloing. Nope. The
key hold was just a smidge too far to the right. If he fell, he might bounce off the side of the Rocker Blocker, but there was no way it would stop him from going to the ground.

  He had planned to rest for one day and then go for it, but it rained, and you can’t climb on sandstone when it’s wet because the holds absorb water and become extra friable. Climbers in sandstone areas like Zion and Red Rocks go ballistic if you break this taboo and climb when the rock is wet, because you could break a key hold and destroy a route. In Alex’s case, the consequences were a bit more severe.

  So he sat in his van in a movie theater parking lot by himself, running through the climb in his mind for hours on end. He thought about the individual moves, the sequences, how he would use his feet above the Rocker Blocker—and how heroic it was going to feel hanging up there on Moonlight Buttress with nothing but the tips of his fingers between him and eternity. But he also thought about how things could go wrong and what it would feel like if he slipped. Rather than hide from this reality, he explored it, right down to picturing how it would feel to hit the ground at terminal velocity. In his mind’s eye, he hovered above his crumpled, bloody body. It was all part of his preparation. He wanted to think about it now, thoroughly, so he didn’t have to when he was up on the wall. Get it out of his system, so to speak. This way there wouldn’t be any surprises. People walked in and out of the movie theater, but no one noticed Alex sitting in his van. Later, he realized that he had been so lost in his head that he couldn’t remember if he had gone to a movie or not.

  The night of March 31, he cooked himself mac and cheese on his Coleman double burner and afterward he watched a police drama called The Shield on his laptop. At eight P.M. he went to sleep.