The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  The next morning, he drove into the park early. Like Yosemite, the six-mile-long Zion Canyon is lined with some of the biggest cliffs in the country, including the Court of the Patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—a cluster of three soaring towers of vermillion Navajo sandstone that Alex admired as he drove past. A mile from the end of the canyon, where it dead-ends at the famous slot called the Narrows, Alex pulled into a turnout below the north face of Angels Landing. On the other side of the Virgin River, Moonlight Buttress glowed in the morning sun. So far, Alex hadn’t seen a soul, nor had he told a single person what he intended to do. He waded barefoot through the ice-cold emerald-colored river, holding his rock shoes in his hand, then scampered up the trail to the base of the buttress. The plan had been to wait until the route went into the shade at ten A.M., but he was so amped that he couldn’t hold himself back. He stripped off all his layers down to a cotton T-shirt and hit play on his iPod, and as Bad Religion, a punk band, began to pump through his headphones, he grabbed the first hold and pulled down.

  The average climbing party takes two days to climb Moonlight Buttress, sleeping in a portaledge on the side of the cliff halfway up, hauling bags full of provisions, and aid climbing most of the route. Alex topped out eighty-three minutes after he had set off from the base with a few songs left on his playlist.

  On the descent down the back, Alex joined a popular trail leading to the summit of Angels Landing, where he passed dozens of tourists. His climbing shoes were too tight for hiking, so he carried them in his hand. A few people felt the need to let Alex know how foolish he was for hiking barefoot. Alex just smiled and chuckled to himself.

  * * *

  —

  IN SEPTEMBER OF 2008, about five months after his free solo of Moonlight Buttress, Alex found himself alone and unroped near the top of the Northwest Face of Half Dome—and things were not going according to plan. One moment he was a hero, a demigod, and the next he was a scared twenty-three-year-old man-child, clinging to the side of a big, scary cliff that he had vastly underestimated. As his armor dissolved like an apparition, it felt like waking up from a pleasant dream into a nightmare. Alex had climbed himself into the ultimate dead end nearly 2,000 feet up the side of one of the most famous cliffs in the world, and no one but he himself could get him out of it.

  He knew what he needed to do, because he had climbed the route a few days earlier with a rope. This move had felt hard, scary hard, and was the one crux on the whole route that he hadn’t felt good about. But afterward, he told himself that he must have screwed up the sequence. When he got up there without a rope, he’d find a better, easier way to execute the move. The day before, he called his friend Chris Weidner, who had become his confidant, and told him what he was planning to do.

  “What?” said Weidner. “Are you fucking crazy? You need to rehearse the hell out of it before you try to solo it.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” said Alex. “And I’ve decided I want to keep it exciting.” On Moonlight Buttress, Alex had done extensive rehearsal before the free solo. As a result, the climb had felt “gimmicky.” He wasn’t going back up to dial in the best sequence for this crux. He would figure it out when he got there.

  But now that he was facing down the move, he realized he had sugarcoated it in his mind. This was simply and unavoidably a horribly insecure move, and without a rope to practice the different options for getting past it, he essentially had no choice but to do it the way he had a few days before, because at least he knew that sequence was doable. It meant pasting his right foot onto a tiny ripple and rocking his weight onto it while crimping two tiny creases with his fingers. If the foot didn’t slip, he could then reach through to a good hold above. But if the foot did slip? Well, that outcome was unthinkable.

  The spot he was stuck in was no picnic either. He wasn’t on a ledge resting while he contemplated how to free himself from this mental prison. The creases he gripped with his fingers were too thin to hold himself up with just his hands. His feet were perched on two small edges in the rock. Most of his weight was on his toes, and his feet and calves were beginning to burn. Footholds like these have a tendency to degrade the longer you stand on them. The friction of the boot rubber against the rock creates heat, which causes the shoe to slowly ooze off the hold. It feels like falling off the mountain in slow motion.

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, while doing the same with his hands. He kept reaching back to dip his fingers into his chalk bag like a frightened child grabbing for his security blanket. Alex needed to calm down. He took some deep breaths. You’ve got this, he told himself. But it didn’t work. He knew he didn’t have it, that he was teetering on the edge of control, that every second he didn’t execute the move it was only getting harder. Half a dozen times, he threw his right foot onto the offending hold. Do it, do it, do it, he willed himself, but something wouldn’t let him.

  If he truly had no choice, he might already have dispensed with the move, whatever the outcome. But there was another option, just as a would-be suicide jumper can walk away from the edge: right in front of his face a shiny bolt protruded from the rock, and clipped to that bolt was a fat oval carabiner. It hung on the wall inches from his right hand. He could grab it, pull himself up, and reach past this horrible move. A body length above him the difficulty eased way off. If he used the carabiner, he could be on the summit in seconds.

  He could hear the chatter of tourists up there. It was a warm late-summer afternoon. A few hundred feet away, dozens of people were taking photos, hugging, laughing, loving life. He looked up to see if any of them were watching him. It’s a common thing for tourists to get on their stomachs and inch out onto a block called the Diving Board that overhangs the vertical northwest face. BASE jumpers use it as their launch pad. Thankfully, no one was watching him. Alex was in hell, but, as he would later recount in his autobiography, at least it was his own “private hell.”

  Just grab the carabiner, a voice inside his head whispered. It’s not worth it. Don’t throw your life away for one dumb rock climb. But another voice, equally powerful, said, Wait, don’t give up yet. You’re one move away from the greatest free solo in history. Do you really want to throw away all the climbing you’ve done to get to this point?

  But some unconscious force in his mind simply would not open the gate and permit him to rock his weight onto his right foot. Each time he lifted it up and placed it on the subtle protrusion in the rock, he froze. He was about to give in and grab the carabiner, when he had an idea. By shifting the load bearing onto his middle and ring fingers, he was able to extend his index finger and lay the first pad on the bottom lip of the carabiner. He touched it ever so gently, making sure not to weight it even an ounce. This would be his compromise. He’d pull the move like this, and if the foot slipped, he’d hook his finger through the carabiner and hold on for dear life. It offered a slim possibility of survival should he blow it.

  He threw his right foot onto the ripple and, with all his weight still on the toes of his left foot, inhaled deeply.

  The gate opened.

  He weighted his right toe and bore down as hard as he could on his fingertips, still making sure not to put weight on the carabiner. The foot held, and he snatched for an in-cut edge with his left hand. Done. He charged up the final crack leading to the summit and, as he topped out, passed about twenty people sitting on the edge of the cliff. He half expected—hoped—that someone would yell, “Holy shit, everybody, check it out, this madman just free soloed the Northwest Face of Half Dome.” But no one said a word. A couple sat on a ledge a few feet away making out. The girl was cute. She paid Alex no mind. He might as well have been invisible.

  Shirtless, panting, he looked at his chalk-covered hands and wrists and the veins bulging from his forearms. He looked around again. It was a beautiful sunny day; a hundred tourists were spread out across the summit of the dome, reveling in the views of the surrounding Sierr
a Nevada and congratulating themselves on the strenuous ten-mile hike to the summit of such a remarkable geologic formation. No one noticed him. Not one single person.

  Alex took off his shoes, strung them through the belt of his chalk bag, and headed off for the cables leading down the slabs on the east side of the dome. And then, finally, someone addressed him.

  “Oh my god,” called out the tourist. Alex looked up hopefully. “You’re hiking barefoot. You’re so tough.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING the climb, Alex was bombarded with e-mails and calls from photographers and filmmakers who wanted to shoot him on the route. The same thing had happened after he free soloed the Moonlight Buttress. He told them all: “Thanks, but no thanks.” All the mileage he had put in on the rock in recent months had caused the tendinitis in his elbow to flare up, and he just wanted to hang out at his mom’s house, eat cookie dough, and keep binge-watching The Shield.

  But in early 2009, Alex had a change of heart. Perhaps, he reasoned, it made sense to go back and re-create the climbs. People were calling them the boldest free solos in history, and it was a shame that he had no record of either of them, apart from a few notations in his Bible. His friend Celin Serbo, a photographer from Boulder, Colorado, had expressed interest in Moonlight Buttress, and Alex had also been talking with another climber turned filmmaker named Peter Mortimer. Alex called them both and told them that he’d changed his mind.

  The night before the re-creation, they went out for pizza in Springdale, the gateway to Zion National Park. As they sat around hashing out the logistics for the shoot, Mortimer shivered, like he had just seen a ghost. An image had flashed in his mind’s eye—the wide-eyed kid sitting across from him free-falling down the side of Moonlight Buttress. In addition to being an award-winning filmmaker, one of the best in the climbing niche, Mortimer was also a skilled climber. He had climbed the route, so he knew exactly how hard and tenuous the climbing was. The plan had sounded great back in Boulder, but now that it was happening, he wasn’t so sure.

  After dinner, Alex headed for his van, and Mortimer; his assistant, Jim Aikman; and Serbo went to their hotel.

  “Guys,” said Mortimer a little later that evening, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I’m having second thoughts about what we’re doing here.”

  “Me too,” said Serbo.

  They talked it over. Nothing had happened yet.

  No one slept well that night. Mortimer tossed and turned as his mind worked through all the various layers of what it would mean if Alex fell. More than anything, more than the fact that it would destroy his career, that people would blame him for encouraging—if not subtly pressuring—Alex to do the climb again for the cameras, he couldn’t bear the thought of Alex dying. “I didn’t know him that well,” says Mortimer, “but I liked him and felt close to him. He was one of the most refreshing people I’d ever met because he was so real and genuine. There was no pretense, no bullshit. You knew you were talking to the real Alex.” The central question swirling in his mind was whether Alex might be doing this for the wrong reasons. They were in Zion to re-create one of the most badass climbs in history. How exactly could you see this as anything but self-aggrandizement? What is my responsibility here? wondered Mortimer.

  “Hey, dudes, what’s up,” said Alex casually, in his deep baritone voice, when they met up for breakfast the next morning. The whole scene felt surreal to Mortimer, as if they were gathering to go look at the pretty rocks from one of the tourist overlooks. But he played along, projecting a confidence he didn’t feel.

  “Cool, man, yeah, let’s do it.”

  Two hours later, Alex was standing on a ledge the width of a staircase tread, eight hundred feet off the deck. Serbo and Mortimer hung nearby, framing up their respective shots. They had all hiked up the back of Moonlight Buttress and rappelled off the top. Alex had never intended to repeat the entire free solo for the cameras; rather, he would do just the final four pitches of the route, which contained the most visually striking and dramatic moves. He slipped off his harness, clipped it to the end of the rope, and called up to Serbo that he could pull it up out of the shot. It was eight A.M., and the temperature was still only in the low fifties, but a light breeze made it feel colder. Alex wore long gray pants and a red T-shirt with a light blue polypropylene long-sleeve underneath. His only accouterment, apart from the rock shoes on his feet, was a purple chalk bag held to his waist with a piece of nylon webbing. A gray-handled toothbrush, for brushing excess chalk off handholds, was slotted in an elastic sleeve on the side of the bag.

  Staring down the wall, they could see three aid-climbing parties below. Two were starting up from the base, and one had spent the night in a portaledge a few pitches above the ground. Mortimer recalls Alex looking down at the “gumbies” and saying something like, “This is bullshit, all this posing. I should just solo the whole route again. Freak all those people out. Show them what real climbing is all about.”

  But the show, such as they had construed it, was set to begin, so Alex jammed his fingers into the perfect crack splitting the headwall above him and stepped off the ledge. The walls on either side of the crack were sandy and smooth, almost without imperfection. The only possible purchase was in the crack itself. Alex buried his fingers in it and twisted his arm and wrist to lock them in place. He tucked the tips of his toes into the crack as well. As he reached for the next finger lock, his continued existence hung from the digits of one hand. On the tighter jams, the ones where the crack pinched down to half an inch, he could get only the tips of his index and middle fingers into the crack. But most of the time he was able to sink all four fingers to the hilt. When the jams were shaped like peapods, tapering down into tight constrictions, he would slide his fingers into the crack with his thumb on top. The meat of these jams rested on his pinky. He loved these “pinky locks,” because they didn’t require the same arm torque as thumb-down jams, and he could extend to his full wingspan between moves.

  Staring through the viewfinder on his camera, Mortimer gasped at the footage he was capturing. This film was going to make them both famous. But what Alex was doing—it was inhuman. On a visceral level, it seemed to violate some unspecified law of nature. Mortimer felt sick.

  As if in answer, Alex looked up the wall toward the two cameramen as he clung to the tiny fissure in the vertical wall of stone.

  “Is this even cool?” he asked. “Do you want me to breathe hard and make it look like I’m scared or I’m trying?”

  GREAT TRANGO, PAKISTAN

  PART TWO

  The Professional World

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Crashing the Gravy Train on the Vertical Mile

  The rope yawned alongside the knife-edge ridge like a giant smiley face. Tied to its end, one hundred feet away to my right, another Alex (it was 1999, and I hadn’t met Alex Honnold yet), the world’s premier alpinist, Alex Lowe, was spread-eagled between slender pinnacles of granite. The opposing outward force of Alex’s hands and feet pressing against the grainy rock created just enough friction to hold him in place. He had been moving fast, but he now appeared stuck, stymied by a crux move harder than anything yet encountered on the nearly 6,000-foot wall we had climbed to get to this point.

  A few minutes earlier, Alex had passed up a spot where I thought he could have placed a piece of protection, an anchor in the rock that would have made the fall he was now staring down a lot less dangerous. Why didn’t he place that piece? I wondered. Did he not see it? If it had been my other climbing partner, Jared Ogden, I would have yelled, “Hey, get something in,” but I hadn’t said anything because Alex and I weren’t getting along, and I was afraid he’d think, once again, that I was bossing him around. There was also a distinct possibility that he was deliberately making the pitch more dangerous because it was faster not to stop and dink around with gear. I had figured that he’d find a way to anchor his rope
when the climbing got hard, but that didn’t happen; the drooping strand of orange cord between him and our belay was attached to nothing.

  Jared, roosting beside me with a leg on each side of the narrow ridge, held Alex’s rope in his belay plate. He looked at me, wide-eyed, and his expression said it all: Alex is pushing it a touch too far. The ridge was like the back of a Stegosaurus, with rocky pinnacles protruding like horns from its spine. On both sides, sheer rock walls dropped almost vertically. The wall to my left was the one we had spent most of the summer climbing. It fell away for more than a mile straight down to the glacier, which I couldn’t see anymore because a churning cloud bank was flowing around the bottom half of the mountain, boiling up its flanks like steam rising from a volcano. One by one, the surrounding summits were disappearing into the murk. How long, I wondered, until the approaching storm would consume us, too?

  The virgin west summit of Great Trango Tower, 20,260 feet above sea level, loomed only seventy-five feet above Alex’s head. I was a stone’s throw away from a place I had been dreaming about for half of my life, since that fateful day I first learned of this magnificent monolith in the Wellesley Free Library. But as the clouds closed in, I could think only of our packs—containing our sleeping bags, some food, and a stove—which we had stashed on a small ledge several hundred feet below our present position. We didn’t even have a water bottle or a puffy down jacket with us, and if we didn’t get back down to that ledge before nightfall and the arrival of the storm, we might well die of exposure.

  I willed myself not to calculate how far Alex would fall if he slipped, whether his rope would cut on the sharp spine of the ridge if he fell off the other side, or how we could possibly get him down if he was critically injured this high up on the mountain. It’s Alex Lowe out there, Mark, I said silently to myself. He won’t blow this. But the cramp in the left side of my chest clamped even tighter. I knew that Alex had already taken three big falls on the route so far, that he had been knocked unconscious by rockfall on pitch 13, that only one day earlier he had been so ill we weren’t sure if he would be joining us on this bid for the summit. Alex, despite the hype that surrounded him, was human, just like Jared and me. And if he inched too far out on that limb, and it broke off, there was a decent chance he was taking all of us with him.