The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  We turned back 3,500 feet up Jannu, at the base of the upper headwall, after almost being caught in an avalanche. But we had fun.

  Odintsov and his team succeeded where all other teams had failed, and their Jannu ascent was nominated for the prestigious Piolet d’Or—an award given out by the French Guides de Haute Montagne each year for the world’s best mountaineering ascent. (In 1999, our two routes on Great Trango were nominated—the Russian Way and Parallel Worlds—but neither team went home with the prize, a golden ice ax.)

  At the award ceremony in Grenoble, France, in 2005, nominees were asked to give short presentations about their climbs. House, who was nominated for a brilliant solo ascent of K7 in Pakistan, used his presentation to criticize the Russians for the heavy-handed expedition style they had employed on Jannu. Nonetheless, the Russians won, and afterward, a tense conversation took place between House and Odintsov. Later, in an article in the French magazine Vertical, House wrote, “The Russians did climb the north face of Jannu . . . but they also mutilated it with their heavy style. The Piolet d’Or pretends to award ascents that represent the ‘evolution’ of alpinism. I maintain that the Russians’ ascent of the North Face of Jannu is irrelevant to modern alpinism.”

  In a letter to Alpinist magazine, House editorialized, “Ever since the great alpinists of the previous generation brought alpine style to the Himalaya, any other style of ascent is a gross and unacceptable step backward into the past, and a great strike against all that is beautiful about the pursuit.”

  Like us, Odintsov never responded to House’s criticism, at least not publicly. I had always wondered what he said to House when they spoke at the Piolet d’Or ceremony in Grenoble. I wanted to ask Odintsov, “Am I the only one who finds all this drama among the climbing elite unseemly?” In 2006 I e-mailed him and asked him about the exchange between him and House in Grenoble. He wrote back immediately.

  Such disagreements legitimately exist between people of different age and mentality, born on different continents. It would be strange if those disagreements didn’t exist at all. Yet there exists a category of people with a firm knowledge of how one is supposed to live. For them, personal happiness isn’t enough; they need to make others happy. To them, it’s absolutely necessary that everyone around them live life by their patterns. If such a zealot is given no power, he is merely amusing and is quite harmless. But God forbid that he is given the means to try out his recipe on others. The Russians are personally familiar with such experiments. The one bad thing is that such discussions lead to disunion among people practicing this wonderful sport. Climbers, including their elite, have little association with each other as it is. To the Atlantic Ocean that separates us, do we have to add a swamp of discussion on who’s better?

  * * *

  —

  LOOKING BACK ALMOST TWO DECADES, it’s hard for me to separate the drama with Alex from the experience as a whole of working for Quokka. The intent was to let people experience, in a whole new way, what it’s like to pioneer a first ascent in the Karakoram. It was a worthy goal, I suppose, one we all believed in at the beginning. But in the end, the expedition turned into something more like an episode of Survivor. We banded together when necessary, but we weren’t a team. And for this reason, among many others, the Quokka experiment was a failure—and a mistake.

  In the years since, I’ve come around to admitting that I wasn’t blameless in the falling out with Alex. At the time, I denied vehemently that I was being bossy and overbearing, but it can’t be a coincidence that my ex-wife and at least one close friend have told me that I sometimes act exactly as Alex described me.

  I can’t speak for the others, but I know that my own awareness of being on a stage—a stage on which I was competing for the limelight with “the world’s best climber” (whether I wanted to or not)—precluded the Zen I had always found in climbing. The act of trying to share what makes climbing such a singular experience had robbed it of its essence and sucked all the joy out of a climb I had dreamed about since I was a Crazy Kid.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Secret Weapon, Mr. Safety, and Xiao Pung

  Where’s your helmet?” I asked.

  “Uhhh, I don’t have one,” replied Alex Honnold sheepishly.

  “What do you mean? You forgot it back in camp?” Before I finished my question, I knew the answer.

  “Uhhh, no. I mean I didn’t bring one on the trip.”

  “Intentionally?”

  “Sort of. I don’t actually own a helmet.”

  The conversation could have been comical if we had been anyplace other than where we were. Imposing walls of crumbly granite hung above us in every direction. The gully was about thirty feet across, its walls polished and striated by the debris-ridden flash floods that coursed through it like a flushing toilet every time it rained. It was not the kind of place you ventured without a helmet.

  Below us, the gully dropped out of sight into a mist-filled cauldron. If we were canyoneers, we could have kept rappelling into the abyss. Six miles farther down the canyon and 10,000 feet below, the gully would eventually spill us into the South China Sea. At the time, only three parties had ever successfully negotiated the canyon, one of which barely survived.

  A few months after the Trango expedition, I found myself in a dusty base camp below a volcanic spire in northern Cameroon. Around the campfire one night, my two South African climbing partners regaled me with tales of a mysterious jungle canyon lined with titanic cliffs. With each round of the whiskey bottle, the walls grew, until a giant beetle landed in the dirt in front of one of the South Africans. He promptly snatched it up and popped it into his mouth. When he was done chewing, he declared that the walls might be 10,000 feet high, nearly twice the height of Great Trango Tower.

  “Pleeeease, just tell me where it is,” I begged.

  “Yeah, well, the thing is, we can’t tell you, because we’re thinking about climbing it ourselves,” said the one who had eaten the bug.

  “You’re the last guy we’d tell,” said the other.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD MOSTLY FORGOTTEN ABOUT that whiskey-addled conversation when, many years later, I came across a book entitled Descent into Chaos. It told the story of a doomed British Army expedition that attempted the first descent of Low’s Gully, the world’s deepest slot canyon, located on the north side of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo. One look at the cover, which showed a jungle gully flanked with towering cliffs, and I knew I had found the secret climbing paradise the South Africans had teased me with back in 1999.

  The British Army envisioned the expedition as a training exercise, but the leader, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neill, vastly underestimated what he was getting into. Of the dozen men comprising his team, only one had significant climbing and canyoneering experience. Three of the men, who were Chinese, were out of shape and had never rappelled before. On February 21, 1994, they dropped into the gully with six days of provisions.

  Early on, the team split into two groups. The stronger members forged ahead, while the stragglers struggled to keep up. The original plan was to leave their ropes fixed in place as they descended, so that they would have a means of getting back out if the gully proved impassable, as sometimes happens in canyons. But they quickly realized they had not brought nearly enough rope. A decision was made to “pull through,” meaning the ropes were pulled down and reused. Now the only way out was down.

  The details of what then transpired have been the subject of two books and a movie, but the short version is that the stronger half of the team eventually emerged from the gully, barely alive, eighteen days later. And they had no idea what had happened to their weaker teammates.

  The largest rescue mission in the history of Malaysia ensued, involving more than a thousand men, most of whom tried, unsuccessfully, to work their way up the gully from below. The Malaysian and British air forces flew countless helicopter sorties
, but the gully was always maddeningly enshrouded in fog and mist.

  On day thirty-one, just before the Malaysian government was about to call off the search, a helicopter pilot spotted the six men huddled on a ledge on the side of the gully at 7,200 feet elevation. All twelve members of the expedition survived the ordeal, but Low’s Gully was forever tainted.

  By the time I contacted the Sabah Parks administration in 2008 with a plan to rappel into the depths of Low’s Gully and then climb the giant cliff hemming its west wall, several more expeditions had ventured into the canyon, including a second British Army expedition, which again had to be rescued by helicopter. So the park’s superintendent had declared Low’s Gully off-limits. I never found out why, but the officials with whom I was communicating decided not to share this crucial piece of information.

  * * *

  —

  THE CLERK AT THE FRONT desk of the hotel in Kota Kinabalu told me that only one other member of my team had arrived—a Mr. Honnold. It was the middle of the night, but after two days of shuffling across twelve time zones, I was too frazzled to sleep, so I plopped into a chair and opened a bottle of duty-free vodka. Taking my first sip, I heard a knock on the door. Through the peephole I saw Alex Honnold standing in the hallway wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. I invited him in, and he took a seat on the bed. It was the first time I’d sat face-to-face and talked with the guy, and I was immediately captivated by his eyes, which were deer-in-the-headlights huge.

  “Vodka?” I offered, holding up the bottle.

  “I don’t drink,” he said. “Never have. I don’t smoke or use caffeine either.” So that’s why the Brits had nicknamed him “the Monk,” I thought to myself. But then he qualified his teetotaling with an awkward admission: “Actually, I do have one vice—fornication.”

  “What did you bring to read?” I asked, having long since learned you could never have too much reading material on a climbing trip.

  “I brought five books,” he replied. “And I’m glad I did because I’ve already read two.” Alex rattled off some titles that included The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and several philosophical treatises on atheism.

  We talked a bit about Half Dome. It had only been about six months since the free solo. People were calling it the boldest rock climb in the history of the sport. Alex told me the story, explaining how he “lost [his] armor” on that slabby face move on pitch 21. “I should have spent more time preparing the route,” he said.

  “So what about El Cap?” I asked. In the two years since he had turned the world climbing scene on its head, he had already established himself as the best free soloist in history. And everyone knew that a free solo of El Capitan was the holy grail of rock climbing. Whoever did it would go down in history as the greatest climber ever. Dean Potter had been eyeing it. No disrespect to the Dark Wizard, but everyone knew it was beyond him. This kid sitting across from me, however, was operating in a whole new realm. It still seemed far-fetched, and I doubted it would actually happen, but every new generation of climbers pushes the boundaries beyond what the previous one thought possible. It was an obvious question to ask, though somewhat impertinent. Climbers tend to be coy about their grandest ambitions and likewise respect one another’s reticence. But Alex had an air of frank openness, which suggested to me that he wouldn’t mind my asking. And I was damn curious whether he would seriously consider it.

  “I do think about it,” said Alex, “but right now it’s way too scary. Maybe someday, though. We’ll see.” With that, he stood up, arched his back, and started toward the door.

  “Well, it was good to finally meet you,” he said as he was stepping out.

  “Actually, we’ve already met,” I replied. Alex looked at me inquisitively, tilting his head to the side, then shrugged and headed out the door.

  That meeting had been only a few weeks earlier, at a rock-climbing festival in the desert outside of Las Vegas. It was dark and noisy, and the only thing I remember from the encounter, apart from its brevity, was the handshake. As Alex’s mitt closed around mine, I felt like a little kid shaking hands with a giant. It was a peculiar sensation, because I’m taller and heftier than he is, and he didn’t have a commanding presence otherwise. He stood hunched forward, shoulders drooped, dark eyes hidden under his hoodie like some shadowy character from a Star Wars movie. Afterward, I wasn’t even sure if we had made eye contact.

  I didn’t want to invite Alex on the Borneo expedition. It had been Conrad Anker’s idea. He’d been the captain of the North Face Global Athlete Team and a leading figure in the climbing community ever since my misadventure on the Great Trango Tower with Alex Lowe and Jared Ogden nearly ten years earlier. It was Conrad’s job to scout for the next batch of talent. Shortly after the Half Dome free solo, he signed Alex to the team. I’d seen Conrad over the years being careful not to bring on people whose personalities don’t mesh with those of the rest of the North Face athletes. The crew usually hovers around forty to fifty people, with an equal number of men and women spanning various disciplines from big mountain skiing to ultrarunning and specialists in every type of climbing. A guy might be the best climber in the world, but if he’s insufferable to hang out with, he’s never getting a contract from Conrad.

  From the way Conrad was selling me on Alex, it was clear he had fallen under this kid’s spell. “He could be our secret weapon,” Anker suggested, a young, fearless gun to send out on the sharp end when the silverbacks are tapped out and a tough pitch needs to be fired. I had used similar phrases about Alex Lowe once upon a time, and the resonance was not a happy one.

  There were, of course, commercial considerations. The North Face planned to use Jimmy Chin’s photography from the expedition for a national advertising campaign. Alex Honnold, who had never been on an expedition before, was to be the new poster boy, it seemed. The firm needed photos of him in action, and the Borneo expedition was the best fit of the trips heading out that year. There was also the fact that Jimmy and another North Face climber, a filmmaker and artist named Renan Ozturk, were planning to make a film about the expedition, the theme of which they were thinking could be “Young and Old.” Just like that, not quite forty, I was the old guy.

  I was diplomatic when Conrad made the ask, careful not to say what I was thinking at the time, which was, Hell no! I don’t want to climb with that maniac. He’ll kill me. Conrad knew as well as I did that the choice of climbing partners is critical. In this case, all signs certainly pointed to the fact that Alex Honnold and I were not operating on the same wavelength.

  I had always put climbers in one of two categories: those who’d had the wake-up call, and those who hadn’t. Until a climber has experienced a serious accident, it’s easy to feel invincible, to fall into the trap of thinking Bad things happen, just not to me. Conrad, having lost several of his best friends to climbing accidents, and having nearly died himself on Shishapangma with Alex Lowe and Dave Bridges, certainly had his eyes wide-open. But what about Honnold? His eyes appeared to be wide-open, but were they really? Did he recognize how close he was to the edge?

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE I LANDED IN KOTA KINABALU, or KK as the locals call it, my idea of Borneo was pretty much the common caricature: a primitive jungle island crawling with hungry cannibals with bones stuck through their noses. KK, I discovered, is a thriving first-world metropolis that serves as a popular vacation destination for Asians, especially Japanese. Ringed with tropical beaches, KK, which is home to about 450,000 people, reminded me of Honolulu. What I didn’t know is that Borneo, the world’s third-largest island, is divided among three different countries. Three-quarters of the island is Indonesian territory, while the northern portion is mostly part of Malaysia, except for a 2,200-square-mile enclave on the north coast owned by the tiny nation of Brunei.

  We spent several days sweltering in the equatorial heat of KK as we dealt with logistics like sorting
and organizing our gear, buying food, and picking up last-minute supplies. What the rest of the team didn’t know was that I was making regular trips to the Sabah Parks administration office to work on our permit, which I still didn’t have. Every day, I was shuffled from one office to the next. The various officials were mostly pleasant, but no one was willing to tell me whether I would be given a permit or not.

  By the time we finally pulled out of KK in two vans, one carrying us and the other all our equipment, I still didn’t have permission for us to rappel into Low’s Gully. I felt like I was gambling with someone else’s money, and I had gone all in. When we got to the park headquarters at the trailhead for Mount Kinabalu, I would find out if the superintendent was going to fold or call my bluff.

  On our way out of town we pulled into an electrical supply store. We had stopped at this shop on an industrial backstreet the day before to get an adapter for the generator that Jimmy and Renan would use to charge their camera batteries. Our outfitter, a middle-aged Malaysian man I’ll call Paul, walked into the store and came out a few minutes later followed by the beautiful young woman who had sold us the adapter. She was petite but had a voluptuous body, with long black hair and sleepy eyes. She slid into the front seat between Paul and our driver, placing a small Hello Kitty bag down by her feet. She looked back at us and smiled but said nothing. I assumed Paul knew her and she was bumming a ride, perhaps to see family who lived out near the park.