The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  Would he be able to right himself and get enough separation from the wall to deploy his chute with any significant chance of a successful opening? He’d seen other jumpers’ chutes hit the cliff, not open properly, or snag. A lot of those people were now dead. The best he could do to increase his odds was to make practice jumps with awkward, uncontrolled exits like falling sideways, falling on his back, tumbling. One day, while rehearsing the first crux of the route on the fourth pitch, he dropped a stone that he had carried down from the ridge in his pocket. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, he counted. Then he heard the crack as it impacted the low-angle slope at the base of the wall. The more he visualized falling off at the various cruxes on the route, the more he realized the parachute offered little more than a vague possibility of survival. If freeBASE wasn’t exactly free soloing, it was far less similar to climbing with a rope. To attempt it on a route that he considered beyond his free-solo realm was pushing up the risk to an almost absurd level, even for the Dark Wizard.

  * * *

  —

  THE LONGER THE TRIP DRAGGED on, the more pressure and stress Dean began to feel. He knew he was taking it out on Jim. They talked about it. Dean told Jim he felt bad about how he was treating him—but he couldn’t help himself. He said he had to be hypercontrolling because if he couldn’t control every little detail in his life, how could he maintain control when he was flying, free soloing, or highlining without a tether?

  It was a flaw—an ill-fitted joint in the conglomeration of brooding personality and exuberant life-force that was Dean Potter. He knew he had been this way with Steph, too, and that it was part of what had driven her away. Now he was doing it to Jim. And Jim was one of Dean’s oldest friends. Jim was thick-skinned, but a person could take only so much abuse. Dean had just ripped into him for not making the coffee according to his exact specifications. If he didn’t ease off, Jim was going to snap. Who then would film Dean’s art?

  After several weeks camped at the base of the Eiger, they woke up one day and the sky was clear. Jim headed up the ridge to the top of the route. Dean traversed in to the wall on a ledge, bypassing the lower-angled pitches at the bottom of the route. As Jim rappelled down from above and Dean started up the climb, wispy clouds began to coalesce around the summit. By the time Dean set off on the crux fourth pitch, clouds were boiling up from below and sifting down the wall from above. Jim hung on his rope about twenty-five feet above him, framing the shot: Dean, wearing a green short-sleeve shirt, black parachute pants, and a small purple-and-black pack (containing his BASE rig), floating above a white cottony ether. Dean crimped a thin side-pull edge, reeled it in, and reached high and right for a brown spot where the rock was spiny, like the back of a puffer fish. At his full extension, the hold was still six inches out of reach. He tried again: same thing. “Fuck,” he said quietly, to himself. Something wasn’t right. Was it the BASE rig? Was it too heavy? He tried one more time, but the hold was just beyond his grasp. Then he realized his feet were too low, on the wrong holds. He resituated them and pulled again, but his forearms were now flushed with lactic acid and his fingers were uncurling from the holds. He was pumping out. The BASE rig felt like a lead weight on his back. He realized this was it: He would have to jump off. He looked over his shoulder into the opaque stew of cloud that had now completely socked in the north face of the Eiger. He was looking at a blind jump into a cloud with no visual cues to orient himself in the air—almost certain disaster. He had only one hope for survival. “Dude,” he yelled. “I can’t do it. You have to rescue me!”

  Jim had been so absorbed in the filming that he hadn’t realized the gravity of the situation. One moment he was staring through the viewfinder, watching Dean grope for the out-of-reach hold, the next he was frantically trying to save his friend’s life. Jim quickly stowed the camera and reached down to drop the rope that he had coiled and clipped to his harness so it wouldn’t be visible in the frame. Pulling back the handle on his Grigri, he slid down the rope, faster than was safe, until he was even with Dean. He kicked off the wall and got himself swinging like a pendulum. Dean was clinging to two tiny 5.12 crimps, and his grip was slipping. Any second, he would have to let go and take his chances diving into the white void. Jim swung in close. Dean looked over his left shoulder, and they locked eyes. Dean lunged. For a split second he was airborne; then he wrapped his flagging arms around Jim’s waist in a bear hug and the pair flew back across the foggy north face of the Eiger in a giant messy heap.

  When they stopped swinging, they looked at each other, shocked and disbelieving at what had just happened. Dean’s custom-built BASE rig had a harness with a big D ring on it. Jim let go of Dean with one hand, found an ascender on his harness, and clipped it to the ring. He then fastened the ascender to the rope. Taking turns, they slowly and carefully worked their way up the fixed lines Jim had rigged earlier in the day.

  When they were safe on the ridge at the top of the wall, Dean turned to Jim and said something to the effect that the rescue fiasco was all Jim’s fault because he had pressured him to do the climb that day.

  Jim was fed up. He started making fun of Dean, mimicking him, trying to get Dean to realize how silly he was being. “If you’re doing it for the camera and you’re not doing it for yourself,” said Jim, “I think you’re a fucking idiot.” Dean shot back that Jim was fired. If that’s the case, replied Jim, then I guess I’ll just go ahead and delete this footage.

  That’s when Dean snapped. “You’re not going to destroy my art,” he roared, charging at his old friend.

  Jim, an accomplished ultrarunner, took off up the hill, still holding the camera. It was raining now, and the entire mountain was enshrouded in thick fog. Visibility was only a few feet. Dean kept after him, and Jim kept running uphill toward the summit. When Dean eventually realized he would never catch him, he picked up a rock and whizzed it at his friend, just missing. Jim then grabbed his own stone and hurled it back at Dean. Stones flew back and forth for a few minutes before both men plopped onto the ground, frazzled from the adrenaline and dismayed at the absurdity of the fact that they were acting like toddlers—on the Eiger. It was drizzling, and they were both soaked. They had run so far up the side of the mountain in the whiteout that they no longer knew where they were. “I’m so fuckin’ angry, I don’t think I can find my way down,” said Dean. Jim, still holding the camera, came down to where Dean was sitting.

  “Hey, man, you seem to be in a crazy head space right now. How about if we do an interview?”

  * * *

  —

  TWO WEEKS LATER, Dean tried again, and this time he succeeded in making the world’s first ever freeBase climb. And Jim filmed it. The footage ended up in the Sender Films Reel Rock Tour. At the end of the segment Dean says, “The thing I’m getting out of pushing my limits is that I turn impossible to possible. . . . The possibilities of what we’re capable of doing if we believe in it is the most compelling thing I can think of.” The botched attempt? The rescue? The rock fight? None of that made it into the film.

  * * *

  —

  “EL CAP IS ONLY A MATTER of time, but that time is looking shorter all the time,” wrote Karl Bralich on SuperTopo in 2008. “I remember when the idea of even a free El Cap route was almost inconceivable but somebody soloing it? We have to be very careful about what we believe to be impossible.”

  In the four years since Moonlight Buttress and Deep Blue Sea, Alex and Dean had similar orbits, at the center of which was El Capitan. Everyone loves a good rivalry, and the Internet peanut gallery, which seemed to have chosen SuperTopo as its rostrum, loved to speculate about who would claim the holy grail of rock climbing. It was no longer a question of if but when—and whether it would be Honnold or Potter who would claim climbing’s greatest prize.

  “I obviously think about it, as does everybody else,” Dean told Outside magazine. “And if I start obsessing on s
omething, I’m kind of helpless but to go for it.” But Dean was facing a real dilemma, because the most obvious route for a possible free solo began with a slab called the Freeblast. And it wasn’t steep enough to be feasible for a freeBASE ascent, which was how he envisioned himself pulling off the feat. “Right now it’s this puzzle that I can’t quite figure out, so I don’t have a definite plan.”

  But then Dean found a way to access the top six pitches of Freerider via a “magical passage” at the top of the west face. He got to it by downclimbing the top of a route called Lurking Fear and then traversing a massive horizontal break in El Cap’s west face called Thanksgiving Ledge. Dean free soloed the U-shaped linkup in 2011, calling it Easy Rider and rating it 5.11d. Afterward, he told Outside that it could be “the first step towards a ground up freesolo [of El Cap].”

  On the far left side of El Cap, where the base of the cliff turns sharply uphill, there’s a route called the West Face, which is not to be confused with the west face, which is the entire half of the cliff that lies to the left of the Nose. The West Face is 1,800 feet high and rated 5.11c. Most people call it a grade V. (Grade is a separate rating system for the length of a route. Grade V and VI are considered big walls.) Around the corner on the cliff’s east end there’s another flank route, called the East Buttress, which is 1,200 feet high and given a grade IV. Every other route on El Cap is grade VI. No one has ever argued that the East Buttress is an “El Cap route”—it’s only nine pitches—but climbers have long debated the status of the West Face. If you climb it, can you legitimately claim membership in the El Cap club? Most of the folks on SuperTopo don’t think so—and, yes, they’ve argued the point ad nauseam. A guy who identifies himself only as bvb wrote: “the intimidation factor on WF is not the same as the frontside routes . . . right around the time that the exposure kicks in, the 11b/c fingercrack pitch, the wall suddenly shelters you and it’s not like you’re a fly on a windshield anymore.”

  In May of 2012, Dean climbed the West Face into Easy Rider with his friend Sean Leary. Dean told Sean that he was going to solo it soon and claim the first free solo of El Cap. Word spread through the Yosemite grapevine, but Alex had long known about Dean’s scheme.

  Two days earlier, Alex had scaled the three biggest walls in Yosemite with Tommy Caldwell—El Capitan, Half Dome, and Mount Watkins, all free, in twenty-one hours. This monster linkup entailed 7,000 vertical feet of difficult rock climbing—seventy-seven pitches up to 5.13a. Dean and Timmy O’Neill had pioneered the linkup back in 2001 but had aid climbed the most difficult sections. It was Dean’s idea to train like a fiend and then one-up himself by free climbing the linkup. Back then, there really was no one he had to worry about beating him to it. But things had changed since Alex and Tommy had come on the scene.

  Dean had been training for the free linkup with Leary. They were planning to BASE jump off the top of each of the formations to save time hiking down. Tommy and Alex, out of respect for the fact that the “Triple Crown,” as they called it, was Dean’s baby, had held off on trying it for a couple of seasons to give Dean the room he needed to get it done. But when the spring of 2012 rolled around and Dean still wasn’t ready for it, they decided they had waited long enough.

  Alex didn’t want to scoop Dean yet again on the West Face, but he also didn’t want to spend the rest of his life explaining to people why the West Face doesn’t count as a real El Cap route. It’s hard to explain an asterisk to a non-climber. Alex later told me that Dean climbing the West Face and claiming it as the first free solo of El Cap “would be the douchiest thing in the world. I couldn’t tolerate that.” After one rest day and one day of rehearsal on the route, Alex free soloed the West Face. He then told a couple of people and word got out. This was important so Dean would know it was a fait accompli and not try to claim it as a first of anything for himself. Of course a thread started up immediately on SuperTopo. Alex made a point not to claim it as the first free solo of El Cap. He later admitted that he did it “specifically to hose Dean,” and that it was probably the most openly competitive thing he had ever done.

  The next day Dean hiked up and retrieved his gear from his stash at the base of the West Face. He would never climb the route again. He also gave up on free climbing the Triple Crown. What was the point if it had already been done?

  A few days later, Alex joined a crew that was heading out bouldering. When he got to the boulder field, Dean was there. “I was so scared he was going to beat me to death,” Alex told me. But Dean was friendly and respectful. He never mentioned the West Face or the Triple Crown, but he certainly understood, probably better than any other person could, what Alex had accomplished over the past week. And he was man enough to tip his hat to his rival, who had just erased any last twinges of doubt about who the king of Yosemite was. It was time for Dean to find a new peg on which to hang his hat.

  * * *

  —

  “IT’S GOOD TO BE THE KING,” said Mel Brooks in the film classic History of the World: Part I. And indeed, being the king of rock did come with its share of perks. Thanks in part to a 60 Minutes profile that aired in 2011, Alex was now as close to being a household name in America as any climber had ever been. He starred in a Citibank commercial, which he claimed paid more for two days’ work than his sister, Stasia, who works in the nonprofit world, had made in the past five years. He had recently signed a multiyear, six-figure deal with the North Face. His agent was even working on a deal for Alex to free solo the world’s tallest building—the 1,671-foot Taipei 101 in Taiwan—live, on TV. He was offered six figures for a climb that would take, at most, a few hours. It never happened.

  But Alex was still living in his van, and his annual expenses were running about 15,000 dollars a year. He was now making more than ten times what he had a few years earlier, yet he wasn’t spending any more than he had back before his career took off. His financial adviser wanted to talk about index funds, real estate, and IRAs. Alex had something different in mind.

  Two years earlier, in the fall of 2010, Alex and I, along with a few others, including Jimmy Chin, had teamed up for an expedition to Chad, where we were the first climbers to explore a 23,000-square-mile area on the southern fringe of the Sahara called the Ennedi Plateau. We made first ascents of about twenty freestanding sandstone towers, but it wasn’t the climbing that left an impression on Alex. The trip was Alex’s first to the developing world and the first time he had witnessed true poverty. In 2010, the life expectancy for a Chadian was forty-nine years.

  To get to the Ennedi we had to drive off road across the Sahara for three long days. About halfway across, in the middle of an endless plain reminiscent of the Bonneville Salt Flats, we rolled up on a pair of men astride two heavily laden camels. They wore scarves wrapped around their heads, and they just sat there, staring at us, their eyes wide. Then one of the men jumped down, fished a battered tin bowl from his sun-bleached saddlebag, and started milking his camel. When the bowl was half full, he jogged up to our vehicle and offered us the frothy brew. Alex tilted back the bowl and took a glug. We gave them bread and water. When they sauntered off, Alex asked our outfitter, “Who were those guys?”

  “They’re Toubous,” he replied. “They’re coming back from Libya. Those bags on the back of the camels are filled with salt and other staples they’re taking back to their village.”

  “Wow,” said Alex, slumping back into his seat in the Land Rover. The commitment it took for those guys to set off across the desert with no backup struck all of us. It was sort of like Alex on one of his free solos. Only these guys were just trying to live. Unlike us, they didn’t have to create artificial challenges to make their lives hard.

  There were six of us split between two jeeps, but Alex and I always seemed to end up in the same vehicle, probably because we were the only ones who wanted to talk. I could throw out any subject and be confident that Alex would have an opinion, or at least be willing to play the devil’s ad
vocate. Mostly we talked about climbing, but we also shared our thoughts on spirituality, atheism, the cosmos, the singularity, and a personal favorite of mine—mental telepathy. We didn’t talk much about people, with one exception—John Bachar. Bachar had died in July the previous year. After free soloing what he personally reckoned to be more than 1.5 million feet of rock, he finally fell at age fifty-two. No one knows exactly what happened. He was soloing a 5.10a at an eighty-foot cliff called the Dike Wall near his home in Mammoth Lakes, California. Some climbers who were around the corner heard a loud whoomph that sounded like someone had dropped a backpack off the top of the cliff. When they ran over to see what had happened, they found him.

  His death sent shock waves across the climbing world. How could something like this happen to a guy like John Bachar? Alex, as he explained that day in the jeep, refused to believe that Bachar simply slipped. It must have been a heart attack or a seizure, he reasoned. Perhaps a chipmunk scurrying across the top of the cliff had dislodged a stone that whapped him in the head as he was making a long reach. “Something must have happened,” said Alex. “John Bachar would not fall.”

  At the time, I felt as though Alex was projecting. Bachar could have just slipped. Shit happens. But later, when I dug into the circumstances surrounding Bachar’s death, I realized that Alex’s intuition might have been on to something.

  By 2006, Bachar was three years into a partnership with a new rock shoe company called Acopa. He was designing shoes and traveling regularly to Mexico, where the company sourced a special sticky rubber. Since his falling-out in Yosemite, he had found his way back to climbing and he was free soloing regularly again, up to 5.11. But what really gave his life meaning now was his son, Tyrus, who was nine years old. Bachar still played his old sax, and he loved nothing more than sharing his passion for music with Tyrus. That summer, he was on his way home to California from the Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City when he fell asleep at the wheel. When he woke up, his car was upside down on the side of the road and he had a broken neck. His girlfriend, who was sitting next to him with her seat belt on, was okay, but his business partner, Steve Karafa, sleeping in the back seat, had been thrown from the vehicle. Karafa died at the scene.