The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  It would be a year before Bachar was back on the rock, but he eventually started climbing again, and slowly, he eased back into free soloing. But he wasn’t the same climber he used to be. The accident aged him. Not just because he broke five vertebrae in his neck but because he never forgave himself for causing the death of a close friend. His friends worried about him. Someone saw him soloing one day at the Owens River Gorge in Bishop. He didn’t look solid. Dean Fidelman, who was working with Bachar on a book about the Stonemasters, confronted his old friend about a month before he fell. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you solid?”

  Fidelman says the question irritated Bachar, who spat back, “Yeah, I’m fuckin’ solid, okay.”

  Two weeks before he fell, Bachar posted the following on SuperTopo:

  bachar

  Gym climber

  Mammoth Lakes, CA

  Anybody have any experience with cervical stenosis?

  Cervical foraminal stenosis in particular?

  What symptoms did you have? How did it start? What treatment(s) did you receive?

  Did treatment work?

  Just want to hear some climber’s perspectives.

  Thanks, jb

  Dozens of people responded. A few days later, Bachar posted again.

  Thanks for the responses. Right now I am receiving deep tissue massage and accupuncture treatments which seem to be helping a little but I’ve only been doing them once a week for about 6 weeks now.

  I still have weakness in my left arm and shoulder. It’s almost like someone has a dimmer switch and turns it down when I try to crank hard. I’m going to see what my surgeon has to say soon. I am going to continue therapy and see if that resolves the problems.

  In the meantime I thought I’d see what, if any, experiences other climbers have had in order to start thinking about what I can do about this.

  Thanks again people for speaking to this—it helps.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE FALL OF 2012, Alex was climbing in Eldorado Canyon, a climbing area just outside Boulder, Colorado, with a friend named Maury Birdwell. They were driving back to town in the evening when Alex casually mentioned that he was thinking about starting a nonprofit. He said he wanted to use his fame and some of his disposable income to try to make the world a better place. He told Birdwell about the poverty he had seen in Chad and how it had changed his view of the world.

  Birdwell is an Oklahoma native who cut his teeth as a climber in the Wichita Mountains. He’d established himself as a lawyer based in Boulder specializing in business, entrepreneurship, and nonprofit development. Birdwell had exactly the expertise Alex was looking for.

  A few weeks later, Alex and I left for a sailing and climbing expedition to the Musandam Peninsula in Oman, where a magical fjord land on the southern shore of the Strait of Hormuz dazzled us. For three weeks, we explored the area’s vast climbing potential—we found hundreds of miles of untouched cliffs lining the shore. We also learned about the Kumzari people, who live in remote fishing villages that can be accessed only by boat. The Kumzaris are a network of families with their own pidgin dialect, a legacy of the cultural collision that has been going on there since ancient times. Linguists don’t know how their language developed, but it mingles Farsi, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, even English. One theory is that the Kumzaris were originally nomads from the mainland who were pushed out onto the tip of the peninsula by Arab, Yemeni, and Portuguese invaders. Another, more intriguing theory (which I made up) is that their ancestors include shipwrecked sailors who washed ashore, perhaps as long ago as the Middle Ages.

  Alex mostly did his own thing. I’d often run him into shore in the dinghy in the morning, and I’d watch as he’d wander off to explore a village and then, later, the unexplored cliffs behind them. No one except Alex knows where he went, whom he met, or how many first ascents he did. But one day he came back to the boat in the evening all excited about a mysterious fortress he had found on a high and lonely ridge that he had discovered after a long free solo.

  “I can’t imagine how they could have built it or what it was for,” he mused, with a sparkle in his eye that I had only ever previously seen after he had done a difficult climb.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HE GOT HOME from the Middle East, Alex immediately called Birdwell. In the months since that climbing day in Eldorado Canyon, he had analyzed his options and realized that he couldn’t find a more perfect partner for the Honnold Foundation. “Would you be willing to help me get this off the ground?” he asked.

  “I was hoping you would ask that question,” replied Birdwell.

  A few days later they filed articles of incorporation and applied for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. They built a website and a Facebook page and posted their mission statement. It reads: “The Honnold Foundation reduces environmental impact and addresses inequality by supporting solar energy initiatives world-wide.”

  What they didn’t publicize was the fact that Alex personally seeded the foundation with 50,000 dollars (about a third of his income that year)—the money his financial adviser had recommended he invest in a mutual fund. “Alex is not the most emotionally expressive person,” says Birdwell. “But he still feels the connection just as strongly as everyone else. He’s the kind of person who expresses himself through his actions.”

  Not long after they launched the foundation, Alex met a guy named Ted Hesser at one of his talks. At the time, Hesser, who is also a climber, was working for a clean energy market research firm in New York City called Bloomberg New Energy Finance. His job was to write research reports that focused on all the changes occurring in the industry. President Obama had made clean energy a key initiative of his administration and, as a result, the industry was at an inflection point. Technologies were changing faster than policies could be drafted to deal with them. A massive amount of investment was pouring into the clean energy space from both government and private sources. Hesser’s job was to figure out who the winners and losers would be.

  He started sending Alex his reports. These were twenty-to-thirty-page research papers so dense that Hesser says most of his clients didn’t even read them, let alone understand them. But Alex read them. Carefully. And then he hit Hesser with astute questions that, without fail, cut to the heart of what mattered. It didn’t take long for Alex to realize that the place where the Honnold Foundation could have its biggest impact was in rural Africa, where many people still didn’t have access to electricity. More specifically, Alex was interested in pay-as-you-go solar systems. Hesser, who had been working in the industry for ten years, had already concluded that this very specific slice of the clean energy market was exactly the place where there was the most potential for creating transformative change. He hadn’t held Alex’s hand; he just sent him the reports, and Alex had figured it out all on his own. “Intellectually, logically, he pieced it together really quickly,” says Hesser. “It was really impressive.”

  The Honnold Foundation’s first project took place in the Kayenta region of the Navajo lands in Arizona, where Alex, Maury, and Cedar Wright worked with a partner called Elephant Energy to install solar panels on homes that had been waiting for years to be connected to the electrical grid. More projects followed, including an expedition to Angola that combined a solar project with the chance to climb first ascents in a largely unexplored mountain range.

  But Alex wasn’t using his star power to pump up the volume on the Honnold Foundation. He was giving away a substantial portion of his personal wealth, and doing so in a meticulously premeditated way, but without any fanfare or hoopla. Birdwell says that the reason Alex has been low-key about his foundation is that he doesn’t want to brag about what he’s done so far, because the scale, at least to date, has been too small. “He’s trying to hit a really long ball,” is how Hesser puts it.

  “Alex has a really i
nteresting relationship with money,” says Hesser. “Giving away 30 to 40 percent of his income [each year] doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it might to someone else. Alex doesn’t worry about money the way most people do. It’s part of his character, and it’s part of what makes him so unique and special.”

  Hesser left me with a story about the time Alex gave a talk in San Francisco to a bunch of well-to-do professionals. Afterward, Alex was musing about how differently he views risk than the people in the audience. “Sure, they could lose all the money in their hedge fund one day,” said Alex, “but they still go home and sleep in a nice bed at night. It’s not like they die.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Secret Dawn Walls

  The van careered around a bend on Highway 120, its tires squealing. Alex wasn’t giving the road his full attention. He rarely did. Alex hates driving. “It’s a waste of life,” he once told me. Driving had always been a time to get things done, to catch up on his correspondence. Sometimes, on roads straighter than this one, he’d read long-form New Yorker articles. But on this dark night on January 14, 2015, Alex was pissed off. He was talking to Becca Caldwell on the phone, and she was sharing some unwelcome news. The plan—for Alex to carry Fitz, Tommy and Becca’s twenty-month-old son, to the top of El Cap to meet his father when he summited the Dawn Wall—was off.

  Tommy and his partner Kevin Jorgeson had been on the wall for the past eighteen days. Now, only a handful of pitches, all well within their ability, stood between the two climbers and the summit. Tommy had first dreamed up this climb back in 2007. At the time, no one had ever considered that it might be possible to free climb the tallest, most sheer section of El Capitan. It was an idea so far beyond the pale that Tommy, at least initially, was loath to admit he was even thinking about it. When he rappelled the wall for the first time, to feel it out, he discovered long sections that appeared to be impossible. But instead of turning him off, the impossibility of the project drew him in, deep. The Dawn Wall soon became his obsession. Kevin came on as a partner in the fall of 2009. Over the next few years, the two men spent months of their lives on the side of El Capitan, slowly piecing together a route. Now, seven long years since Tommy had first envisioned it, that climb was finally within reach.

  Becca wasn’t the one shooting Alex down. Like Tommy, she thought the plan was reasonably safe, even if Alex was planning to bring Fitz up the East Ledges, the climber’s shortcut to the summit of El Cap that includes a five-hundred-foot cliff. Alex had planned to ascend fixed ropes with Fitz securely strapped to his back in a child carrier. What could possibly go wrong? The problem was that Patagonia, Tommy’s main sponsor, had caught wind of the plan, and the corporate honchos weren’t into it. What irritated Alex was the fact that people were being irrational and illogical, worrying about what-ifs that were statistically negligible. Sitting in the passenger seat was Joe Hooper, a journalist from Men’s Journal magazine. Hooper was planning to accompany Alex to the summit. When Alex hung up the call, he turned to Hooper and said, “That’s like typical PR shit, and it’s so annoying. That’s why she [the woman in Patagonia’s marketing department] works in an office. The rest of us don’t work in an office because we actually do things.” He paused for a few moments, then added, “I fucking hate PR people.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN ALEX AND HOOPER ARRIVED on the summit of El Capitan the next morning, Kevin and Tommy were a few hundred feet from topping out. About forty people had gathered to celebrate the momentous occasion. The crowd included journalists like John Branch from The New York Times and a feisty camerawoman from ABC News wearing shiny fashionista combat boots. Becca was there, as were Kevin’s girlfriend and his father. There were friends and sponsors and even some hangers-on—local dirtbags who didn’t want to miss such a historic occasion. The eclectic ensemble reminded Hooper of groupies gathering backstage after a concert. Marijuana smoke wafted through the air.

  The occasional patch of ice hid in the shadows, but the air was mild, the sky clear. Climbers were calling it “Juneuary.” A couple of cameramen, dangling on ropes at the lip of the cliff, announced that Tommy had just reached the final anchor. But it was located just below the lip in a spot that no one could see. As everyone waited for Tommy and Kevin to scramble up into view, Alex scampered down the steep slab and disappeared over the edge. When Tommy topped out, Alex was right there. They hugged, and Alex hung out while Tommy belayed up Kevin. After congratulating his friends on the climb of their lives, Alex got out of the way. As the cameras whirred, the grizzled, bearded climbers stumbled up the final slab on wobbly legs that hadn’t felt terra firma in nearly three weeks. In view of the crowd, Tommy and Kevin stopped and gave each other a hug.

  Tommy, who had come down with a cold and lost his voice, appeared bewildered. He embraced his wife awkwardly. It was clear he wasn’t comfortable sharing this intimate moment with all these people. He had climbed El Capitan about sixty times, but until now, there had never been more than a friend or two to greet him on top. Kevin, on the other hand, embraced the role of the conquering hero. He shared a warm, passionate embrace with his sexy girlfriend as the paparazzi’s flashbulbs popped all around him. Someone handed them bottles of champagne. Tommy popped the cork on his and started drinking it. Kevin shook his up and sprayed it all around him like he had just won the World Series. The crowd cheered.

  When the hubbub had settled slightly, Hooper approached Tommy to offer his congratulations. He was shaking his hand when a guy from Patagonia, who was acting as the master of ceremonies, and doing so somewhat heavy-handedly, shooed him away, telling him that Tommy was “off-limits.”

  A little while later, the Patagonia guy called out, “If we get a call, we’ve all got to go silent. It might be the president.” A murmur rippled through the crowd.

  “That would be sick if President Obama called,” said someone. Obama did eventually call to offer his congratulations, but not until later.

  Alex stood in the background quietly observing. Up until this moment, he had been the most famous climber in the world. But not anymore. That title now belonged to Tommy Caldwell. News of the intrepid climbers battling their way up the world’s most difficult rock climb had gone viral shortly after they set off in late December. With access to a strong LTE signal, Tommy and Kevin had been using their smartphones to post daily updates to their Instagram and Facebook accounts from the portaledge at night. It was like reality TV, but you could comment and interact with the stars of the show. If you were lucky, they might even respond.

  It wasn’t always like this. Millennials don’t know anything different, but those of us who climbed before the invention of the Internet can remember a day when expedition climbers unplugged from the outside world when they went off on expeditions. When I didn’t arrive on that flight from Baffin Island back in 1996, my parents had no way of knowing if I was dead or just running late. At the time of the Quokka experiment on Great Trango, we had no idea how profoundly the rise of the Internet and social media would change the culture of climbing. By 2015, it wasn’t just possible for professional climbers to keep their fans apprised of their exploits in real time; it was expected. Endorsement contracts often included stipulations about social media: how often to post, which hashtags to use, and even creative guidelines. For better or worse, social media was now the primary way climbers interacted with one another and it was how we broadcasted our accomplishments. And it was a rare soul who avoided getting sucked into the vortex.

  * * *

  —

  THE MAJORITY OF THEIR NINETEEN days on the wall were spent at what they called their base camp, a portaledge situated about 1,200 feet above the ground. Fixed ropes connected to the ground and every few days some of their friends would climb the ropes, hauling up bags of supplies. On one of those supply missions, Alex came up with a load. When he got to the ledge, he looked at Tommy and said, “Dude, I was expecting this climb to look like this tota
lly badass futuristic thing. What’s up with that overhanging choss?” It was a typical Alexism, Tommy would later say, to look at something that most people would view as totally outrageous and “make it seem lame.”

  The crux of the climb was a section just above the camp called the Dike Traverse. About two hundred feet long, it followed a horizontal band of calcite on a smooth swath that was essentially a vertical friction climb. Tommy had been trying to find a path across the dike for years, and it’s a testament to his doggedness that he never gave up, even after it had spit him off hundreds of times. And then, a week after leaving the ground, he finally unlocked an enigmatic sequence of moves that allowed him to squeak through. Afterward, he wasn’t sure exactly how he had done it. There is no stronger motivator than competition, and seeing his friend succeed gave Kevin his own burst of inspiration, and he, too, succeeded on his next attempt. The pitch, which was probably the hardest ever done on a big wall, is rated 5.14d. But so is the next, pitch 15. Tommy redpointed it the next day, but Kevin came up short. Then he fell again and again and again. With each subsequent attempt to climb the minuscule, razor-sharp holds, the skin on his fingertips grew thinner until the pad on his middle finger split. “The moves are hard but the issue is, you have to want to grab,” said Kevin in an interview he gave journalist Andrew Bisharat, from the portaledge one night. “And you have to not give a fuck about how much it hurts. Which is kinda hard to do.”