The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  Six days after the accident, Alex wrote an essay about Dean for Time magazine. “He was a hero of mine growing up, representing everything badass about the climbing world,” wrote Alex. “As a young gym climber, I thought what he was doing was impossible—and amazing.” The public response to Dean’s death, according to Alex, ranged from “deep respect for a man who greatly influenced his sport to unchecked contempt for someone who threw his life away, squandering what’s most precious in search of the next cheap thrill.” The contempt rankled Alex, perhaps because it hit close to home. And so he may have been projecting a bit when he wrote, “No one spends 20 years at the cutting edge of their sport by being an adrenaline junkie all the time. Most people had only seen his climbing and flying through short YouTube videos and never got a glimpse of the years of training behind them. Dean actually had a thoughtful and conservative approach, building up to things slowly over time as he became physically and psychologically prepared.”

  There were some who argued that Dean’s risk-taking was immoral, but the way Alex saw it, these people were hypocrites because many of them risked their own lives on a daily basis by sitting on the couch eating potato chips. “I was 19 when my father died from a heart attack,” wrote Alex. “He was a 55-year-old college professor and had led what was by all appearances a risk-free life. But he was overweight, and heart disease runs in our family. No matter the risks we take, we always consider the end to be too soon, even though in life more than anything else quality should be more important than quantity.”

  Following Dean’s death, Alex called Weidner and confided to his old friend that he was feeling rudderless and unmotivated. He had been working hard on his autobiography with the writer David Roberts, but rather than finding motivation in telling his story, it was causing him to feel depressed. “Man, this is so lame,” he said. “Here I am turning thirty, and all I’m doing is writing about how rad I used to be.”

  Alex had developed a cycle in which he went big every other year. It wasn’t something premeditated, more just that his motivation seemed to ebb and flow on a biannual basis. The year before, 2014, had been an on year, but 2015 was turning out to be a year of low motivation. “I used to do cool shit,” he told Weidner. “Now I’m just hanging out in my van feeling tired and unmotivated.” It was possible that wearing the mantle of being the world’s greatest free soloist was beginning to weigh on him. In that same conversation, he told Weidner, “This may be the first time I feel real pressure to perform.”

  The past year had been an emotional roller coaster. One of his friends had achieved his lifetime dream. Another had died in the process of seeking his. What is the arc of my career? wondered Alex. Am I actively pursuing the things I care the most about? One thing he knew for sure: He was burned-out. He needed to get a better perspective on things, to make sure he was heading in the right direction and living his life with intention. He needed to take a break from climbing for a while—something he had never really done.

  He didn’t quit cold turkey, but over the next two months he put climbing on the back burner. He spent his time reading, trail running, and going on long hikes. He dated a bit but didn’t have a steady girlfriend. He spent hours alone in his van.

  I spoke with Alex in early December. He was back at his mom’s in Carmichael, California, hanging out in his old bedroom. He said he had been going through some of his old training journals and reading through his notes and to-do lists. One of them was titled “How to Be a Better Person.” “I’ve definitely always thought about all that stuff,” he said. I asked about his fall season and how it felt when he went back to climbing. He said he was surprised at how good he felt when he got back on the rock. One of the first things he did was head up onto El Cap, where he free climbed a difficult new route recently established by his friend Mason Earle. He expected to feel rusty and out of shape, but instead he was firing on all cylinders, climbing just about as well as he ever had. His motivation was flooding back in like a spring tide, and all signs were pointing to 2016 being an on year for him.

  Could it be the year, the one he had been dreaming about since he free soloed Half Dome in 2008?

  “Honestly, this was the first year I was like, ‘Hmm, maybe,’” he replied when I asked him if he was still thinking about soloing El Cap. “It doesn’t fill me with terror the same way it has in the past. So maybe it’s getting closer or it means I’m becoming . . .” Alex trailed off and didn’t finish the thought. He paused for a moment and then said, “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE

  PART THREE

  Topping Out

  CHAPTER NINE

  Amygdala

  Alex, his arms by his sides, lay on a padded, gurney-shaped table in the radiology department at the Medical University of South Carolina. Sitting in a control room on the opposite side of a thick leaded-glass window, Dr. Jane Joseph watched as Alex slid headfirst into the body-size donut hole in the Siemens Magnetom Trio fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. As his head entered the narrow tube and his shoulders brushed against the sides, a sudden and overwhelming wave of claustrophobia washed over Alex. His heart rate spiked. His breaths came fast and shallow. “Are you comfortable?” asked Joseph, her voice coming through a speaker inside the plastic tube. Alex nodded, but he wasn’t okay—he was panicking. He had never had an MRI before, and he hadn’t expected it to trigger a primordial fear. Phlegm from a lingering cold dripped down the back of his throat. Sniffling and swallowing repeatedly, he thought, What if I choke? Then came the loud noises. Buzzing, popping, and clicking surrounded him as the machine came alive and vibrated with energy. He felt it resonate inside his body. He wanted out.

  But Alex had flown across the country to have this scan, so he took a few deep breaths and reminded himself that his fear was irrational. Nothing could hurt him in the tube. At any moment he could signal the technician, who could have him out of the machine in seconds. He flexed his will to regain control of his physiology. He felt his heart rate slow, and he calmed his breathing. The range of emotions from feeling relaxed to feeling panicked and back again had lasted three or four minutes. During this time, Joseph was doing an anatomical scan of Alex’s brain but not yet looking for electrical activity. By the time she was ready to activate the fMRI, Alex had centered himself. Though no one knew it at the time, the test was essentially over.

  * * *

  —

  IN DECEMBER OF 2014, Alex, Jimmy, and I gave a lecture in Grosvenor Auditorium at National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, DC. Afterward, we set up in the reception area to do poster signings. Alex’s line stretched out the door; Jimmy’s was nearly as long. Mine was embarrassingly short, but in it stood a man who stepped up to the table and identified himself as a neuroscientist. Glancing over at Alex, who was signing posters for his adoring fans, the man leaned in and whispered, “You know Alex’s amygdala isn’t firing, right?”

  The amygdala is an almond-shaped nodule located deep in our brains. It acts sort of like the hub of a bicycle wheel, with the spokes representing its connection through the limbic system to a vast array of brain structures. The amygdala helps us to attach emotional value to stimuli that constantly swirl around us, and it is strongly associated with our most primal emotions, including sexual arousal and fear. If you’ve ever felt your pulse shoot up as a result of, say, being badly startled or seeing an erotic image, then you know your amygdala is firing.

  That night, back at the hotel, I was reading about the amygdala online when I came across a reference to Urbach-Wiethe disease. It’s a rare genetic condition that destroys the amygdala. This in turn led me to an article in Discover magazine about a person with the disease whom brain researchers had anonymously labeled SM-0426. The article was entitled “Meet the Woman Without Fear.” Scientists have been studying her since the mid-1990s in hopes of better understanding fear and anxiety. They’ve dangled snakes and spiders in he
r face and had her watch scary movies like The Blair Witch Project and The Shining. Nothing fazes her.

  When I later mentioned the neuroscientist’s comment to Alex, he scoffed. “That’s total BS,” he said. “I experience fear just like everyone else.” Alex had been asked many times whether he’s a sociopath or if he has Asperger’s, and he has conceded that he’s probably “somewhere on the autism spectrum.” But this was the first time someone had speculated that a basic structure in his brain was broken. And so I wondered if he was asking himself the same question I was: Is Alex Honnold’s brain wired differently than the rest of ours, or has he found a way to master life’s most primal emotion?

  * * *

  —

  I COULD NOT HAVE IMAGINED the far-ranging implications of that seemingly innocuous encounter at National Geographic. A few months later, I shared the story with David Roberts, who was cowriting Alex’s autobiography, Alone on the Wall, and he included it in the book. After that, the defective amygdala story became, in the popular imagination, Alex’s superpower. It was as if Alex were a real-life version of Dr. Seuss’ Mr. Sneelock, a savant whose magical skill, rather than being able to quickly tally huge sums, was to turn off fear. And this annoyed Alex, because he knew he experienced fear just like every other normal person.

  What fascinated me was not the question of whether Alex had a working amygdala but instead why everyone, myself included, felt so compelled to probe for an explanation of how Alex can do what he does. Anyone who climbs and knows of Alex Honnold’s exploits has had the “how does he do it” conversation with their partners between burns at the climbing gym or sitting around the bar with a round of beers. The question was the impetus behind countless magazine articles, films, blogs, podcasts, and, yes, this book. I wondered whether this fascination with Alex’s brain reveals more about us, the people asking questions, than about him. Because for every individual who tips his or her hat to Alex’s talent and nerve, there is another, like the Grosvenor Auditorium neuroscientist, who feels compelled to label him as abnormal—and perhaps pathologically so.

  “People want to explain him away, they want it to be something that doesn’t place a demand on them,” says J. B. MacKinnon, a writer from Canada who arranged the brain scan and later wrote a widely read article about the results for Nautilus magazine. “Because if Alex is just an ordinary guy who managed to transform himself into this superhuman figure of fearlessness and cool under pressure, then they should be able to do that too. And nobody wants to believe that’s the reality. We all feel this need to make him into something different and unique so the rest of us don’t have to take any lessons from what he’s done.”

  “I didn’t think there was going to be a ghost in the machine,” adds MacKinnon. “But if we looked at his brain and there wasn’t anything [wrong], it really would raise the question: How the hell does he do it?”

  * * *

  —

  “THIS IS SOMETHING I’M STARTING to wonder about myself,” said Alex when MacKinnon called him and explained he had a neuroscientist lined up to scan his brain. “I don’t think I’m abnormal, but I guess we can take a look.” Alex knew that he couldn’t have Urbach-Wiethe disease, because he did experience fear and always had. Fear made him need to poop before a big solo. Fear gave him high blood pressure before his first public speaking engagements. Fear caused the butterflies that fluttered in his chest when he was screwing up the nerve to talk to a pretty girl. And fear made his palms sweat when he watched videos of himself free soloing. Still, a seed of doubt had been sown. It would take three days out of his life to travel to South Carolina for the scan, but it was a unique opportunity that might lay certain questions to rest and silence those who dismissed him as a freak.

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY BEFORE THE TEST, in early March 2016, Alex and MacKinnon were walking the streets of Charleston, which is anything but a climbing town. At a café, they ran into a woman in her fifties who recognized Alex from seeing him on TV. She had never climbed before. A few minutes later they had a similar encounter with a younger woman who also said she had never climbed. Everywhere they turned, they kept bumping into fans. The next one was a man in his late twenties who was in awe that he had randomly stumbled upon his climbing hero. He followed the standard script: “Man, I can’t believe you don’t experience fear.” According to MacKinnon, Alex struggled to hide his annoyance.

  Years ago, John Bachar had a similar encounter at a gas station in Yosemite. A climber approached Bachar as he was filling his four-by-four. “How can you solo all that crazy stuff?” he said.

  “You’re soloing right now,” replied Bachar.

  MacKinnon now stood next to Joseph as the first images of Alex’s brain appeared on the monitor. “That’s a good-looking brain,” she said. Joseph was referring not to the fact that it was extraordinary in any way but that it appeared at first glance to be normal and healthy, without the shrinkage or other degeneration she often sees in her lab. The amygdala was located near the bottom of Alex’s brain, not far from the roof of his mouth, and it had not yet come into focus. Like most brain structures, there are two amygdalae, a right and a left. The ancient Greeks were the first to discover the amygdala when dissecting brains, and the name comes from the Greek word for “almond.” Joseph told the technician to find Alex’s.

  A second later it came into focus, right where it should be.

  “He has one!” exclaimed Joseph. She couldn’t help but be pleased, since she knew too well how serious it would be if his was nonexistent or showed signs of disease. Now it was time to see if she could fire it up.

  The test she administered has been used for decades. Subjects are shown a series of pictures that are meant to disturb or excite, and while they are viewing these images, the fMRI uses a strong magnetic field and radio waves to detect blood flow in different brain regions. The more blood flow, the more synapses that are firing. Images flashed on the screen in front of Alex’s face: cockroaches, a close-up of a hissing snake, children burned by napalm, a woman shaving her pubic hair, a tarantula on a man’s shoulder, a toilet filled with feces, a decaying corpse, a snarling dog, a riot scene with people throwing rocks, a gory close-up of a head that had been bashed so hard the eyes were sliding out of the skull.

  Joseph told me she is loath to view these images even though she has seen them countless times. She admitted that while researching Alex before his arrival, she had found herself unable to watch YouTube videos of him free soloing. So at least for a low-sensation seeker, as she describes herself, the images spark strong responses.

  The slideshow lasted about fifteen minutes; then Joseph started the second part of the test, which she calls the Reward Task. It was a game in which Alex could earn small amounts of money depending on how quickly he pressed the button on a clicker he held in his hand. While Alex clicked away, Joseph monitored a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. It’s a structure near the top of the brain stem that processes dopamine, a neurotransmitter that carries electrical impulses between neurons. Most people think of dopamine as the chemical associated with lust, motivation, and addiction, but its function is complex and still not fully understood. What brain researchers do know is that the test Alex was undergoing is known to flood the nucleus accumbens with dopamine in reward-driven people.

  When Alex emerged after half an hour in the tube, he looked at Joseph. “I can’t say for sure [if my amygdala was lighting up or not] but I was like, ‘Whatever.’” It felt, he said, “like looking through a curio museum.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE BRAIN SCAN, Joseph gave Alex a personality test. Not surprisingly, he scored as twice as likely to seek high sensations compared to the average person. Yet the test also showed him to be well adjusted emotionally. He scored extremely high in the categories of conscientiousness and premeditation, low in neuroticism.

  But there was one outlie
r. Joseph had assumed Alex would score low on disinhibition, a term used in psychology to describe the tendency to be impulsive and unaware or uncaring of social customs. A disinhibited person is also likely to be bad at assessing risk. Joseph had assumed that Alex was not overly disinhibited, because if he were, he would have already killed himself free soloing. But Alex had scored high in this category. I wasn’t surprised, however, knowing what I do about climbing. I see it the opposite way: An inhibited person would never get into free soloing in the first place. But what I find interesting is that while Alex scored high in disinhibition, the test also indicated that he’s highly analytical and punctilious—an unusual combination, according to Joseph. This juxtaposition may point to the tension that I have long sensed in Alex, something MacKinnon also noticed. He described Alex to me as someone who is “constantly suppressing some kind of internal intensity.”

  It took Joseph a month to study and prepare the results of Alex’s scan. By this point Alex was in China, on his way to climb Getu Arch, one of the world’s most difficult multipitch sport climbs. He was curious about the results, but he had already decided that whatever the brain scan revealed, he was not going to modify his behavior on its account. Joseph had e-mailed Alex four images, two of his brain and two of a control subject’s brain. The pictures showed all activity that had occurred across the entirety of the two tests. The control subject was a rock climber and deemed a high-sensation seeker by the researchers. Alex had met him while he was at the university, and Joseph had scanned the man shortly after Alex. Joseph had made clear from the start that the test results of Alex’s scan were not scientifically valid because there had been only one control. This was not a study that would be published in any medical journals.