by Mark Synnott
“Is my brain intact?” asked Alex via Skype.
“It’s perfectly healthy,” said Joseph.
The images produced by fMRI brain scans use various colors to illustrate the strength of synaptic activity, similarly to how meteorologists portray the intensity of thunderstorms on radar maps. The image of Alex’s brain showed two gridlines that formed a plus sign directly over his amygdala. The nodule was dull gray. The fMRI had not detected any electrical activity. Neuroscientists call this “zero activation.” The only part of his brain that showed any color was the visual cortex—proof that he was actually looking at the images.
Now Joseph referred Alex to the image of the nucleus accumbens taken during the reward task. The results were the same. The neurons weren’t firing. Zero activation during both tests was “highly unusual,” according to Joseph. The control subject was given the exact same tests. Like Alex, he reported feeling no emotional stimulation. It was obvious to this subject what the game was, and he felt confident that his brain, which had seen him up countless difficult rock climbs, had not taken the bait. He was wrong. His amygdala and nucleus accumbens were both lit up like a Christmas tree.
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THOSE OF US WHO KNOW and follow Alex weren’t surprised when we heard the results of the scan. Over the past twenty years, he has focused intently on learning to control fear. It’s been a gradual process, something he once described to me as “slowly expanding the bubble around my comfort zone.” It’s a progression every climber must follow, from first overcoming the irrational fear that ropes and anchors won’t hold, on up to learning how to stay calm and loose when executing difficult moves, even if the fall would be dangerous.
Since he first envisioned free soloing El Capitan, Alex has known that he would need to take this process to a rarified extreme, training himself to control his innate fear response when climbing near the limit of his ability thousands of feet above the ground without a rope. So one possible interpretation of Joseph’s findings is that he has succeeded brilliantly—assuming, of course, that his amygdala is actually capable of firing, ever. And this, Joseph emphasizes, the test could not determine. It only indicated that his amygdala doesn’t respond in the same way to the same stimuli as do those of the vast majority of test subjects.
When Alex’s book came out in the fall of 2015, I interviewed him for National Geographic. He told me that one of his prime motivators for writing it was to help people understand why he can do what he does: “I’ve done so much soloing, and worked on my climbing skills so much that my comfort zone is quite large. So these things that I’m doing that look pretty outrageous, to me they seem normal.” He said that it makes “total sense” to him and that it’s “easily understandable,” but still, people don’t seem to get it. “Maybe I should have explained it better,” he said.
He used the analogy of driving on the freeway. It can be terrifying the first time a new driver pulls into speeding traffic from the on-ramp. But as you do it more and more, you become accustomed to the high consequences of a mistake, and after enough repetitions, it’s a routine experience, like brushing your teeth.
I pointed out that it’s a lot easier to keep your car in the proper lane than it is to hang from a pinky lock on a 5.12 finger crack. But Alex disagreed. He said it’s only easy because I’ve done it a lot. “If you were some aboriginal dude who had never even seen a car before, you’d be like, ‘Holy shit I’m about to die,’” he said. “Climbing to me is the very same thing. I’ve actually spent more time climbing than driving. Imagine New York City cabbies and all the outrageous things they do. That’s kind of like me with my climbing. I’ve spent a ton of time hanging on pinky locks, so it’s not a big deal.”
The rationalization that his free soloing is no more dangerous than being a cabbie in a busy city is one that Alex has carefully constructed, probably because it’s the keystone in the philosophical edifice he has built to justify the risks he takes. Try to tell him that free soloing is dangerous, and he will argue the point, every time. The closest I’ve come so far is to get Alex to admit that the “consequences” of a fall while free soloing would be “disastrous.” But then he’ll quickly point out that just because a consequence may be severe, its probability of occurring does not increase. The consequences, he’ll say, are equally dire if your hand slips off the steering wheel and you swerve into the oncoming lane and collide head-on with a Mack truck. “Every time you go out on a highway you’re running an astronomically small chance of being hit by a big rig. That’s just the cost of doing business.” According to the Insurance Information Institute, the lifetime odds of dying in a car accident for a person born in 2013 are roughly one in six hundred. Change the metric to dying in any kind of accident and the odds are one in twenty-four.
Engage Alex in this conversation, as I have on numerous occasions, and invariably he will quote his own homegrown statistic that no free soloist has ever fallen while pushing his limits. “It doesn’t seem to be the way that people die,” he has said. As far as I know, he is correct. Bachar died soloing 5.10, which could be considered moderate terrain, at least for him. Derek Hersey, the famed British free soloist who fell off Yosemite’s Sentinel Rock in 1993, was on a route rated 5.9. To date, his is the only death ever attributed to free soloing in Yosemite National Park. (Afterward, someone taped a laminated photo of Hersey onto the rock at the start of the route. “We miss you Derek,” it read.) Dan Osman, another free soloist, and a founding member of the North Face Team, was killed when his rope broke while he was practicing a sport he invented called “rope jumping.” John “Yabo” Yablonski, the Stonemaster, and Earl Wiggins, an unsung Colorado climber, both noted free soloists, committed suicide. Charlie Fowler, the Coloradoan who on-sight free soloed the Direct North Buttress of Yosemite’s Middle Cathedral in 1977, was killed in an avalanche in western China. Michael Reardon drowned in the Irish Sea. Dean Potter perished while BASE jumping. Henry Barber, who soloed the Steck-Salathé route on Sentinel Rock in 1973 (the same route on which Hersey would later fall) is still alive and well, as is Peter Croft, who, with little fanfare, continues to solo 5.12 at the Owens River Gorge.
“I think that the odds of me actually falling are very low,” says Alex. While I might disagree, I see how Alex needs to believe this, in order to do what he does. Otherwise, he’d be afraid to do it. And that fear, if it turned to panic at the wrong time, could kill him. Most of us look at our one-in-twenty-four chance of dying in some kind of accident the same way Alex looks at free soloing. We choose to go through life believing that we won’t be unlucky because otherwise, we’d be too afraid to get in our cars or even leave the house. If hanging from a fingertip jammed in a crack 1,000 feet off the ground is just as ordinary an experience for Alex as negotiating rush-hour traffic is for the rest of us, then one might have to admit that his rationalization makes sense.
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OUR NATURAL FEAR RESPONSE to danger is an evolutionary trait. We call it colloquially the fight-or-flight instinct. Essentially, our muscles become supercharged with adrenaline, which gives us extraordinary strength and energy to fend off an aggressor or run away. This was the greatest acute danger faced by our prehistoric ancestors, so presumably it’s an appropriate and potentially life-saving physiological response to attack. But rock climbing is different. Yes, it demands strength and energy—in abundance for long, difficult climbs—but it also requires calm, finesse, and poise. You’re not going to get up a 5.13 with an uncontrolled explosion of fury. An adrenaline bath might help you run faster than you ever have, but if you’re trying to find the precise body position to unlock an enigmatic sequence of climbing moves, it would be like using a chainsaw to perform surgery. Succumbing to fear will all but guarantee the bad outcome that is causing you to be fearful in the first place. So Alex tries to deal with fear in the same way he would other basic emotions, like hunger. “When you’re hungry, you set the f
eeling aside and eat when it’s convenient,” says Alex. “With fear, your pulse quickens, your vision narrows, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I’m feeling fear, oh my god, oh my god,’ and then it cascades out of control and you lose your ability to perform. With free soloing, obviously I know that I’m in danger, and feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping me in any way. It’s only hindering my performance, so I just set it aside and leave it be.”
Alex reported feeling panicked when he was first jammed into the tube. He said that no part of the test was as uncomfortable as the “oh no, I’m trapped in a box” moment he had in the beginning. Was his amygdala firing when he felt claustrophobic? Joseph hadn’t yet activated the fMRI, so we don’t know. But Alex says he recognized the irrationality of his fear, chose to set it aside—breathe it out, as he describes—and then felt fine. So perhaps his amygdala, if it had been firing, calmed down and essentially turned off. Nothing in the test was tuned nearly high enough to elicit emotional discomfort similar to the claustrophobia, so Alex’s amygdala may have simply remained in the off position.
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IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING the brain scan, while Alex trained relentlessly for Freerider, I decided to dig deeper into the amygdala question. I contacted Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who has been studying the amygdala for thirty-five years. He kicked off the conversation by telling me that writers have a tendency to oversimplify when trying to explain something as complicated as the brain. He said that contrary to popular belief, the amygdala is not the fear center of the brain. “The amygdala has a lot of consequences in the brain that affect our feeling of fear, but the feeling of fear is not generated by the amygdala. . . . The field [neuroscience] has always failed to make the distinction between fear as an experience and fear as a sort of implicit processing system, and it’s caused a lot of confusion.” According to LeDoux, damage to the amygdala does not eliminate the conscious experience of fear; rather, it prevents the behavioral and physiological responses to threats—sweaty palms, spiking pulse rate, and tunnel vision.
When I asked LeDoux about the zero activation, he said it was a meaningless result because fMRI machines are tuned to detect a certain threshold of electrical activity. “The fact that the experiment failed to find it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” he said. He told me that electrodes placed directly onto Alex’s amygdala, that is, on the inside of his brain, not the outside, would indeed detect synaptic activity.
And LeDoux dismisses the possibility that Alex’s amygdala is dormant. Instead he posits that Alex may have been born with a muted amygdala response relative to the general population, making him a genetic outlier, so to speak. He also says it’s likely that Alex has desensitized his amygdala to be less responsive to threats, particularly those associated with heights, by routinely exposing himself to high places. “By self-exposing, training himself in those situations, he’s going to reduce the amygdala activity, because that’s what exposure does. And perhaps he has trained himself to be able to turn on that inhibition when he goes into those kinds of situations.”
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SO HOW DOES IT FEEL to stare death in the face and not be afraid? What does the world look like through those eyes? I was contemplating these questions at my mom’s house in Florida when I happened to catch a segment on the Today show about Nik Wallenda and the Big Apple Circus. Nik is a member of the famed multigenerational family of aerialists known as the Flying Wallendas. The segment was about a horrific accident that had taken place the month before. The troop was attempting a world record eight-person pyramid on a wire twenty-eight feet above the ground, with no net, when someone on the bottom faltered. Five of eight people fell to the ground; three, including Nik, managed to catch the wire. No one died, but Nik’s sister broke every bone in her face. The story reminded me that the last time I had seen Nik on television he had been walking across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope. The death-defying walk, which he did without a tether, was broadcast live on the Discovery Channel. I remembered it as one of the most mesmerizing performances I had ever witnessed.
I sent Nik a message on Facebook, and he called me the next day from his home in Sarasota, just up the road from where I sat in my mom’s home on the Gulf Coast. It turns out Nik is a big fan of the world’s greatest free soloist.
“I say it all the time. Fear is a choice,” said Nik. “You can decide whether you want to be scared or not.” As an example, he referenced a haunted house. “I can go in there with the expectation of being scared to death, or I can go in there, and go, ‘These people are paid to scare me. Why would I be scared of this? It’s not real.’”
Whether you are fearful of heights, financial problems, or your spouse being unfaithful, Nik said it’s our choice whether we want to “allow it to take root.” He compared fear to a weed in your garden. If you don’t pull out the weed, it spreads and takes over. “As soon as I experience any thought of fear, I kick it out immediately. I counter it with, ‘No. I know what I’m doing. I’ve done this my whole life. I’ve trained for the worst cases.’ I always counter negative with positive in every aspect of my life. I truly have no question in my mind that fear is a choice.”
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IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, what may be most remarkable about Alex is that he is both a “super sensation seeker” and, at the same time, an individual with an unusually high degree of emotional regulation. These two traits are often antithetical, but the fact that they coexist within Alex may have a lot to do with his ability to tread so close to the edge.
What concerns Joseph is that a high-sensation seeker like Alex may find that he constantly needs to up the ante, to bring himself ever closer to the edge of his limits in order to get that hit of dopamine his brain is accustomed to getting. Evidently, her test wasn’t tuned high enough for Alex’s nucleus accumbens to fire—perhaps not even close—but it’s fair to assume that Alex is a reward-driven individual. As MacKinnon points out, everybody climbs for the reward. Why else would we do it if not for some psychological payback? The problem with getting caught up in an endless game of one-upmanship, even if it’s just with oneself, is that it can lead to addiction and other pathological, self-destructive behaviors. In her lab, Joseph sees this most often with drug users and gamblers, but it’s easy to imagine how it could happen to a free soloist.
Alex had survived because he tempered his drive to explore his limits with sober premeditation, diligence, and patience. If he didn’t have control of his impulses, he might have gone for El Capitan without a rope years ago. Joseph didn’t know about Alex’s secret plan (neither did MacKinnon, although he had his suspicions), but she did have a parting word of advice for Alex: “Don’t let the impulsivity win out over the conscientiousness.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Source
Alex falling through the [camera] frame to his death,” said Jimmy, “that’s what I think about. And if I’m already seeing it, I can only imagine what it would be like if it happened.” Jimmy and I were sitting in white plastic deck chairs on the roof of Gîte Tawjdat, a climbers’ guesthouse in a remote village called Taghia in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. The gîte (French for “vacation house”) sat in the back of a cirque ringed with red-hued limestone towers that poked into a hazy sky. They call this place the Yosemite of Africa, and for the past two weeks, Jimmy and his crew had been racing around filming Alex and Tommy Caldwell as they raged up the spires that towered above us. A few days earlier, the pair had succeeded on a monster linkup of three of the longest and most difficult routes in the canyon. They were calling it the Taghia Triple Crown. I had arrived a couple of days later, in time to spend one day with Tommy before he flew back to the States. Alex was staying on for another week. He had told me over the summer that he might “scramble”—a euphemism he often uses for free soloing—one of Taghia’s big walls to finish off the trip.
; Jimmy had declared a rest day, the first since they had arrived. The crew, totaling half a dozen, included a director of photography, a sound guy, a high-angle cameramen, a producer, a “data wrangler,” and a professional rigger, most of whom were close friends of Alex’s. They were scattered around the guesthouse tinkering with their gear. Alex was in his room, probably binge-watching Spartacus. He’d told me the day before that he had downloaded all four seasons off Netflix before the trip, and he was already on season three.
I hadn’t seen Jimmy since that day on the tram in Jackson Hole. He looked drained as he slouched in his chair and sipped mint tea from a chipped ceramic mug. There were bits of something, probably twigs or leaves, tangled in his shaggy black hair. He said he was having trouble sleeping because he worried that the film he was making about Alex “might put undue pressure on him to do something he might not do if there wasn’t a film being made of it.” Like Alex soloing Les Rivières Pourpres, a sixteen-pitch 5.12c on the 1,800-foot tooth of rock that rose in the back of the gorge above Jimmy’s left shoulder. “And that’s really, really heavy,” said Jimmy.
Jimmy was articulating the same thing he had told me when we spoke by phone in August. Being Alex’s documentarians meant that we might one day watch him fall off the mountain. And worse, at some level, we’d be complicit in his death. Looking into Jimmy’s eyes, I could see that it scared him, not just because he would lose a friend but because he knew it would be a dark cloud hanging over him for the rest of his life. It was one thing to contemplate it in the abstract at his home in the Tetons, another to live it, as he was now.
