The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  And it wasn’t just Alex whom Jimmy worried about. For the past two weeks he and the crew had been moving nonstop through high-angle technical terrain. They had been doing plenty of their own climbing and occasional free soloing to get into position to film Alex and Tommy. It was at a far lower grade, say, 5.6 instead of 5.12, but they were wearing huge packs filled with ropes and camera gear, and the chance of someone dislodging a loose rock onto another, or Alex himself, was ever present.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS EARLIER, I had traded a Toyota Land Cruiser for a donkey where the road ended at a bustling village called Aguddim. The drive from Marrakech had taken five hours, leading south and east across the flat desert of lowland Morocco up into the High Atlas Mountains. The tarmac followed the ancient path of a historic trans-Saharan caravan route connecting Marrakech with Timbuktu. Beyond Aguddim, no roads penetrate the most remote parts of the High Atlas, and I proceeded on foot, following the donkey as it clopped along a dusty trail with my green duffel bag strapped to its back.

  Taghia lies at the same latitude as El Paso, Texas—thirty-one degrees north. Its 6,600-foot elevation keeps it much cooler than Marrakech. Prime climbing conditions tend to run about a month earlier than they do in Yosemite, making it an ideal choice for someone looking to get tuned up for a season of free climbing big walls. Alex first visited Taghia in 2012 with Hazel Findlay, who joined our Oman sailing and climbing expedition later that same year. He told me they had a “thing” on that trip and that something about the place, which he couldn’t quite put his finger on, set him up for what turned out to be the best Yosemite season of his life. That was the year he and Tommy climbed the Triple Crown and then he broke the speed record on the Nose of El Capitan with Hans Florine.

  “Yeah, I could go anywhere in the world,” he said, gesturing toward the High Atlas Mountains, “but where’s better than this?”

  The muleteer led me to a sprawling two-story house surrounded by a tall stone wall. I ducked through a doorway into a courtyard lined with trees and tossed my duffel bag on a wooden bench. A slim, narrow-faced man with light skin emerged from a doorway, gently took my right hand in his, and said, “As salaam alaikum” (Peace be unto you).

  “Wa alaikum as-salaam” (And unto you peace), I returned, having learned the proper reply from my past travels in the Muslim world.

  Said Massaoudi, the owner of this gîte, looked to be in his mid-fifties. He built his guesthouse in 1994, shortly after French and Spanish climbers discovered the gorge’s untapped climbing potential. During prime climbing season, March through April and September through October, his guesthouse bustles with foreign climbers, mostly Europeans, who pay 150 dirhams (about fifteen US dollars) a day for room and board.

  Said lives in a portion of the downstairs with his wife, Fatima; their three daughters; and a married son who has a baby. The home, which appeared to have had rooms haphazardly added on as needed, was set up like a hostel, with a large common room on each floor, bathrooms with pit toilets, a hot shower, and at least a dozen double-occupancy guest rooms.

  Said, like all of the three hundred or so inhabitants of Taghia, is a Berber. The name Berber is a derivation of “barbarian,” from the Greek word barbaros. Berbers have lived in northern Africa for thousands of years, and they are well-known as traders who braved the Sahara to establish caravan routes connecting sub-Saharan Africa to the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. One of those routes, reported to have been in continuous use for at least seven hundred years, passes directly through Taghia Gorge via the same path I’d followed from Aguddim to Said’s gîte.

  * * *

  —

  I FOUND THE TEAM’S EQUIPMENT and other stuff upstairs. One whole wall of a large living room was stacked waist-high in black plastic Pelican cases. Apparently, the crew was out, because the place was quiet. I poured myself a cup of tea and stepped onto a porch that offered an unobstructed view down the valley through which I had just hiked. A stream ribboned the valley bottom, sparkling in the midday sun. Terraced fields rose from its banks, quilting the surrounding hillsides in varying shades of green—sage, lime, olive, emerald. Scattered among the lush fields I could see dozens of snug little hobbit homes, built with mud and dry-stacked limestone blocks that looked as though they had grown from the earth like the fig and almond trees that surrounded them. Closer by, a man was spread-eagled in a tree twenty feet in the air whacking walnuts to the ground with a long stick. Sounds of a bustling village filled the air: children playing, babies crying, the bray of donkeys, dogs barking, the constant buzzing of insects. I knew, from having studied the High Atlas Mountains on Google Earth before the trip, that the vast wasteland of the Sahara lay just on the other side of the mountains that rose behind the gîte. More desert lay to the north, east, and west, but Taghia, fed by a fabled spring called the Source, is an oasis.

  I was trying to figure out the line for a famous route called Babel that climbs the left side of Taghia’s version of El Capitan, a 2,800-foot cliff called Tagoujimt n’Tsouiant, when I noticed two young women marching purposefully down a switchback cut into the slope below the mountain. They looked to be in their twenties and, as they clearly weren’t Moroccans, I guessed it was Alex’s girlfriend, Sanni, and her sister, Jaime. A few minutes later, they bounded up the stairs. Sanni was effervescent and appeared genuinely pleased to meet me. She shook my hand warmly and said Alex had told her I was coming. Petite, with blond hair down to her shoulders, twenty-four years old, she had a smile that would make most men melt. Jaime is older, more reserved, and I wondered if she might be wary of her little sister dating a guy like Alex Honnold (I would later learn this to be the case). We sat down at a table in the living area, and they told me that they’d just done a big hike. The rest of the team had spent the night on top of one of the mountains.

  I had never met Sanni (short for Cassandra), and the only thing I had heard about her was that she had “dropped” Alex while climbing at a cliff called Index in Washington State. I learned the details, like most of the climbing community, in a publication called Accidents in North American Mountaineering. As the title suggests, it makes for grim reading.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS MARCH OF 2016, early in the season for rock climbing in Washington State. But it was warm and sunny, and Alex was leaving in a few days to climb Getu Arch in China. He was about to run up a moderate 5.9 crack called Godzilla when Sanni’s parents, who were climbing with them that day, asked if he would use their rope and set the climb up as a toprope (toproping is when the rope is run through an anchor at the top of a route and the belayer is situated at the base of the climb; it’s the way most ropes are set at indoor climbing gyms). This way they wouldn’t have to lead it and they could run laps on the climb while Alex and Sanni went to climb something harder. What no one realized was that the rope they handed Alex was too short for Godzilla. After Alex finished the climb, Sanni began lowering him. Everyone was chatting and having fun, when she felt the end of the rope slip through her fingers. A split second later it popped through her belay device. Sanni screamed. Alex, now without a belay, dropped ten feet into a pile of rocks, landing hard on his butt and side.

  Sanni rushed to his side. “Are you okay?” she asked with a gasp.

  “Hold on,” said Alex, while he assessed his injuries. His elbow was bleeding, and his body was hurting all over. Jaime and her boyfriend, who were also climbing that day, took charge of the scene and ran through the ABCs—airway, breathing, circulation—then they did a “chunk check.” It appeared nothing was broken, so Alex got up and, with a hand from Sanni and her dad, hobbled down to the van. They drove straight to the hospital. Sanni was in back with Alex, bawling most of the way. An X-ray didn’t show any breaks, but considering the mechanism of injury, the doctor suggested a CT scan. It revealed compression fractures in two of his vertebrae.

  The next night, back in the van, Alex tried to br
eak up with Sanni. “I want to be a good climber,” he said, “and I have to make sure that my life is supporting me becoming a better climber.”

  “Listen,” replied Sanni, “we’re not going to do this thing where you break up with me, go off and do some angst soloing, and then we get back together. . . . You don’t have to be angsty to be a good climber. This was a terrible accident, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to happen again.”

  Alex wasn’t taking any responsibility for the accident. As the vastly more experienced climber, it was his job to “close the system” before leaving the ground. The standard way to do this is to tie a barrel knot in the end of the rope. If he had done that, the knot would have jammed against Sanni’s belay plate when he ran out of rope, preventing it from popping through. Sanni had been climbing for only about six months and had barely climbed outdoors, so it was unfair to put the blame on her for a housekeeping safety detail. Alex, the same guy who showed up to climb a choss big wall in Borneo without a helmet, has always been resistant to the sport’s long-established safety protocols. Perhaps when you free solo big walls, tying knots in the end of the rope seems a bit silly.

  “We hadn’t fallen in love yet,” Sanni told me. “In his mind, it was like, ‘I wanna do what’s best for climbing, and if you’re not best for climbing, and being around you sets me back, then I don’t want to date you.’ And I think it was also part of this weird secret desire to have some angst, so that he goes and climbs better.”

  And so Alex went to China, where the running joke of the trip was “My girlfriend broke my back, and then I tried to break up with her, and she didn’t let me, so I guess we’re still dating.”

  * * *

  —

  “BEFORE WE START, I’m just going to get through the annoying questions, the things I don’t like very much, and cover some of the basics about fear and death. Because that’s what everyone always asks me about, and I just want to get that over with.” Alex, wearing a plain red T-shirt and asphalt-colored chinos, was standing behind a podium on the stage of Town Hall Seattle. He mentioned the “annoying questions” a second time, then cued up a five-minute film about his 2014 free solo of El Sendero Luminoso in Mexico.

  With its vaulted ceilings, large stained-glass windows, and wooden pews, the Great Hall felt like a place of worship, which it was up until the 1990s, when the Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist sold its church to a group of civic-minded Seattleites. The Great Hall can seat more than eight hundred people, and it was packed. Sanni sat in the middle of a row toward the back. Her friend, an avid climber, had asked her if she wanted to go to see Alex Honnold.

  “Who?”

  Sanni had just started climbing in September in a local gym called Vertical World and had never heard of Alex Honnold or any other professional climbers.

  * * *

  —

  TOWARD THE END OF THE PROGRAM, a man stood up and said, “Several years ago you mentioned that one of your primary motivators for soloing Half Dome was to get more attention from women. Would you say that has happened, and do you have any crazy stories you’d be willing to share?” Someone catcalled from the back of the hall.

  “Yeahhhhh . . . well, I’m single, so obviously I still need to solo harder walls,” Alex deadpanned. The crowd cheered. “When I first was living in the van and road-tripping, my first interview in Rock and Ice I was like, ‘Oh, I’m in the magazines, and now I’m gonna get laid.’ But it did not work at all. It’s surprising how, even after being in a bunch of films and being on the cover of things, it turns out that personality is more important. So, it’s still not really working, but thanks for rubbing it in.”

  This guy is sassy, thought Sanni. Sure, he was a bit awkward, a bit goofy, but he was still “super cute.” And there was something else. “I don’t want to say it’s fearlessness,” she was telling me now, as we sat across from each other in the gîte, “because I know it’s a word he stays away from, but he had this readiness to go, this total competence.” Sanni had been single for almost two years since graduating from UNC Chapel Hill. She was working at an entry-level marketing job and living in a house with four girlfriends. They all wanted to meet guys, but money was tight and the bar scene was grim. She tried dating apps and went on occasional dates, but no one captured her imagination.

  At the end of the presentation, a long line formed to purchase Alone on the Wall and have it signed by Alex. Sanni and her friend decided to buy one copy and share it. Alex worked his way through the queue, just like he had at every other event he’d done in the years since he had become famous. As each person stepped to the front, he locked them with his doe eyes, flashed a toothy smile, and said a few kind words. Many of the younger people wanted selfies with Alex. He tried to make each one quick. The line stretched across the Great Hall, and he had to be efficient if he was to get back to his hotel at a decent hour, where he hoped to watch some Harry Potter before bed.

  In each book, he wrote the same thing, “Alex Honnold,” followed by two words that sum up his philosophy on life: “Go Big.” Alex told me that at one such event, a buxom woman arrived at the front of the line and asked Alex if he would sign her breasts. “Uh, are you serious?” Alex stammered. In answer, she pulled up her shirt, under which she wasn’t wearing a bra. As the rest of the people in line gazed in awe, Alex grabbed his Sharpie, wrote his name on her left breast, and then, almost as an afterthought, wrote “Go Big” on her right one. Sanni was a bit more discreet. She said hey and gave Alex her most charming, dimpled smile, and when he handed back the signed book, she passed him a note.

  Later that night, back at the hotel, Alex pulled it out of his pocket.

  “Because you made me laugh and why not. Sanni.” And her number. He racked his brain to try to remember the woman who gave him the note, but he had given hundreds of autographs that night, and all the faces blurred together. But he grabbed his phone and sent a quick text to say thanks and that he was leaving the next morning at five A.M.

  Two weeks later, Alex was on his way back to Seattle for a talk at REI. He had forgotten about the woman at the Seattle Town Hall.

  Sanni, though, had been thinking about Alex, and when she saw an announcement that he was coming back to Seattle, she texted him. A few days later she picked up Alex and Cedar Wright at the climbing gym and took them to dinner. After their talk at REI, she brought Alex back to her house for a bonfire party in his honor.

  “Right away, there was a really strong connection,” she tells me. Alex left again, but a few days later he invited Sanni to fly to Vegas to climb for a weekend in Red Rocks. Sanni said yes.

  I’m going to Sin City to hang out with a guy I barely know, who lives in a van. What’s the worst that could happen?

  * * *

  —

  AS I SIPPED a cup of tea in the gîte’s common room, Alex appeared in the hallway. I had been wondering where he was hiding and had not seen him come in. Perhaps he’d been in his room all afternoon. He looked around with one eye scrunched shut, said, “Hey,” and something like “I feel like death” and then shuffled into the bathroom. I’d seen him like this before, suffering from an acute migraine. They don’t strike him often, but when they do, it’s like Superman and kryptonite.

  I didn’t see him again until nine A.M. the next day. “Morning, kiddies,” he said. He looked tired, but his face wore a knowing smile, as if he was laughing inwardly at the notion that we were all children and he the only adult among us. The migraine had passed, and his superpowers were building back up. He carried a book in his hand, which he placed on a shelf behind the dining table, next to the gîte’s guest book. I saw on the binding it was Open, Andre Agassi’s autobiography. I hadn’t read it but had seen some reviews, and I knew it focused on Agassi’s struggles with fame and how he came to hate tennis, the sport around which he had built his life.

  Alex stepped up to the sink attached to the wall outside
the bathroom and examined his face in the mirror. Bare-chested and barefoot, he wore only his well-loved black climbing pants. As he stood there brushing his teeth and examining himself in the mirror, I looked around and noticed that every eye in the room was on him. Alex weighs around 160 pounds, which isn’t light for a five-eleven rock climber. Every muscle from his waist up is chiseled into his frame. I imagined that punching him in the gut would feel like hitting a wall. His shoulders are broad for the size of his frame, and his arms are long and borderline freakish on account of the ape-like hands that hang from their ends. His fingers are so thick they actually look buff, like they have miniature muscles in them. And instead of hanging straightish, they appear naturally curled like a gorilla’s. They’re so thick I wonder if he can even straighten them. His fingernails, on the other hand, are surprisingly normal. Most climbers’ nails get banged up so badly that at least one or two end up looking like Ruffles potato chips. Mine are sometimes so bad I find myself trying to hide them from certain people. Alex’s are scratched, but they’re not deformed.

  “It’s a little embarrassing,” said Cheyne Lempe, one of the high-angle cameramen, “but every time I see him I get a little starstruck.”

  * * *

  —

  WE SCOOTED DOWN A NARROW path that ran along the bank built to divert water from the river into a canal running straight to Said’s gîte. The trail, red and muddy, stood out starkly against the vibrant green grass growing along its edges. Where the canal connected with the main river that fed it, we hopscotched across to the other side on flat limestone rocks that rose a few inches above the rippled water. A wider trail led us past a small square of hard-packed red dirt where a few young men sat on a stone wall holding phones in their hands. A 2,500-foot-high limestone tower called Oujda loomed overhead. At the bottom of the cliff, some fifty to one hundred feet above the ground, dozens of rivulets poured out of cracks in the face—the magical spring they call the Source, the place that gives Taghia its baraka (spirit). Green beards of moss hung beneath the gushing founts, reminding me of a romanticized painting I’d once seen of the mythical Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Before crossing the boggy slope below the Source, I looked downstream. The Ahansal River flowed northward from its headwaters, sparkling in the sun, its banks green and radiant against the brown foothills of the High Atlas Mountains. In the other direction, upstream of the Source, the riverbed was dry. The boundary of the oasis formed by the Source was as stark and abrupt as the vertical walls that rose from the sandy corridor into which we were filing.