The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

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  WE SHUFFLED ONE BY ONE into the slot canyon, which narrowed until I could touch the walls on either side at the same time. The way ahead was blocked by an overhang capped with a water-polished boulder. Here the Berbers had jammed a juniper tree trunk between the walls of the canyon. Such makeshift ladders can be found all over these mountains, similar to the via ferrata that crisscross the Dolomites in Italy, only made of wood and stone instead of iron. I was told that many “Berber bridges” are the handiwork of the Ait ‘Atta, a nomadic tribe of goat and sheep herders who winter in the Sahara and in summer lead their flocks up into the High Atlas. For a thousand years, the Ait ‘Atta have been allowed access to the high pastures of these mountains in exchange for providing security to the inhabitants of Taghia and Aguddim against enemy tribes from the Sahara.

  The Berbers cross this makeshift bridge multiple times a day, and I think they even lead goats across it, but apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought it was sketchy. Some climbers, it wasn’t clear who, had created a bypass by drilling a bolt into the canyon wall about fifty yards upstream. By utilizing an étrier clipped to the bolt, our crew, which included some of the best climbers in the world, was able to bypass the Berber bridge.

  Once we were past this crux, the canyon opened up to the width of a dirt road. As I stared up between the overhanging walls at a tiny arc of sky high above, I marveled at the geologic forces that sculpted these natural cathedrals from rock that was once the bed of an ocean. With a little bit of imagination, I could picture the three mountains that towered above me back when they must have been one giant plug of rock.

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  ON A SMALL LEDGE at the base of Taoujdad, Alex attached a Micro Traxion to a black rope hanging on the wall. The cliff rose like the prow of a spaceship, seeming to overhang every inch of its 1,800 feet. I followed the rope upward with my eyes, knowing it traced the route Alex planned to free solo. A thousand feet overhead I lost the line where it disappeared above a blocky overhang. On the hike into this valley, the wall had looked reddish in the midday sun, but now that I was standing at its base I saw that its color was closer to orange, with blotchy patches of pink, white, and gray. The route was marked by tiny white splotches—handholds covered in chalk, like a 3-D game of connect the dots.

  Alex set off with a water bottle and a spare Micro Traxion swinging from a gear loop on the back of his harness. I asked him why he didn’t attach the second device as a backup, and he said he thought one was better because it was simpler and cleaner. He had heard stories of people falling and having the two devices jam against each other such that neither clamped down on the rope. His point was that sometimes less is more.

  That morning, back at the gîte, Dave Allfrey, the team’s rigger and a close friend of Alex’s, was in the hallway sorting through his gear. He said he was going to mini-track Rivières Pourpres, and with a serious look, he told me about a superstition he has about Alex and his big free solos. For a number of years, he has been climbing routes with a rope before Alex goes and solos them. He’s not sure how it started, but the superstition is that Dave needs to feel good on the route and complete it without falling for it to be okay for Alex to climb it without a rope. “I need to report back [to Alex] that it felt easy.” As he’s climbing, he keeps an eye out for anything that might be amiss—loose holds, edges that have too much chalk. If there’s a key hold that he thinks Alex might not notice, he marks it with a small dab of chalk called a tick mark. “When I do try to drop myself into his shoes,” said Dave, “sometimes it’s distracting, and I find myself not climbing as well because it throws me into an uncomfortable mental space.” Alex, who is not superstitious in the least, finds the whole thing a bit silly.

  “Get some, Mark,” Alex called from above, when he looked down and saw me setting off on my own mini-track adventure. There was a problem, though: I hadn’t anticipated mini-tracking in Morocco, and so I had not brought my rig. When Alex invited me that morning to go up with him, I scrounged up some gear, but the devices I was using weren’t Micro Traxions. My setup wasn’t sliding smoothly up the rope. I had to keep reaching down with one hand to manually pull the rope through the system, which was difficult because the route was steep and unrelenting. The manufacturer’s website specifies that the Micro Traxion can be used for self-belay, but it should always be backed up in some fashion. Most climbers, myself included, use two. I clip both to my belay loop, but I extend the top one and hold it up by clipping it to a bungee cord (actually an old headlamp strap) around my neck.

  The diciest part of mini-tracking is the transition at anchors. This entails clipping a lanyard to the anchor to secure myself, removing the Micro Traxion from the lower rope, and putting it back on the rope above. There is no room for error, and mistakes made at these changeovers have resulted in a number of fatal accidents.

  A prominent New England climber fell to his death in 2014 at my home cliff, Cathedral Ledge, while mini-tracking. No one knows exactly what went wrong, but he was found at the base, unclipped from the rope. Another New England climber, while climbing Moonlight Buttress (the route Alex free soloed in 2008) in Zion in March of 2016, heard a whooshing sound coming from above and assumed it was rockfall. He looked up and saw to his horror that it was a man, still alive, free-falling to his death. An investigation revealed that he was mini-tracking high on the route when he somehow came unhooked from the rope.

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  I HADN’T WARMED UP, and there were no rests. And even if I had, the route was above my current pay grade. By the time I was 120 feet up, my forearms were burning. I pumped out on the second pitch, meaning my arms got so tired that my fingers opened and let go of the holds against my will. I fell back on the rope. As I hung there and shook out my arms, all I could think about was the horror of how it would feel to pump out while free soloing. I knew the climbing was easy for Alex and that this would never happen, but still, the thought of it made me slightly nauseous. I was also dubious of the integrity of some of the holds I was pulling on. A few were nothing more than congealed blobs of calcite that had leached out of the limestone. I yanked on one of them while I was hanging there, and it felt solid, but I knew that some holds, especially on limestone, feel secure right up until they break off. We call them “time bombs.”

  I hung on the rope or fell at least once on most of the pitches, but I eventually worked out the kinks with my rig and there were sections I climbed well. It was thrilling to be high off the deck in Morocco, pulling hard on small holds. At the anchor of the sixth pitch, about halfway up, I met Alex, who was on his way down. He had climbed the entire route in about ninety minutes.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “I’m working my way up,” I replied. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  For a brief moment, I thought Alex was about to give me some kudos for making it as far as I did.

  “This is like when they let a normal guy into the pool in the Olympics,” said Alex.

  All I could do was laugh. “You really can be a dick sometimes,” I replied. “I thought I was doing well.”

  “Well, for a middle-aged father of four, you’re doing great.”

  * * *

  —

  MIKEY SCHAEFER, Jimmy’s director of high-angle photography and all-around right-hand man, walked up behind Alex and began kneading his shoulders. Alex bent his arm like a chicken wing and rotated it around as if rowing a boat. “I’ve got something going on with my right shoulder,” he said. Mikey dug in with his short but powerful fingers. Alex sighed. His head dropped, and his chin settled onto his chest.

  “Is that gray hair?” asked Mikey, whose own bushy mop and rug-thick beard were flecked with silver strands. Though he stands only five foot four, Mikey is a giant in the climbing community. He’s not a household name like Honnold or Caldwell, but among climbing’s cognos
centi, he is revered as a quiet badass who operates under the radar, despite being one of the best all-around climbers in the country.

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “Think about all the stress I experience.” Everyone laughed, but I couldn’t tell if Alex was being sarcastic or not. In all the years I have known him, I have never actually seen him appear stressed-out.

  Said appeared carrying a sombrero-shaped, brightly painted ceramic dish called a tagine. Steam poured from a volcano-like spout and filled the room with the mouthwatering aroma of a stew Fatima had been slow cooking all afternoon. Berbers have been cooking with tagines for hundreds of years. It’s an ingenious design; the spout traps the escaping steam, which condenses and drips back into the stew, slow cooking and tenderizing inexpensive cuts of meat with a limited amount of water. The dinner menu at Said’s is tagine, tagine, and tagine. The only mystery is what kind of meat you’ll find inside. It could be goat, lamb, or chicken. That night it was chicken. The other ingredients were carrots, potatoes, squash, onions, and other bits and bobs I couldn’t identify. It was seasoned with spices typical of a Moroccan kitchen, including turmeric, ginger, and coriander. Said appeared with a second tagine, this one meat-free for Alex, who has been a vegetarian since 2012. I dug in heartily with a large spoon. The chicken melted off the bone, and the flavor was bold and spicy and unlike anything I’d ever tasted. Said returned throughout the meal with endless loaves of bread baked in his homemade clay oven. We drank tea flavored with mint that Said’s daughters had picked from the side of a stream a few yards from the house. Everything had come from within one hundred yards of where we sat. The only exception was the flour in the bread, brought in by donkey from the market in Aguddim. Once a month, the king subsidizes the delivery of a discounted fifty-kilo bag of flour for every family in Morocco.

  The kitten must have smelled the tagine. It darted in the door, wove its way between our legs, and jumped up onto the couch with Alex. Someone mentioned how the creature looked well. It had been so scrawny and emaciated when the crew first arrived that people weren’t sure it was going to make it. Said had been putting out bowls of milk, and the crew had been slipping it plenty of snacks.

  Alex then casually said he wouldn’t care if someone killed it. All eyes in the room turned on him: eyebrows raised, looks of bemusement, and grumbles of disapproval. Having known Alex for eight years, I’ve heard this sort of comment before. You might even call it a signature Alexism: first, that it occurred to him to contemplate whether he cared at all about the cat, second, that he decided he didn’t, and third, that instead of keeping his mouth shut, he decided to share this gem of a revelation with the rest of us. I wondered if he would have still made the comment if Sanni and her sister were there—they had left the day before. Sanni didn’t say why she was leaving early, but she did tell me that she had never watched Alex free solo. Perhaps she wanted to keep it that way.

  “I didn’t say I would kill the cat,” he added. “Just that it wouldn’t bother me if someone else did.” I looked back at Alex stroking the kitten with his huge hand. A smug smile had replaced the poker face, and I knew that it was all a game, a game in which the object is to make your companions uncomfortable, to force them to stop talking about climbing, for once, and to think.

  Seconds later, we were back to talking about climbing.

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  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, Alex sat at the table chewing on a stale piece of bread, tapping a meaty forefinger against the screen of his phone. The shaky Wi-Fi signal we’d been pulling in with a Moroccan cell booster wasn’t working. “It seems slightly warmer today,” he said. Just a casual observation about the weather? Maybe, except the temperature had a lot to do with how well his fingers would adhere to the rock. And in an hour, he would be hanging from his fingertips with 1,000 feet of air sucking at his heels.

  Someone bumped into a red plastic bucket in the hallway, and it clattered loudly. “Hey, you just kicked the bucket,” said Alex, trying to lighten the mood.

  A banana-shaped canvas pouch filled with Scrabble tiles sat on the table in front of us. “Want to play?” I asked Alex.

  “Sure,” he said, “but you have to let me win so you don’t shatter my confidence.”

  As I divvied out the pieces, the kitten jumped up onto the couch and Alex picked it up, cradling the little creature in one of his giant hands and scratching the top of its head with his other. Alex told me that he had just been e-mailing with some folks from his high school in Sacramento. They were inducting him into their Hall of Fame at a ceremony in October, and they had a few questions, like how did his education at Mira Loma High prepare him for the things he’s doing now.

  “So?” I asked.

  “I just told them that I never really gave a shit about my education, but that school did help shape my overall worldview.”

  Alex looked down at the pieces on the table in front of him and began moving them around like he was playing a shell game. In seconds, he had eight words interconnected in a crossword puzzle: Jab-jetty-lieu-taze-bane-cane-came-been. I had two: nun-cunt. I suck at Bananagrams.

  “I’m pretty sure ‘cunt’ is slang,” said Alex. “Is ‘glinty’ a word?”

  I said I didn’t think it was, but it turned out I was wrong. Alex added it on.

  Clair Popkin, the director of photography, signaled me. It was time to go. He and I and a local Moroccan named Hassan El Mouden who had been working for the crew as a porter had a plan to climb up the back side of Taoujdad and wait for Alex on top of Rivières Pourpres. “Good luck, my man,” I said to Alex, clasping his hand in a kung fu grip.

  Alex stared at me with his big brown eyes and smiled.

  * * *

  —

  LIKE THOUSANDS OF TIMES BEFORE, Jimmy hooked his daisy chain to the two-bolt anchor, unhooked his rappel device from the black static line he had just slid down, and shifted his weight onto the tether. “Off,” he yelled, the signal that the rope was free and Mikey could come down. Jimmy secured himself to the next rope, transitioned off the anchor, disconnected his daisy chain, and started rappelling down the next rope. The rock was gray and weathered, slightly less than vertical. Jimmy walked down the wall, carefully placing his feet so as to avoid any loose rocks.

  When French sport climbers first established Rivières Pourpres and other routes snaking up this vast acreage of limestone cliff, they climbed the route from the ground up, taking five days to inspect, clean, and protect it. In addition to placing a dotted line of expansion bolts for anchoring ropes, they pried off any loose blocks and flakes of rock that might pose a danger while climbing. It’s standard practice when establishing bolted routes and creates a relatively safe climbing experience for both the first ascensionist and all other subsequent climbers. Jimmy’s crew had reconnoitered camera positions off to the side of the route so they could film Alex as he climbed past. These sections of rock, well beyond arm’s reach of the route, had never been touched, let alone scoured for loose rock. Dislodging a deadly missile onto a fellow cameraman—or even Alex himself—was always a real and nerve-fraying possibility and one Jimmy was assiduous to avoid at all times.

  So Jimmy couldn’t believe it when he looked down and saw a backpack-size block sliding out from under his right foot. The terrifying sound of rock grating against rock filled the air, and there was nothing he could do to stop what was about to happen. Two of his close friends, Dave Allfrey and the sound guy, Jim Hurst, Dean Potter’s old friend, were somewhere down below.

  “Rock, rock, rock,” he bellowed. The boulder bounced several times, leaving puffs of dust each time it hit the wall and filling the air with a loud cracking that reverberated through the canyon. Spinning violently, it hit a grassy terrace sixty feet below, where it exploded and dislodged several more rocks. Jimmy looked down and watched two dozen softball- to football-size stones raining down toward Dave and Jim.

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  FOUR HUNDRED FEET BELOW, Dave heard the cracking and the call of “Rock” that is every climber’s nightmare. I’m a fuckin’ magnet for this stuff, he thought as he looked up and saw the sky above him filled with black projectiles that whistled like incoming artillery. In the spring of 2015, he had been pummeled by a filing cabinet–size fin of rock that Cheyne had inadvertently dislodged onto him on a first ascent in Baffin Island. Dave had shown me the scar, which looked like a shark had taken a bite out of his back. Now he sucked himself in close to the wall, tried to make himself as small as he could under his helmet, and waited to find out if it was his time to die.

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  THE NEXT THIRTY SECONDS PASSED in slow motion for Jimmy. He heard the rocks hit the canyon floor, then an eerie silence. The radio crackled to life. “I’m okay,” said Dave, “but holy fuck was that close.” Jim Hurst came on the line and said he was also okay.