The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  Jimmy hung on the rope, his hands over his face.

  * * *

  —

  “DO YOU HEAR THAT?” I said to Clair and Hassan. We were sitting on the summit of Taoujdad. The “trail” up the back had included a section of 5.5 free soloing near the top. It was easy, but some of the rock was vegetated and loose, and the exposure was real. A fall from anywhere on this section would have been fatal. Just below the top, Clair’s radio had crackled with the news that Alex was starting up.

  “Yeah, what is that?” said Clair. Wind blasted the summit, sieving through the scraggly bushes that clung to jumbled piles of rocks. A gust blew up the wall from the direction of the sound, and we both heard it more clearly. It sounded like, “Alex, Alex, Alex.”

  A jolt of adrenaline hit my chest, and I felt like I was in a car skidding off an icy road at high speed. “What the hell is going on?” I said to Clair, as we both started scrambling down a steep ridge to see if we could figure out what was happening. Fifty feet down, the wall dropped away below me into a dark abyss. I looked over the edge and saw something that my brain had difficulty processing. A dark-haired man in a short-sleeve blue shirt was walking a tightrope stretched between Taoujdad and a similar tower on the other side of the gorge. The line, I could see, was made of nylon webbing—a slackline. It must have been 1,000 feet across and a similar distance above the ground. It was windy, and the line vibrated like a guitar string. The man swung his arms back and forth over his head as his body whipsawed from side to side like a skier on a slalom course. Another gust carried his calls in our direction.

  “Allez, allez, allez.” The yelling that had almost given me a heart attack was this guy cheering himself on in French.

  After the panic had washed through me, I felt an intense anger toward this overly exuberant acrobat. His obnoxious hooting and hollering must have been a serious distraction to Alex. That the guy probably didn’t even know Alex was soloing the wall to which his line was attached didn’t matter to me.

  “That guy needs to shut the fuck up,” I said to Clair, looking up at him and realizing that he was filming.

  * * *

  —

  OVER THE COURSE OF TWO weeks in Taghia, Alex had climbed nearly two hundred pitches. Of those, 140 or so were 5.12 and above. The amount of difficult rock climbing he had done in Morocco was unprecedented, and it had taken a toll on his body. The big toe on his right foot felt tender as he stepped onto a tiny foot nub on the first hard move of the route. Miles of climbing on razor-sharp limestone had also calloused and dried out his fingertips. His index and middle fingers, in particular, felt too dry where they gripped the rock. Alex worried that the thickened skin made his fingertips less sensitive to the nuances in the holds he was gripping. Calloused skin can sometimes cause a fingertip to “skate” off a hold, like a foot slipping on a banana peel. His fingers needed moisturizing. So he popped the last phalanx on his right index finger into his mouth and gave it a quick suck. The middle finger was next. He looked up and saw Cheyne off to his right dangling on the black rope he had used for mini-tracking two days ago. Cheyne was leaning over, camera up to his eye, so focused on composing the shot that he didn’t notice Alex’s consternation.

  A few hundred feet higher, Alex screwed up a sequence and found himself in the middle of a small roof facing a move he hadn’t rehearsed. This pitch is rated 5.11d, a grade at which Alex has a large margin for error, but the rock was steep, there were no rests, and he was feeling more pumped than he had on any of the previous three times he had done this section. He was tense, overgripping a bit because he wasn’t trusting his sore foot. He hadn’t yet found the flow.

  What the fuck is that? Someone was yelling. Alex looked over his left shoulder and spotted the French slackliner.

  “Allez, allez, allez,” the man cheered himself, over and over. Who does that? Who cheers for himself? The Frenchie fell. Caught by his long tether, he dangled like a spider on a thread eight feet below the line. At least he had stopped yelling.

  Most of Alex’s weight was hanging from a deep pocket he underclung with his left hand. He had buried his fingers so deep he wasn’t sure if they would come back out of the mountain; it’s something he tends to do when free soloing. His right hand was on a smaller edge, and the next move was a big one. His feet were splayed out below. He looked around—Frenchie bobbing on his tether, two guys dangling on ropes up and to his right, one jugging up from below. He may have been soloing, but he certainly wasn’t alone.

  * * *

  —

  MIKEY SETTLED HIS FEET AGAINST a reddish streak in the limestone, rotated his torso to the left, and stared down the wall through the camera’s viewfinder. Alex seemed to be moving smoothly now. His foot is barely on the pedal. He’s giving what? Like, 50 percent, maybe 60? Mikey knew the climbing wasn’t as easy as Alex made it look because he had done the route himself when he first got to Taghia. He had struggled on one of the moves Alex was about to pull—1,200 feet up an overhanging wall.

  Afterward, when I talked with Mikey about the experience of filming Alex free soloing, he described some of the thoughts running through his mind. “He’s running at low rpms, barely revving his engine, but still, I feel like I’m watching someone on top of a building who’s about to jump. And it’s sucking the energy right out of me. This must be like war photography. The chance of someone dying—it’s not a point-zero-zero sort of thing; it’s a percentage point, like multiple points. It could happen. I wouldn’t want to do this job every single day for a year. Oh man, that would be really bad odds.”

  Mikey had been trying not to dwell on the fact that shortly before leaving for Morocco, the climbing tribe had sustained another loss. Kyle Dempster, thirty-three, and Scott Adamson, thirty-four, two of America’s best alpinists, had disappeared in late August while attempting the unclimbed north face of the Ogre, a 23,000-foot mountain in the Karakoram. A storm blew in on the second day of what was supposed to be a five-day mission. The pair was last seen by their cook halfway up the face. Most of the crew knew them personally.

  * * *

  —

  ALEX PULLED HIMSELF onto the route’s only decent ledge 1,400 feet above the ground, as Mikey continued filming.

  “Hey, how did you get up here?” said Mikey. “Where’s your rope?”

  Alex laughed. Jimmy was nearby on a separate rope a bit above Mikey, jugging up to get in position to film the next pitch, which was by far the most dramatic on the entire route—gently overhanging, smooth gray rock with streaks of orange and red. Big moves between positive holds. The rating: 5.12c. Alex slipped off the heels of his shoes and shuffled a few feet across the ledge. He turned his back to Mikey, who was still rolling, and let out a sigh. A stream of urine arced through the air.

  * * *

  —

  THE JANGLE OF CLINKING CARABINERS drew my attention to a notch between two fins of scaly gray limestone one hundred feet below. Jimmy, panting and dripping with sweat, was hustling to top out before Alex, so he and Clair could shoot Alex summiting from two different angles. He pulled the huge black camera case from around his neck and threw it down in the rocks by his feet.

  “Did you hear what happened?” he asked me as sweat dripped off the tip of his nose. “I almost killed Dave and Jim.”

  A few minutes later, we heard whistling. Alex, wearing a bright red shirt, black pants, and a yellow chalk bag, scrambled up onto the summit, all nonchalant, as if he were strolling down the sidewalk to get a pack of gum from the corner shop. Jimmy and Clair had their cameras trained on him, while Alex stood there, staring at his forearms.

  “That felt like work,” he said, to no one in particular.

  “How did it go?” I asked him.

  “I was overgripping and a little tight on the whole bottom part. I didn’t really loosen up until I got to the crux. That actually felt pretty good—smooth, easy. I don’t think I’ve actually
ever soloed anything like that before. It was wild. Overall, I would give myself a B-minus. But I’ve had solos where I was more on edge, like Romantic Warrior.” He then reminded us of the story that had become legend among those of us who follow his exploits. “I was so gripped on that one I took a dump on pitch 3.”

  With that he grabbed the pack we had brought up for him with his shoes and a water bottle, threw it onto his back, and walked off.

  Hassan had been sitting a few feet away, absorbing everything. He’s twenty-five years old, six feet tall, and movie-star handsome. The entire time I had been in Taghia, Hassan had been wearing a tight, light blue cotton V-neck sweater with no shirt underneath. He lives in Aguddim, speaks fluent English, and works as a translator and guide. He’s also a budding climber, a member of the first generation of Moroccans to venture up these cliffs with ropes and quickdraws. Hassan had told me earlier that all the Moroccan climbers know about Alex and Tommy. They had watched the coverage of Tommy’s Dawn Wall ascent on CNN. “Everybody wants to meet them,” said Hassan. Alex and Tommy are famous in Morocco, even among non-climbers. Which explained the Moroccan woman who saw us walking back from the cliff and called out, “Alex, I want to marry you.”

  “He [Alex] is an inspiration for young people here. It’s making me motivated to get more into climbing,” says Hassan. “But it worries me, because it’s dangerous.”

  When Alex left, I turned to Hassan. “What do you think?”

  Hassan looked me in the eyes and shook his head. “He’s crazy.”

  Mikey showed up a few minutes later and plopped down on the summit next to Jimmy. They both looked dog tired, as anyone would after a long, sweaty day humping heavy loads through the mountains. But more than just physically exhausted, they appeared mentally frazzled, shell-shocked almost. Jimmy stared across the canyon with an expression that looked pained and aggrieved. I had been through a lot of emotional, pressure-packed moments with Jimmy over the years, but I had never seen him like this before. No one spoke for a while.

  Then Jimmy said, “Today was awful for me. . . . The thing is, I was hyperfocused. I knew the most dangerous thing that could happen would be to kick off a rock. It was all I was thinking about. The place I put my foot, fifteen people had already gone over that ground. It kind of made me lose my stomach. I was like, ‘Fuck this shit.’ I told Mikey, ‘The last thing I want to do right now is shoot somebody soloing.’”

  “And I had to be like, ‘Hey, he will be up here in thirty minutes. You got a job to do. Put it in your pocket and think about it later,’” said Mikey.

  “This shit is fucking gnarly,” said Jimmy. “And I knew it would be like this, I mean, I knew it would be dangerous like everything else we do. But with this shit—with this many cameramen—the chances of hurting someone else . . .” His voice trailed off, and he looked down at the ground, which was covered in loose rocks.

  Any climber who ventures out of the gym or beyond manicured sport-climbing crags has had close encounters with rockfall. It’s part of the game and a risk you learn to mitigate rather than eliminate. When I’d heard Jimmy say that he’d knocked off a rock above Jim and Dave, I wasn’t surprised. It is a common occurrence. I’ve had my bell rung at least a dozen times by golf ball–size rocks that have taken chunks out of various helmets I’ve owned over the years. But I’ve always been roped in when this has happened.

  The real reason this incident was so chilling was because we all knew that it could have happened when Alex was on the wall. Without the security of a rope, he can’t squeeze in tight, dive for cover, or shield his head with his arms. And he doesn’t wear a helmet since it would be useless if he fell from any appreciable height—not to mention it’s just not his style. My stomach churned as I imagined a shower of rock shrapnel peppering him amid a hard sequence. I know what it feels like to get whapped with a small piece of stone. Even a peanut-size rock hitting Alex in the head might cause him to falter if it happened at the wrong moment.

  Dave said afterward that he could feel the rush of wind on his ears as watermelon-size chunks of rock shrieked within inches of his skull. Yes, he was wearing a helmet, but it wasn’t going to offer much in the way of protection against rocks that big, which would have ripped his head off his body. Jimmy was now bearing the full weight of his decision to take this job on. Jon Krakauer’s perfectly rational advice that someone would film Alex, and that Jimmy should be “the guy” because he was the most qualified to do it, seemed utterly worthless in this moment, like, “Somebody’s going to ski off the summit of K2, so it might as well be you.”

  In Jimmy’s film Meru, he has a line about how the best alpinists are the ones with the worst memories. Only those who can selectively forget the misery and near misses are willing to return again and again to attempt big, dangerous climbs. While this project didn’t involve the physical discomfort of a Himalayan expedition like Meru, it certainly offered its own set of horrors.

  We all just sat there, listening to the wind whistle through the notches in the rock, staring off at the parched hills surrounding the tiny oasis of Taghia. “I don’t want to do this job for the rest of my life,” said Mikey. “All the stress is just going to ruin me. I’ve seen other shooters that work in the mountains, and they’ve seen it go bad, and now they’re paranoid, because they hit their threshold. We could be doing car commercials or shooting models in Mexico.” Mikey paused and appeared to be deep in thought, like he was imagining those bikini-clad models on the beach. I looked at Jimmy, and he was finally smiling. He does photo shoots with supermodels on occasion. “But none of that work is really meaningful,” Mikey added. “You’re just selling shit. Here we’re actually trying to show somebody special.”

  * * *

  —

  LATER, BACK AT THE GÎTE, everyone hung out on the roof watching the sunset. All that was left of the trip was to pack up and head home. It would have been the perfect time to break out some beers to celebrate, but Alex and Jimmy don’t drink and consuming alcohol is against the law in the Kingdom of Morocco. After Rivières Pourpres, Alex had gone and soloed a classic multipitch 5.11. In total, he had soloed an El Cap’s worth of hard rock. It had been one of the most impressive days of free soloing in the history of the sport. Alex wasn’t glowing and animated like I’d seen him after other big successful days—too much hadn’t gone well for everyone. But he was more chatty than usual, and a question I’d been pondering came to mind.

  He had read three books in Taghia. Open, The Push (Tommy’s autobiography that he shared with Alex in real time via thumb drive as he was writing it at the gîte), and The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. Somehow, he had also found time to watch at least three seasons of Spartacus. The Signal and the Noise is all about statistical probability and why most predictions fail. In the book, Silver explains what he calls the prediction paradox: “The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.” I found it interesting that the world’s greatest free soloist was reading a book about probability in the weeks leading up to what could be called the ultimate gamble. I wondered where Alex put his odds of success if he decided to go for it. It’s a pretty loaded question to ask someone, but given his mood and the tie-in to the book, I decided to toss it out.

  First, he talked about other people’s odds of pulling it off. His friend Brad Gobright, an up-and-coming free soloist? “If he woke up one day and decided that he didn’t care if he lived or died, he’d run a 35 percent chance of dying. There are a ton of dudes who, if you put a gun to their head, they’d have a 70 percent chance of living” to claim the first free solo of El Capitan. “Obviously these are unsatisfactory odds for most people,” he added.

  Alex said that while training in Switzerland that past summer, he had visited his friend Ueli Steck, a brilliant forty-year-old climber nicknamed “the Swiss Machine.” Steck is a household name in Europe, known for constantly breakin
g his own speed records on classic routes in the Alps, like the North Face of the Eiger. Steck is to alpine climbing and mountaineering what Alex is to rock climbing.

  They had gone on a hike in the hills above Steck’s home and talked about “when you just take the chance.” Steck told Alex that on some of his big climbs, he “seizes his moment and just goes for it,” acknowledging that when the stakes are high enough, he’s willing to roll the dice. Steck was undoubtedly referring to his 2013 solo ascent of the 8,000-foot South Face of Annapurna, a 26,545-foot mountain in Nepal. This climb is high on the short list of the boldest Himalayan coups in the history of the sport. Annapurna, the tenth-highest mountain in the world, is often called the “deadly mountain.” As of 2012, 191 people had stood on Annapurna’s summit, and 61 had died trying to get there or on their way back down—a fatality rate of roughly 32 percent, the highest of any 8,000-meter peak.

  Steck had attempted the face twice before. On one of his failed bids, in 2007, he was hit by rockfall while climbing unroped low on the face, causing him to fall 1,000 feet. In 2013, when he finally succeeded, Steck was climbing with a Canadian named Don Bowie, who bowed out the day before the pair planned to set off. Rather than be denied a third time, Steck set off alone carrying a small backpack and two hundred feet of six-millimeter rope. According to his own account, he climbed nearly nonstop for twenty hours, free soloing every inch of the face, including mixed climbing on the crux rock band that required him to use his ice axes as hooks on vertical rock at 23,000 feet. On the summit, he briefly took in the view, then turned around and climbed and rappelled back down the way he had come up. He was back in camp twenty-eight hours after he set off. “If I climb anything harder than that, I think I will kill myself,” said Steck afterward.