by Mark Synnott
* * *
—
“I’M LOOKING FOR SOMETHING REPEATABLE,” said Alex, as he lounged in a plastic chair on the roof of the gîte. “[Mark] Twight’s whole summit or death—either way I win—that’s not really my scene. But I do think a bit about it. Maybe for El Cap I just need to embrace that mentality. Some things are worth it.”
As an example, Alex mentioned his University Wall free solo. After rehearsing the route, he could only get his odds up to about 95 percent. So he set the project aside.
“Then one day [six weeks later] I was like, ‘Today is my day,’ and I just went up and did it. Sometimes you have to choose your moment, which is the opposite of today—a Tuesday morning at the office—time to clock in. Soloing is so much about confidence. Today I should have been ultrastrong, but I actually felt slightly weak.”
* * *
—
WHEN JIMMY AND I had first started talking about this project, he had suggested I join his crew as a rigger and work alongside Dave helping fix anchors and ropes for the cameramen. At first, I loved the idea, because it would intimately embed me with the crew. But I’ve done a lot of rigging over the years, and I fully understand the dangers involved. When I stepped back and thought about it carefully, contemplating all the loose rock, the sharp edges, and how much danger I’d already been exposed to in my life, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
In 2008, not long after an expedition to Kashmir with Kevin Thaw and Peter Croft, I retired from high-risk Himalayan expeditions. My marriage was falling apart, and my sense of responsibility of being a father was growing on me as I approached my forties. A sober assessment of the odds of survival if I kept pushing the limits indefinitely—which were all too stark given the deaths of too many close friends and associates—left me with no delusions of immortality. And so I let go of the ambition, which had burned since I first found climbing as a youth, to compete with the best alpinists and adventurers of my generation. I still climbed and skied and traveled the world. I just did so with a greater margin of safety than before. I said no to many opportunities. I chose to focus more on my guiding business, my writing career, and other interests like sailing that have expanded my horizons in new ways. And I spent more time with my kids and got them involved in some of my adventures.
There had been several times over the years, since I had first gotten to know Alex, that I wanted to grab him, shake him by the shoulders, and say, “Dude, if you don’t step back from the edge, you’re gonna miss out on a lot of good living.” I felt that same impulse on the rooftop in Taghia.
Instead, I said, “There’s a lot of things that you still need to experience, Alex.”
“Yeah,” he replied, looking mischievous and not missing a beat, “like threesomes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Her Attitude Is Awesome”
When was the last time you talked to Alex?” asked Chris Sylvia, my boss at the North Face. It was my twentieth year on the Global Athlete Team—as they now called it—and Chris was the latest in a series of a dozen or so managers with whom I had worked over the years.
“A couple days ago, why?”
“He took a bad fall and destroyed his ankle. He doesn’t know if it’s broken yet, but he showed it to me on FaceTime and it looked really bad. Black and blue and swollen all the way up to the knee. I’ve never seen him so down.”
When I got off the phone I texted Alex. “Hey just heard about your fall really sorry to hear that you got hurt but glad you are ok just wanted you to know I’m sending good vibes your way.” Instantly, the three little iMessage bubbles lit up. Alex, who is usually climbing and slow to respond, was tapping the tiny keypad on his phone with his sausage-like fingers.
“Thanks dude, appreciate it. I got it looked at today and it’s good so I think things won’t be too bad. Pretty optimistic. Just almost climbed 12c in the gym one footed. Which is something at least. It might be ok in a week or two according to the doc.”
I called Jimmy. The phone rang once, then switched to a foreign dial tone—a common scenario for Jimmy, who is constantly traveling around the world working on photo shoots and film productions. He didn’t pick up, but a couple of minutes later he called me back. “You heard about Alex, huh?” he said. “I guess we’re going to postpone a week, but Alex has done major damage to the ligaments in his ankle and you know how long it can take for that kind of thing to heal.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I haven’t heard the details yet. I just know that his ankle is destroyed, and that I’ve now got a serious problem on my hands. My team has been booked for months, and I can’t just cancel or postpone on them—they are all counting on the work and have turned down other jobs. And now there’s nothing to film. He was climbing so well in Morocco and our whole team was really starting to gel. We had all this momentum, and now . . .”
Afterward, I sat at my desk, thinking back to the spring of 1997, when I took a similar fall on El Capitan. My partners thought I was overestimating the extent of my injury, so they taped up my ankle and we kept climbing, setting a speed record in the process on a route called Lost in America. Two days later I got it X-rayed and found out I had broken my ankle. I was in a cast for six weeks, and the day after it was removed I flew to Pakistan to climb Shipton Spire. I thought back to how shaky I had been on that climb, how worried I was that I’d fall again and reinjure it. I remembered how it had taken a year to regain my confidence as a climber. How would Alex handle it?
* * *
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TWO AND A HALF WEEKS later, Jimmy and I sat in his van outside the Majestic Yosemite Hotel (formerly the Ahwahnee), waiting for a text from Alex. We’d just linked together two classic routes—Super Slide and Serenity Sons—on a cliff called the Royal Arches. Neither of us had been climbing much, and the linkup, which Alex free solos in a couple of hours, had taken us all day. Now the plan was to go find Alex. Neither of us had seen him since Morocco.
We found him half an hour later, sitting at a high-top table in the corner of the Mountain Room Bar with Mikey Schaefer and two other guys I didn’t know, a guide for the Yosemite Mountaineering School and another climber. There were glasses of water on the table. These guys had been here for a while, but no one had ordered anything. Alex looked like he’d just gotten out of bed. His black hair was tousled and unruly, as usual. He wore his standard getup, a pair of black softshell pants and an orange puffy jacket that had brown stains down the front. I gave him the kung fu grip handshake with a half hug / back slap—standard climber greeting.
“So let’s see the ankle,” said Jimmy. Alex slipped off his right shoe and peeled down his sock. His ankle was huge. Deep purple, pink, yellow, and orange bruises, like the colors of a sunset, ran from the tips of his toes to just below his knee.
“Whoa,” said Jimmy.
“This is nothing,” said Alex. “You should have seen it two weeks ago.” Alex told us that he had been climbing and hiking every day. His orthopedist told him that since it wasn’t broken it was okay to get out and push his ankle as much as he felt comfortable. For Alex, this meant soloing 5.9 instead of 5.11 and 5.12. He told us about some multipitch climb that he soloed up and down that day, in his approach shoes.
As we got caught up, a climber from another table came over to say hey to Alex. I had never met him, but I knew who he was—Kevin Jorgeson, Tommy Caldwell’s partner on the Dawn Wall. He was dressed from head to toe in Adidas and sporting almost as many corporate logos as a NASCAR driver, including a Day-Glo green ADIDAS across the front of his hat. He’s a distinctive-looking character, with a Cheshire-cat grin and a close-cropped beard. His smile is so wide that it has permanently etched deep creases into his cheeks.
I was sitting right next to Kevin, so I couldn’t help but eavesdrop. He and Alex were talking about Adam Ondra, the twenty-three-year-old Czech wunderkind, currently th
e world’s best sport climber, who had just arrived in the valley to attempt the second free ascent of the Dawn Wall. Apparently, he had never trad climbed before, which meant he would need to learn how to jam his fingers and hands into cracks and place protection, on the fly. For the past several months Jorgeson had been sharing “beta” via e-mail with Ondra—giving him precise details of the route’s trickiest passages and strategy suggestions like where to place portaledge camps. Jorgeson had come to the valley to do some of his own climbing and to support Ondra in person, even though Ondra had stated publicly on social media that he planned to one-up Tommy and Kevin, to improve on their style, by climbing the route from the ground up, and in a more speedy fashion. Ondra had said he hoped to do it in a week. It struck me that Ondra’s plan was a good thing, because it was likely to draw media attention away from Alex and his top secret mission to free solo Freerider. Alex didn’t mention it to Jorgeson there in the bar, but I suspected he already knew.
* * *
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A FEW DAYS LATER, I was strolling through Yosemite Village with my wife, Hampton, and our seven-month-old son, Tommy. I had vowed to avoid one of the biggest problems of my first marriage—being away from home too much—by bringing Hampton and Tommy with me on my travels whenever possible. National Geographic had rented me a cabin in the town of Foresta, a small inholding within the park that was a twenty-minute drive from the valley floor, so that I could report closely on the unfolding story of what would certainly be the most sensational rock climb in history. I’d been ribbing Hampton about how unfair it was that she got to stay in a house on her first visit to Yosemite, whereas I had only graduated to having a roof over my head after years of hiding out in the talus field above Camp 4. I promised that one day soon I would give her and Tommy a tour of my favorite caves.
The village is home to most of the park’s rangers, and some of the more senior ones live in a row of houses that fringe a meadow below the imposing Northwest Face of Half Dome, a cliff that illustrates the power of glaciation perhaps better than any other geologic feature on earth. “That’s the wall that Alex free soloed in 2008,” I told Hampton, gesturing toward the dome that looks like it has been sliced in half with a guillotine. Hampton looked up and just shook her head.
I texted Alex to see if he was around. “Yeah, come say hi. I’m hangboarding at Mikes,” he replied.
We found Alex a few minutes later sitting in his van, which was parked in the driveway of Mike Gauthier, Yosemite National Park’s chief of staff. The house is a one-story ranch with a large attached garage. A fire pit and a weathered picnic table sit in the middle of a yard that has been left to grow wild. Through the massive oak trees growing all around the house I could see sections of upper Yosemite Falls. California was in the midst of a record-breaking drought, and the waterfall was barely a trickle. Normally, the falls’ roar fills the valley, but on this day it was silent.
“Hey, Hampton,” said Alex, giving her a hug. They had met once previously in Moab, the day before I asked her to marry me halfway up a four-hundred-foot sandstone rock spire (the plan had been to propose on the summit, but Hampton doesn’t climb much and I had underestimated the route). Alex took Tommy’s tiny hand—about the size of one segment on Alex’s index finger—and gave it a shake. “Nice to meet you, Thomas,” he said, looking our little man in the eyes with a bemused smile. “Welcome to my home,” he said proudly, gesturing toward the interior of his Dodge Ram ProMaster 2500. He had traded in his old van, a smaller Ford Econoline, after nine years and 190,000 miles. A futon set on a wooden frame about three feet above the carpeted floor took up the rear. Underneath was a storage area where he kept his climbing gear in crates. Above the bed sat a bookshelf, about two-thirds full. It was dark back there and I couldn’t quite make out the titles, but I recognized several guidebooks to Yosemite and the Sierras, and I supposed the rest were probably environmental nonfiction, the subject he was currently most passionate about. Across from the door, a countertop ran from the edge of the bed to the back of the driver’s seat. It housed a propane range with a double-burner stove top and a small oven below. “My friends convinced me I should have an oven,” he explained, “but I don’t know. I’m not much of a baker.” A small sink without a faucet was adjacent to the stove, beneath which sat a minifridge. Cabinets made of some kind of blond hardwood, perhaps maple, hung above and below the countertop. The handles were different-colored lobes from Black Diamond Camalots—a type of camming device. It was an eye-catching detail added by his friend and climbing partner Mason Earle, whom Alex had hired to customize the interior.
“My ankle is doing a lot better,” he said, pulling up his pant leg. And indeed, it did look a lot less swollen and bruised than it had two days before. “Sanni’s mom turned me on to this castor oil compress I’ve been wrapping it in at night and it seems to be working.”
Perhaps the van’s most distinctive feature was the hangboard bolted above the door. Two feet wide and eight inches in height, it was routed from a single piece of yellow poplar featuring variously sized grips intended for finger strengthening. BEASTMAKER 2000 was branded into the wood in the upper right corner. “Check out these forty-five-degree slopers,” he said, fingering two ramp-like grips on the top of the board. I reached up to feel them. They were baby-bottom smooth, with nowhere to grab. “Supposedly there are humans that can hang these,” he said, “but I’m skeptical.” All the holds on the Beastmaker are designed to mimic the features a climber might find on real rock. On the outside of the bottom row are the “monos”—two divots just big enough for the tip of one finger. Rumor has it that Ondra can do a one-arm pull-up on this tiny pocket.
Alex had spent the morning mini-tracking a route called the Excellent Adventure. It’s a difficult crack climb, rated 5.13, that breaches an eight-foot horizontal roof at the top of the flawless pillar of gray and orange granite known as the Rostrum. Excellent Adventure is a variation to the last pitch of the North Face (5.11c), a route that many believe to be the best free climb in Yosemite. Peter Croft was the first to free solo the North Face of the Rostrum in 1985; then, two years later, he combined it with Astroman—the free solo linkup that established him as the boldest valley climber of his generation. All told, Croft soloed the North Face of the Rostrum a total of fifty or sixty times, sometimes downclimbing it. And it was during one of his many forays up this wall that he spotted the line that would become the Excellent Adventure. I can still remember the photo that ran in Climbing magazine back in 1989 when Croft and Dave Shultz did the first ascent. At the time it was one of the hardest pitches in Yosemite, and to this day it is rarely climbed.
“I climbed it with one rock shoe and one approach shoe, and it felt pretty good,” said Alex. “I might try to scramble it when my leg feels better,” he added nonchalantly.
I nodded and said nothing. In my previous incarnation as Mr. Safety, I might have called him out. Free solo the Excellent Adventure? Are you out of your mind? But things were different now. I didn’t want to say anything, or do anything, that might mess with his mojo. So instead I nodded and very quietly said, “Hmmm,” as if he had just told me he was going to the store to buy some chips. Still, my mind struggled to process what I had just heard. In my years of climbing and hanging out with Alex Honnold, I’ve learned that when he mentions he might do something, he’s already made up his mind he is doing it. And, of course, then he does do it. At times like this, I could still get caught off guard and find myself sitting there, my jaw on the proverbial floor, stupefied at the audacity this guy could wear so comfortably, like one of his well-loved red T-shirts. Evidently the injury had done nothing to disturb his confidence.
Alex looked down at his phone. Beastmaker has an app, which offers a multitude of different workouts with names like Beasty, Crimpcentric, and Pocketcentric. To complete a full workout requires hanging from the board, off and on, for an hour or so. As we chatted, the app was counting down a two-minute interval betwe
en sets. When the timer hit zero the background on the app turned from green to red.
“Time for my next burn,” he said, stepping up to the board and gripping a half-inch-wide edge on the bottom row of holds with the fingertips on his right hand. He settled onto his fingers, lifted his feet in the air, and reeled himself upward with one arm. At the top, with his chin even with the bottom of the board, his head nearly touching the ceiling of the van, he locked off for a couple of seconds, then slowly lowered himself back down. Climbers call this a “one-armed negative,” and before that moment I had never actually seen someone do one.
“I’m glad you guys came by,” he said. “These workouts are pretty boring, so it’s nice to have people to chat with between burns.”
He reached for a journal with a black cover sitting on the counter and jotted down some symbols to denote the set he had just cranked off. He explained that he has different symbols for the various holds on the board. I looked over his shoulder as he flipped through a few pages. The book was filled with what looked like hieroglyphics. For years, Alex has been recording everything he does related to climbing, every route, how long it took, little notes on how it felt, plus the details of every training session, including every hangboard set. “I’ve got stacks of these notebooks at home,” he told us, “going back to around 2004.”
“Is it actually useful to record all that info?” I asked.
“Believe it or not, I do look back on it occasionally, and I can see how much I’m improving—or not.” He put down the book, opened the minifridge, and pulled out some hummus and a loaf of bread. “And I’ve been making progress. Earlier in the summer I couldn’t even hang the half-pad edge, but now I can.”
