The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

There are two things Alex trains to improve his prowess on the rock—power and endurance. The latter is something that he has in almost unlimited supply, and he maintains it by running, going on long hikes, and soloing and simul-climbing a mind-numbing number of pitches every week. He once free soloed one hundred pitches in a morning—that’s more than the average weekend warrior climbs in a year. His legendary endurance is a big part of what sets him apart from other climbers. And it’s what has allowed him to climb things like the Yosemite and Taghia Triple Crowns. Tommy Caldwell is the only climber I know who can keep up with him in the endurance arena.

  What Alex lacks, at least to his own mind, is power, or what climbers call “contact strength.” The ability to hang on tiny holds hinges on two things: the thickness of finger and forearm tendons and the ratio of this tendon strength to body weight. This type of strength can be trained and increased, as Alex’s black books bear out, but, just like the ability to run fast or jump high, if you’re not born with unusually strong tendons, you will never rock climb at an elite level. As a climber, Alex is naturally gifted, probably more so than 99 percent of the population, but his maximum grade of 5.14c is still a full tier below the highest echelon of climbing, where the grades top out at 5.15d. The difference between sport climbing and the big-wall linkups that Alex specializes in is like the difference between sprinting and distance running. One relies primarily on power, the other on endurance. Alex is a long-distance thoroughbred, not a sprinter, and no matter how hard he trains, he will never be able to pull as hard as the world’s best sport climbers, guys like Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra, and Alex Megos; just like how Haile Gebrselassie will never beat Usain Bolt in the hundred-meter dash—and Bolt will never beat Gebrselassie in the 10,000 meters. The point is that while sport climbing and big walls are part of the same sport, they’re entirely different disciplines. One of the things that makes climbing unique, though, is that the different disciplines can be combined. The Dawn Wall, which combined powerful cutting-edge sport climbing with the drawn-out effort of a medieval siege, is a perfect example. Tommy Caldwell told me in Morocco that in 2014 he invited Alex to join him on the Dawn Wall when Kevin got hurt. But Alex declined because he didn’t think he was strong enough. “I’ve only climbed 5.14c,” he told Tommy, “so how do you expect me to climb 5.14d up on El Cap?”

  “I think Alex was selling himself short,” Tommy told me. “He could do it; I’m just not sure if he has the attention span for something like the Dawn Wall.”

  Since I first met Alex, he has always been quick to point out climbers who can crank harder than him: “You know Alex Megos did Realization in one afternoon, right? That’s just sick.” (Realization is widely regarded as the world’s first 5.15a, established by Chris Sharma in 2001.) It bothers Alex that he’s lauded as one of the world’s best rock climbers, when there are teenagers popping up in climbing gyms all over the country who can pull harder than he can. Earlier in the year he recounted a story of getting burned off by a fourteen-year-old girl at an indoor climbing center in Denver: “I was like, wow, I can’t climb that route. I wish I could climb as hard as that little girl.” He routinely gets questions about whether he will compete in the first Olympic climbing competition, which will take place in Tokyo in 2020. “People don’t get it,” he said. “I just can’t perform at that level.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER A FEW MORE SETS, the app said it was time for a longer break, so Alex sat down on the floor with his back against the cabinet and ate his sandwich. I passed him little Tommy, and Alex plopped him into his lap. After a few minutes, Tommy, who had recently learned to sit up, began leaning forward, which turned into a slow-motion fall. There was plenty of time for Alex to grab him, and Hampton and I both assumed that’s what would happen. But for some reason, Alex just sat there. Tommy toppled out of his lap and bonked his head on the corner of the doorframe. It was one of those wipeouts where the baby doesn’t cry at first, making you think, Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked—then he explodes like a volcano. Tommy’s ear-splitting wails soon filled the van. Hampton scooped him up and gave me an annoyed look that said, What the fuck is up with your friend?

  “Wow, I just crippled little Tommy,” said Alex with a sheepish look on his face. “Sorry about that. I guess I’m not cut out to be a father.”

  A few minutes later, Sanni pulled up in a green Subaru. “Hey, everyone,” she said, hopping up into the van and cooing over Tommy for a minute before wrapping her arms around Alex. She had spent the past two weeks hiking the John Muir Trail, a 215-mile trek through the Sierra wilderness. She had started in Yosemite Valley the week before and ended on the summit of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States, 14,505 feet above sea level. The back of her truck was filled with groceries she had bought outside the park, and she set to work stocking everything into the van.

  * * *

  —

  JIMMY PICKED me up the next morning at eight A.M. An electrical storm had blown through overnight. A massive lightning strike had awoken Hampton and me in the middle of the night. It shook the foundation of our little cabin. The lightning had struck a tree outside Jimmy’s house, just up the hill from ours. The tree came down, taking out power to all of Foresta and landing on the roof of Jimmy’s brand-new van. “Can you believe this shit?” he said, pointing at the crunched-in roof.

  We drove down into the valley, past El Cap Meadow and Yosemite Falls, to the Upper Pines Campground, where we found the Caldwells in Site 68. The Pines is located near the head of the valley, and the towering walls to the east—namely, Washington Column, Half Dome, and Tenaya Peak—block the sun until midmorning. The temperature gauge on Jimmy’s dash read thirty-eight degrees. The Caldwells’ van was parked next to a picnic table. The door was open, but the windshield was frosted. Tommy emerged carrying his seven-month-old daughter, Ingrid, who was chewing happily on a toothbrush. I had never met Becca, Tommy’s wife, but when she came out with Fitz, their three-year-old son, I realized that I had run into her at the post office the day before. Strangely, I had briefly mistaken her for Beth Rodden, Tommy’s first wife, a top female climber who lives in Yosemite. They are both good-looking, athletically built women with long brownish blond hair and blue eyes.

  * * *

  —

  CHEYNE, MIKEY, JIM, AND CLAIR—all of whom had been on the crew in Morocco, plus a new camera assistant named Jacob Bain, fanned out around Alex. I hung back, hiding behind the van so I wouldn’t be in the shot. When they were fully out of view, I trailed along, keeping several hundred feet behind.

  I caught up as Alex and Tommy were gearing up at the base of a climb called the Great Escape. The valley runs from east to west and dead-ends below Half Dome, above which looms the Sierra high country, an alpine zone of rocky peaks that form the crest of the Sierra Nevada. East-west is an ideal orientation for a rock-climbing venue, because it means that the cliffs lining the valley, for the most part, face north or south. Having both sunny and shady offerings makes it possible to rock climb year-round in Yosemite—yet another reason it’s the world’s climbing mecca. Climbers always prefer to be a little cool rather than a little warm, because chilled rock offers excellent friction, whereas hot rock does not. And even though it was only in the upper thirties, Tommy and Alex still preferred to climb in the shade rather than in the blazing sun, which was now baking the cliffs on the other side of the valley. Typically, on a day like today, the temperature differential between the north- and south-facing sides, a distance of less than a mile, was probably thirty to forty degrees.

  Unlike most of the routes in Yosemite, the Great Escape is a bolted face climb, similar to the type of routes these guys had climbed together in Morocco. It’s rated 5.11+, and it fit the goals for the day because Tommy had a family outing planned and could spare only two hours to climb with Alex. “Check it out,” said Alex, holding up his rock shoe. “You can actually see the scuff mark on the ru
bber where my ankle impacted with the rock.”

  Tommy grabbed the shoe and inspected it. “How did it turn?”

  “Like this,” said Alex, using his hand to simulate the way his ankle rolled outward when it hit.

  “Is that your worst climbing injury?” said Tommy.

  “Yeah, maybe the most acute because I’m crippled and I can’t climb hard. I honestly thought it would be doing a lot better by now. It’s been twenty-four days.”

  The conversation turned to Adam Ondra. The day before, as a warm-up for the Dawn Wall, he had attempted to free climb the Nose, the same route Warren Harding pioneered up El Cap back in 1957. It remains the cliff’s most popular route, and for most climbers it’s the most accessible way to scale El Cap using a combination of aid- and free-climbing tactics. Five years after El Cap was first free climbed via the Salathé Wall by Todd Skinner and Paul Piana in 1988, the Nose still eluded climbers seeking an all-free ascent.

  * * *

  —

  “IT GOES, BOYS.”

  In climbing lore, these now-famous words rival even George Mallory’s “because it’s there” quip about why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. It was 1993, and a new giant, standing all of five feet two inches tall, had emerged. Lynn Hill, like many other notable rock climbers of her generation, grew up in Southern California. As a youth she competed in gymnastics, then started climbing in 1975 at the age of fourteen. By the late 1970s she had fallen in with the Stonemasters, whom she routinely amazed by matching and even one-upping the best male climbers of her generation. By the mid-1980s she was competing on the World Cup and trading titles with Catherine Destivelle, a Frenchwoman who until Hill’s ascendancy was widely regarded as the best female rock climber in the world. In 1986, Hill finished second to Destivelle in the famed Arco Rock Master competition. In an interview with Rock and Ice magazine in 1992, Hill tells of the time she asked one of the Rock Master officials why there was such a disparity in prize money between the men and women. His response: “If the women climb without their tops, then we’ll pay them the same.”

  Hill’s first attempt to free climb the Nose was in 1989, but neither she nor her partner Simon Nadin were able to master the tiny crack splitting the Great Roof on pitch 22. She returned to competitions and the next year won a World Cup in which she bested not only all the women but all the men as well. That same year she became the first woman to climb the grade of 5.14. She chose a route called Masse Critique because the first ascensionist, a Frenchman named J. B. Tribout, in a fit of a chauvinist hubris, had declared the route so hard that a woman would never climb it. Hill once again proved she was as good as, if not better than, the best male climbers. In 1993, in the best shape of her life, she returned to Yosemite with the goal of free climbing the Nose. She worked the route for several months, and then over five days in May she climbed it from bottom to top, leading every pitch. She gave the route a 5.13b rating (it has since been upgraded to 5.14a). At the time it was the most difficult big-wall free climb in the world. But she wasn’t done. She trained fervently for another six months, then returned and climbed the route free in a day. More than twenty years later, it was still ranked by many as the greatest rock-climbing feat in history.

  Ondra, keeping to the tradition of one-upmanship, had announced that he would try to on-sight the route—in a day. Ondra’s stated objective would be like a figure skater nailing a new Olympic-caliber routine on her first try or a pianist sight-reading Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto and playing it flawlessly. He made it to pitch 22 without falling, but after the Great Roof spat him off several times in a row, he abandoned the free-climb attempt and just motored as fast as he could for the top, climbing mostly free but pulling on the occasional piece of gear when he needed to.

  “I texted him one word: ‘Respect,’” said Alex.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING we were back at the Great Escape, though I wasn’t quite sure why because Alex didn’t have a partner to climb with. Would he actually try to solo it with a bum ankle? This was hard to imagine, considering he hadn’t managed to get a rock shoe on his right foot yet, and the Great Escape is known as a sandbag; even to Alex, who is infamous for downgrading. (He once declared a route I was struggling on in Maine a 5.6—we later found out it’s six grades harder.)

  Alex spilled a pile of rock shoes out of his pack at the base. “I’m gonna mini-track it one more time and if it feels good I will probably scramble it,” he said. After some experimentation with the variously sized shoes, Alex slipped a size 41 onto his good foot and an approach shoe on his hurt foot. “I’m going to switch to the rock shoe higher up where it gets harder,” he said, clipping a right-footed size 42 to the back of his harness. His final piece of preparation before he set off up the wall was to girth hitch a sling to the belay loop on his harness to use as a tether for the transitions at the anchors. But instead of attaching it to a locking carabiner, which is standard practice, he used a non-locker. Locking carabiners have a mechanism that prevents the gate from opening accidentally. It’s a cardinal rule that if a climber is clipped to a single carabiner, it should be a locker. In all my years of climbing, Alex is the only one I’ve ever seen who routinely breaks this rule. I call lockers “daddy biners,” and in recent years I have been using them for clipping protection midpitch. Well, at least he’s using a tether, I thought. In Borneo he sometimes didn’t even attach himself to the anchors.

  When he touched back down thirty minutes later, he announced that he was heading off to “take a poo.”

  “It’s funny,” he said, “because I already went, but once I got up there and started visualizing all the moves and imagining climbing them without a rope, I suddenly had to go again. I guess it’s kind of true what they say about pooping yourself when you’re afraid.”

  When he returned a few minutes later, he sat down in the dirt and slipped back into his two different-size shoes. “My ankle hurts,” he said to no one in particular as he stretched the 42 onto his still-swollen right foot. Before he left the ground, he took his phone out of the pocket of his puffy coat, gazed at the screen briefly, and stuffed it back in. I assumed he was checking the time. As Alex entered the first crux, a sideways move that forced him into an iron cross, his arms spread to their full index, I realized that it had been a long time since I had watched him free solo, probably not since Oman. In Morocco I waited for him on top of Rivières Pourpres, so I didn’t actually witness the act. Suddenly, I felt a little sick, like I was standing on the deck of a boat hobbyhorsing in a churning sea. Some primal instinct compelled me to look away. I knew he could slip. And if he did, I didn’t want to see it.

  The holds are tiny. Long reaches to crimps the width of matchboxes. Footholds the size of peas. I know because I had mini-tracked the route the previous day—and I had fallen all over it. The rock is not impeccable. Could he break off a hold? I wondered. As if in answer, pebbles ripped down through the canopy of yellow oak leaves overhead, making a noise like a BB gun. I wasn’t wearing a helmet, so I moved farther out from the base, just in case someone broke off a bigger piece, like had happened in Morocco. I looked around for Mikey, but he had disappeared. I hiked down the hill and found him down by the trail, with his back to the wall, tinkering with his phone. He apparently had no interest in watching Alex climb.

  “Why do you think he’s doing this?” I asked. “Why risk his life for a nothing of a route?”

  “I think he’s just trying to keep himself in the free-solo mind-set,” he replied. “In the long run, it’s going to make the main event safer.”

  Right then, I heard a sharp noise. My heart skipped a beat. Mikey kept his head down, but I looked up as a sudden pang of fear constricted my throat. I saw Alex splayed out across the rock, his left arm fully outstretched, his right close in by his chest pulling sideways on a tiny black crystal, probably a basaltic intrusion, which I remembered as one of the shittiest holds
on the route. Cheyne was jugging up his rope to get back above Alex. The noise was the rope slapping against the rock.

  I watched for a bit. Alex flagged his right foot and hopped up on his left—one, two, three moves in a row. His movement, which I had only ever witnessed as a fluid, choreographed dance up the rock, looked all herky-jerky. There was no question—he was babying his ankle on a 5.12 free solo.

  “Thirty-seven minutes round trip,” he declared a few seconds after reaching the ground. “That’s probably the speed record on the Great Escape. Now it’s time to go spray all over the Internet.”

  “Why this route, Alex?” I asked.

  “I heard that Dean and Stanley [Sean Leary] used to simul-climb it with five draws when they were training for the Nose record. It’s something to work on while I recover. Need to keep morale up while I suffer. . . . It was interesting, though, how some of my beta didn’t really work for soloing. In this one undercling crack thing I buried my finger a lot deeper than I did when I was mini-tracking, and I struggled to get it back out. I also found that I didn’t like making the long reach on the last pitch because it means getting way up on my toes, which didn’t feel good without a rope. It’s hard to be tuned in to all these nuances when I’m rehearsing the moves. The nice thing about soloing is that you’re so focused, you don’t feel your ankle at all. Or if you do, you don’t care.”

  Jimmy touched down, and the look on his face was one of stunned relief, as if he had just soloed the route too. “I was so gripped,” said Jimmy, pulling his camera case from around his neck. “I had my foot pasted on this little dish when Alex was climbing past me, and it was grinding off. And he was so close. I was trying to film, but at the same time looking at my foot and just being like ‘Don’t come off, don’t come off.’ I was so worried I would barn door and swing into him. I was totally overgripping all my gear, and I don’t even remember pressing the record button. I was worried I forgot, but I didn’t. I got the shot. I’m just never going to get used to that.”