The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  “Solo up to that ledge and put me on belay up there,” said Alex, pointing to a shelf of rock forty feet above our heads. I must have looked incredulous, because he then added, “It’s only 5.7.” Without waiting to hear if I was comfortable starting our day with some free soloing, Alex took off. He was halfway up the first pitch when I got to the ledge. I pulled the rest of the rope up and tied into the end as it whipped off the shelf like pot warp reeling off the deck of a crab-fishing boat. I barely had time to dip my hands into my chalk bag before the rope came tight on my harness. Time to move.

  My job was to make sure the rope never tugged on my harness. Each time it did, it meant Alex couldn’t move up. The guy is generally unflappable, but if you want to test his patience, try simul-climbing with him and continuously bringing him up short. Jimmy once likened Alex to a racehorse: “You can’t hold him back once you let him out of the gate.” In that same conversation, Jimmy also told me that Alex had “fired” him because he moved too slow one day when they were simul-climbing on the Freeblast. I had known this was going to hurt, but I had underestimated how much. I felt like I was at a track meet. One minute I was standing around waiting for my heat, the next I was going all out and looking for a place behind the bleachers where I could go vomit.

  But there was something else I hadn’t anticipated: how fun it would be. Alex was running it out fifty to a hundred feet between protection points, so there was hardly anything for me to do besides climb. And while he had an anvil (me) hanging off his harness, I had the opposite: the rope pulling me up from above like some magic beanstalk. Moving so fast over so much stone, I wondered whether it’s how a bird feels when it flies, or a monkey as it swings through the canopy—a joy so deeply rooted in your soul that it makes you feel like you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Tom Frost, one of the Salathé Wall’s first ascensionists, described this feeling as a religious experience: “The whole route felt like the Creator made it just for traditional climbers who would feel the love and fall in love in return.”

  I couldn’t see Alex—a bulge in the rock was blocking my view of him—but I could see the mighty bulk of El Capitan hanging above me like some Gothic cathedral. Climbing, even on some little rock in the woods, is a joyful experience, but doing it on the side of a geologic marvel like El Capitan feels like a spiritual awakening. I felt like Stuart Little would if he walked into Notre Dame.

  On the fifth pitch, the rope hung limply in front of me, which was not how I wanted it. I wanted it tight, like guitar-string tight, because at that moment, I wasn’t sure how I was still stuck on. My toes were bent backward on the seventy-degree rock, making a deep crease in the leather on the top of my shoe. My fingers were pressed against blank rock on either side of my shoulders. There was nothing to grip, but my skin must have been adhering to something, because I knew that if I let go with either hand, I would slip off.

  By this point, Alex was belaying me from the anchor at the top of pitch 6. I could yell, “Up rope” or “Take,” telling him to reel in slack, but then I thought, You’re climbing with the Hon, Mark. That’s kind of weak sauce. I wondered if he was keeping the rope slack on purpose. I looked up and left. Jimmy was hanging on a fixed line, his camera trained right on me. He didn’t say anything. If I was to avoid being that guy who fell in his film, I needed to keep moving before my feet melted out from under me. I could feel them slowly oozing off the smears. But I already had a loop of slack in front of me, and if I moved up and Alex didn’t reel it in, I could slide ten to fifteen feet before the rope would snap tight on my harness.

  “Up rope,” I finally yelled. A few seconds passed: nothing. A few more. At the exact moment the rope came tight, my left foot skated out from under me. My fingertips bent backward, but somehow I didn’t slide off the wall. I took a few deep breaths to center myself and then my left foot skated out from under me a second time. Again, I didn’t fall, but I felt improbably adhered to the rock, as if I were cheating the laws of physics. At that moment I thought of myself in this position without a rope. My guts quivered.

  Higher up, Alex directed me off right onto one of his variations that followed a series of small ledges cut like stairs into the rock. The staircase ended at a horizontal band of calcite thirty feet below the ledge where Alex was belaying. He coached me through the moves, which turned out to be even harder than the ones I’d just done. The handholds were on the left, footholds on the right, which forced me into an unfamiliar yoga-like contortion.

  “Stick your left toe in the divot,” said Alex. I looked out left and saw a triangle-shaped hole that resembled a snake eye. It was big enough for the pea-size chunk of rubber on the front of my shoe. I rocked over it like it was a ledge, committing my entire weight to it, knowing I just had to trust it because there was no other way to do this move—which is fine when there’s a guy thirty feet above holding your rope.

  “Nice job,” said Alex, when I met him at anchor. It had been close, but I hadn’t fallen on any of the pitches.

  “How’d it go for you?” I asked.

  “I’m grumpy,” he replied.

  “How come? Because of me? Because I was so slow?”

  “Kind of. You did fine, but I had to wait for you in the middle of the first crux, a place where you want to just quickly move through, and so I fell. I wanted it to feel easy and it wasn’t. I’m going to head back down and check it out a little more.”

  “Do you want a belay?”

  “No, I think it will be easier if I just self-belay with my Grigri.”

  Alex had told me it was going to be hot on the wall, and it probably would be later in the day, but in the shade, with the stiff breeze, I was cold. I pulled up the hood on my shirt, and as I huddled on the ledge eating some jerky, I noticed an old bolt sticking out of the wall about five feet to the left of the main anchor. It was ancient, a rusted, brownish blob with an iron ring fastened through the eye of its hanger. I assumed it was one of the original bolts from the first ascent in 1961. There aren’t many of these old bolts in Yosemite anymore. Most of them have been ripped out or been replaced with beefy stainless steel bolts by the American Safe Climbing Association (ASCA). I used to own one, a memento of the fifty-foot fall I took when I ripped it out of the Northwest Face of Half Dome on my first big wall in 1990. The ASCA sometimes leaves an old one here and there as a historical relic. This particular one undoubtedly had a story to tell.

  The Salathé Wall was the second route on El Capitan. The first ascensionists, Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt, and Tom Frost, had decided to up the ante on Warren Harding by climbing it in alpine style. Whereas Harding had spent a year and half sieging the Nose with half-inch hemp ropes (he later switched to nylon when one of them snapped) and a wheeled cart for hauling supplies, like coal in a mine, Robbins, Pratt, and Frost simply walked up to the base of the cliff and started up. I wondered if this ledge was where they spent their first night. Perhaps they had drilled the bolt so they had something secure to clip into as they bedded down right where I was sitting. What would they think about Honnold climbing this wall fifty-six years later, without a rope? Tom Frost was the only one still alive. Robbins had died in March. Pratt died in 2000. When asked by Outside magazine which climbers he respected from the new generation, Robbins had called out Honnold and Tommy Caldwell: “Many of the things that are being done today were clearly impossible in our day. And they’re doing them.”

  Quietly jolted back from history to my immediate present, I noticed something strange that I hadn’t seen at first. To the left of the main anchor, someone had chipped the word “slave” into the rock. It looked as though it had been pecked in with the pointy end of a wall hammer. An odd thing, considering that defacing the rock is one of the strongest taboos in climbing. I wondered who had done it and why.

  My mind wandered back to Alex and the fact that he’d just fallen again on the slab. In October, Alex had told me that he had climbed the Freebla
st twenty or so times. And he’d fallen twice—10 percent of his attempts. I wasn’t sure how many more times he had climbed it since, but even if he had doubled his previous tally, his ratio was now three out of forty: 7.5 percent. Sure, there were extenuating circumstances, like old silverbacks who forced him to stall out in the middle of the crux, shoes that were too loose or too tight, or just not being focused enough. But what struck me was that the odds seemed to have this weird way of staying consistent. The orange rope clipped to the anchor in front of me kept coming tight and then limp, as Alex went up and down. He wasn’t giving up. But this slab was getting into his head.

  I realized then and there that he would never have this slab section dialed in to his satisfaction—no matter how many times he rehearsed the moves. And he must have known it too; the climbing was just too insecure for him to ever feel the degree of certainty he sought for free solos. I remembered the story he’d told me about the slab move at the top of Half Dome, how his subconscious mind simply would not allow him to make the move. The same thing had happened the previous fall in this same spot on his first attempt.

  What would happen this time? I wondered. Would he just roll the dice, as Ueli Steck had done on the South Face of Annapurna? Alex had said this climb was so singularly special that it might be worth just saying fuck it and rolling the dice. The question was: Could he override his instinct, which seemed to know, as only our primal selves can, that pulling this slab move without a rope was a very bad idea? Was Tommy right, I wondered, when he said that this whole business was just a game of Russian roulette?

  “Well?” I asked, when he pulled back onto the ledge.

  “I’m just kind of bummed,” he replied. “I was so excited that I had maybe found a way around the slabs, but these variations just aren’t noticeably better. That move is really insecure. I don’t like it.”

  We stood side by side for a minute or two.

  “What do you want to do?” said Alex finally. “Do you want to keep going, or do you want to bail?”

  “I’m easy,” I replied. “I’m here to support you, so whatever you want to do is fine.”

  “I’m not really bothered to keep going,” said Alex, “but I’m also not stoked to deal with all these people either.” Looking down the wall, we could see two parties on their way up. We would have to rappel past them, and invariably, they would want to know what we were doing, if they didn’t already know. For the past month, Alex had again been all over Freerider, working various sections on almost a daily basis. All the climbers in Yosemite, it seemed, were being respectful and discreet, but with each passing day, word of Alex’s spring campaign was spreading exponentially. He didn’t say so, but I suspected he bore extra psychological weight now that his secret was going viral. It all added up to a whole lot of people, most of whom Alex didn’t know, who had expectations of him.

  “Let’s chill for a few minutes,” said Alex, plopping down onto the ledge and pulling up the hood on his shirt. He reached into his pack and pulled out an apple, took a big bite, and held it out to me. I took a chunk out of the other side and handed it back. Passing it back and forth, we quickly took it down to the core.

  “Is it cool if I toss this?” I asked.

  “Actually, give it to me.” I handed it over, and he dropped it into his pack. “I do chuck them sometimes, but there are people down there, so let’s just bring it down with us.”

  The normal way to descend a cliff is to feed the rope through a set of rappel rings, jam the two strands through a tubular friction plate, then slide down to the next anchor one at a time. This, of course, is not how Alex does it. His preferred method is called simul-rappelling, which entails a person on each end of the rope, sliding down at the same time. It requires careful coordination because if one person forgets that he’s counterbalancing his partner and unclips, the other goes flying. It was in this manner that Alex and I ended up hanging on either side of a bearded young man who looked like he was about to slip off the side of the mountain.

  “If you want, you can just step on that bolt,” said Alex, “and from there you can reach this hold.”

  The guy looked bewildered. He didn’t acknowledge that he knew it was Alex Honnold coaching him. But he knew. Everyone knows Alex. These days, there probably isn’t a climber anywhere who wouldn’t recognize him. Between his long neck, doe eyes, big ears, and uniform—the black pants and red shirt—he’s memorable. The guy looked like I did when I climbed this section, but maybe worse, because he had a bad case of “sewing-machine leg”—which is exactly what it sounds like. Alex, sensing that his student was about to go airborne, swung in closer and started pointing out every possible hold. Following Alex’s detailed instructions, the guy squeaked out the sequence, but he must have still been spooked, because when he got to the next bolt he hooked his finger through the hanger.

  “Hey, man, you don’t want to do that. If you slip, you’re going to break your finger. It’s better to pinch it like this,” said Alex, holding up his fingers like how you’d grab someone’s earlobe.

  “Just a little unsolicited advice,” I offered, hopping into the conversation. The guy hadn’t said a word, so I wanted to give him an opening to say, “Yeah, thanks, I’ll figure it out,” in case he felt that Alex was oversharing. Some climbers don’t appreciate being sprayed with beta.

  The whole scene struck me as bizarre, considering that a few minutes earlier, Alex had told me he was dreading having to interact with these people. I expected Alex to be tight-lipped, but instead he was eager—a tad too eager, at least to my mind—to help a complete stranger.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, I sat on a rock underneath a scrub oak watching the sky turn gray and enjoying the cool mist from Yosemite Falls. It would be dark in a few minutes, but I was in no rush to get back down to the valley floor. I wanted to think a little bit more about the route beneath me, a four-hundred-foot 5.6 called Munginella. Was I up for soloing it?

  I’d been thinking so much about free soloing over the past year that it had gotten under my skin. In some ways, I found myself in a position similar to where Alex was in 2004. I was spending most of my time researching, studying, and writing about the great free soloists who had operated during my lifetime—Barber, Bachar, Croft, Potter, and Honnold. The deeper I got into the subject, the more it seemed to take hold of me. I kept asking myself what I might be capable of if I shelved my fear.

  I had been talking and e-mailing with J. B. MacKinnon, the writer who arranged Alex’s brain scan. He told me that after his trip to South Carolina with Alex, he had returned to his home in Vancouver “ready to push the limits” of his own brain. The reward he walked away with from working with Alex was the knowledge that we all have it within us to work a “little bit of Honnold’s magic,” as he said. We might not be able to shut down our fears on command, but as MacKinnon wrote in Nautilus magazine, “with conscious effort and gradual, repeated exposure to what we fear, any one of us might muster courage that we didn’t know we had.” MacKinnon hadn’t free soloed in years, but a few days after he got home he went and soloed a couple of 5.7 routes at a local cliff, “just to remember the feeling.” And the feeling must have been heady, because I talked to him again shortly after I arrived in Yosemite, and he told me that he was still soloing and had brought the grade up to 5.9. The Honnold magic held some allure for me, too. The more I thought about free soloing, the more I wanted to do it myself.

  That spring, I was entering my thirty-second year of climbing, and while I wouldn’t call myself a free soloist, I do consider soloing to be a requisite component of the game. I typically solo my home cliff, the five-hundred-foot Cathedral Ledge, a time or two each season, and in the winter I usually solo a few ice climbs. When I used to guide a lot, one of my weaknesses was spacing my protection points so widely that I might as well have been free soloing. My examiners at the American Mountain Guides Association gave me
marginal scores for “running it out,” but I kept doing it, almost compulsively.

  Over the winter, I had decided that since I wasn’t going to have a partner in Yosemite, or a lot of time to climb, I should do some free soloing. I had even written up a list of routes, some of which I had soloed before. Munginella was on the list. It was the only route on the list I had never climbed. I had just spent the past couple of hours rope soloing the route, which is different from mini-tracking. I led the route from the bottom, self-belaying myself with a Grigri on a skinny, eight-millimeter rope that I tied to an anchor at the base of each pitch. At the end of each lead, I’d rappel off, take out the gear, and then mini-track back up. This meant climbing the wall twice, which was good, because I was rehearsing it for the solo—like Alex on Freerider, just seven grades easier.

  When I mentioned to Alex that I was thinking about free soloing Munginella, he had told me to just go for it, even though I’d never done it. He’s not shy about pressing other people to push their limits. But I was glad I hadn’t, because near the top, some three hundred feet off the deck, I encountered a move that was hard and committing for a 5.6. I hadn’t expected the route to have a roof move. The only decent hold on this crux was a hand jam in the ceiling over my head. I slotted my hand into the fissure, touched the tip of my thumb to the base of my pinky, and flexed my fingers to hold it in place. It was a good jam, but it was behind my head, and as I pulled my feet up onto some small nubs on the wall in front of me, my body went inverted. I was surprised to find myself hanging nearly horizontal.

  Looking over my right shoulder to take in the exposure, I imagined how this move would feel without the rope. My last piece of protection was about twenty feet below me. If I fell, I would go twice that distance, plus rope stretch, which, on an eight-millimeter rope, is significant. So I was looking at a fifty-foot fall, minimum, and I would hit a ledge or two along the way. I’d suffer major, quite possibly fatal, bodily trauma—an unthinkable fall, really. But, no matter how run out I was, that strand of nylon, thinner than my pinky, profoundly altered my perception of the situation. It pushed the certainty of death around the corner, out of plain sight. However illusory, the rope provided an essential psychological buffer that allowed me to calmly hang my life from one hand stuffed in a crack, a dizzying height above the ground.