by Alex Honnold
LOWTHER DID JUST AS Alex suggested, contacting Smalley, who by 2011 had become an air force lieutenant. Smalley’s sardonic portrait of Alex as a kid and teenager rounds out the picture of the dorky misfit Alex genuinely considered himself, even after he started to attract the notice of the climbing world. According to Smalley, as told to Lowther,
Alex wore sweatpants to school. Every day. There was a gray pair and a blue pair. He wore T-shirts that were two sizes too big, and they said things on them like, “I hiked the Grand Canyon,” “Visit Yellowstone,” or “How to Identify Deer Tracks.” He was very good at capture the flag. Defensively. He could talk to you about the War of 1812 for an hour. It wasn’t so much that he was shy, as he just didn’t even bother to try. Like, he would speak to you if you spoke to him. He wore hoodies in class, always with the hood up, and he would just sit there, but he always knew the answer if a teacher called on him. He’s got sort of a Holden Caulfield thing going on, maybe, in that he’s always on the lookout for a phony.
When that passage was read out loud to Alex, he confessed, “Ben’s got me down.” All the details about his youthful persona, Alex confirmed. The passage stirred up other memories. “I still love sweats,” he said. “I never wear jeans.” And: “I had another T-shirt from Banff or Jasper, with a picture of a bear on it, but a bear with antlers. It read, ‘I am not a bear.’ It was part of some kind of don’t-feed-the-bears campaign.
“About the War of 1812—my dad gave me a book about decisive battles in history. The Monitor and the Merrimack, Hannibal crossing the Alps, that kind of thing. I loved history. It wasn’t that I hated school—just that I was an uncool kid. I had a hard time talking to strangers.”
In Lowther’s profile, Smalley went on:
His parents were not very happily married. His father would sit on the couch most nights, reading until he fell asleep. I would say [Alex] got worse in high school, actually. He withdrew further. He hung out with the kids who played Pokémon in the math room at lunch. During sophomore year, Alex got his first girlfriend. Her name was Elizabeth Thomas. She went by E.T. That should give you some idea of the social circle she ran in. I just don’t think Alex thought the typical high school stuff was for him. He considered himself more of a loner.
Says Alex, “E.T. was cool. Ben didn’t like her. She was half-Irish, half-Japanese. A nice girl, real smart. We were a couple for maybe three years.”
In high school, Alex consistently scored high marks, finishing with a weighted grade-point average of 4.8. Yet he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to go to college. At the last minute, he applied only to two branches of the University of California—at Davis and Berkeley. Accepted by both, he chose Berkeley.
The single year he spent at one of the elite bastions of higher learning was, Alex feels now, a waste of time. “I had vague plans to major in engineering,” he says. “But I didn’t make any friends at Berkeley. I can’t recall a single student or a single professor. I should have lived in a dorm, instead of the two-bedroom apartment a friend of our family let me sublet. I spent a year basically in isolation.
“I did have a job as a security guard. For fourteen dollars an hour, I’d walk around by myself all night. I had a police radio. Sometimes I’d escort girls back to their dorms.
“The second semester, I stopped going to classes. I’d buy a loaf of bread and an apple and go out to Indian Rock”—a diminutive crag in the suburban Berkeley Hills—“and do laps. I just couldn’t hack college.” That summer, like most freshmen, he moved back home with his mother.
Alex’s parents’ divorce became final in May of his freshman year. Two months later, on July 18, his father was rushing through the Phoenix airport, trying to make a tight connection, when he dropped dead of a heart attack. Alex got the news when he came home from a long hike. He recalled the event to Alex Lowther:
The house was open, all the windows were open and stuff, but like, everything was dark; nobody was in the house. And, I was like, “Mom?”—“Mom?” And went and found Mom sitting outside in the pool. Sitting with her legs in the pool. Just sitting there crying. And she was just like, “Your dad died.” I don’t remember what she said, but basically like, “Your dad died,” and then she went to bed.
I don’t remember disbelieving her. But for all I knew, he could still be alive. I never saw a body. There was never a real funeral. This little can of ashes showed up one day, and people said he was dead. I read all the articles about him. For a while I would see people on the bike path. People who looked like Dad, with a big beard and just all big, and I would be like, “Oh!” And then, “Oh, that wasn’t him.”
Ben Smalley told Lowther, “I kind of had to yell at him about it. ‘Why aren’t you upset?’ I think deep down, Alex never did any mourning.”
“Did you mourn at all?” Lowther asked Alex.
“I was too young and angstful,” he answered. “I had too much anger.”
Alex clarifies: “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Mom when she told me Dad had died. It’s that my family doesn’t do funerals. Dad was cremated in Phoenix. There was a memorial service at Lake Tahoe. I thought, ‘Huh, I’ll never see him again.’ But there was no closure.”
Charles Honnold was fifty-five when he died. Alex was nineteen. The event crystallized Alex’s decision to drop out of Berkeley. Supported by the interest from his father’s life insurance bonds, he “borrowed” his mother’s minivan and set out for various California crags and the life of a dirtbag climber. In 2007, he bought a used Ford Econoline van that he converted into a cozy garret-on-wheels. Eight years later, after many home improvements, and despite his fame and unexpected wealth, Alex still lives in the van. His default residence is his mother’s house in Sacramento, where he spends a few weeks each year.
Whether or not he truly mourned his father’s death, the loss had a profound impact on Alex’s outlook on life. His mother’s parents had been devout Catholics, and both Stasia and Alex attended Catholic services when they were young. The effect was to turn Alex into a confirmed atheist. As he sardonically commented in a 2012 YouTube video, “At no point did I ever think there was ever anything going on with church. I always saw it as a bunch of old people eating stale wafers. . . .”
His father’s death brought home the carpe diem injunction to live the only life he has to the fullest. In a 2012 Q&A for National Geographic Adventure, Alex came up with a startling metaphor. He was asked, “If you don’t believe in God or an after-life, doesn’t that make this life all the more precious?”
Alex responded: “I suppose so, but just because something is precious doesn’t mean you have to baby it. Just like suburbanites who have a shiny new SUV that they are afraid to dent. What’s the point in having an amazing vehicle if you’re afraid to drive it?
“I’m trying to take my vehicle to new and interesting places. And I try my very best not to crash, but at least I take it out.”
The Regular Northwest Face route on Half Dome begins with a 5.10c finger crack that happens to be one of my favorite pitches on the whole climb. The next two pitches are only 5.9 and 5.8. It was a good warm-up for the two thousand feet of climbing above me.
But then, on what’s normally the fourth pitch, I ran into the first bolt ladder. There are two variations that bypass that blank section on either side. I’d climbed first one, then the other, on my two roped free climbs of the route. On the left is the two-pitch Higbee ’Hedral, rated a stern 5.12a, first freed by Art Higbee on his 1976 ascent with Jim Erickson. On the right is the Huber ’Hedral, named after the German climber Alex Huber, full-on 5.11d. (’Hedral is slang for “dihedral,” a vertical inside corner in the rock. Thanks to Art and Alex for the handy alliteration of their last names!)
Even though the Huber variation is one grade easier, it’s less secure. You have to traverse across a wall that’s so smooth it’s like polished glass. I thought about what it would take, then told myself, Screw that, and chose the Higbee ’Hedral instead.
The crux 5.12a s
equence comes in a short boulder problem off a big, comfortable ledge. It made, I thought, for secure soloing, since if I couldn’t connect the moves I thought I could jump off and land on the ledge. But those are some of the hardest moves on the whole route, and I had to shift my mentality from cruising up fun cracks to actually cranking on small holds. I laced my shoes up extra tight, then powered through the six-move boulder problem without hesitating.
The rest of the pitch was quite dirty. Half Dome is so much higher in altitude than the other walls in the Valley that it has some of the feel of an alpine mountain. And with mountains, you get loose holds that you have to test before pulling on them. (Pulling loose a single hold, obviously, can spell the difference between life and death when you’re free soloing.) You also get dirt and even vegetation in the cracks. Because the free variations are tackled so seldom, they don’t get “gardened” by climbers the way the regular pitches do. It’s a scary business to be on rock that ought to be reasonable to climb, only to have your fingers scraping through wet dirt or your toes jammed on clumps of moss or scrawny little shrubs. But I followed the faint trail of chalk marks that Brad and I had left two days earlier, and managed to avoid most of the vegetation and dirt. As I rejoined the normal route, I relaxed and mentally shifted gears back into cruise mode. I had about a thousand feet of climbing above me until I got to the next hard pitch. I wanted to go slow and steady, so as not to get tired. A slow jog, rather than a sprint.
I had my iPod with headband ear buds so I could listen to tunes while I climbed. When the going got harder, I’d knock one earbud out. If it was really serious, both buds, so I wouldn’t be distracted. The headband then would just dangle from my neck. That day I was cycling through some songs by Eminem, especially “Lose Yourself.”
The beautiful day was holding steady, but I had no time to look around and admire the scenery. Scenery is what you get to enjoy when you’re belaying your partner on a conventional roped climb. When I’m free soloing, even on the easier pitches, I’m totally focused on what’s in front of me. The universe shrinks down to me and the rock. You don’t take a single hold for granted.
The sheer magnitude of the wall came home to me as I climbed. I realized that this project was way more serious than Moonlight Buttress, even though both routes are rated 5.12.
Pretty soon I was halfway up the route, a thousand feet off the deck. Here the line, as first climbed in 1957, suddenly traverses to the right to access an enormous chimney system. The final section of blank rock before the chimney is normally tackled by a fifty-foot bolt ladder. The previous time I’d free climbed the route, I circumvented the bolt ladder via a 5.12c pitch, using the bolts for protection but not aid. But now as I was approaching the ladder, I got cold feet about soloing it. The pitch is extremely insecure: slopers and scoops, shallow indentations you can barely hold with flattened fingers, and which you have to “smear” with your feet, straining your ankles so that you can get as much friction as possible on the holds with the soles of your shoes. Then those moves are followed by a down mantle. It’s a tricky move, like lowering yourself off a table with your hands extended downward, palms gripping the edge of the ledge. Balance is everything, and it’s hard to look down to see where to place your feet. And the feet have to find a narrow ridge of granite on which you step before you can let go of the mantle and move on.
The free variation Higbee and Erickson worked out in 1976 breaks off to the left a pitch before the bolt ladder and circles around this whole section of the wall, rejoining the route another pitch above. I’d never climbed it, and I’d heard that it was loose and dirty, but suddenly adventurous 5.10 seemed a lot more fun than insecure 5.12c. The variation is a pretty devious line, as you climb a long 5.9 gully straight up, followed by a meandering 5.10b scuttle toward the right, after which you have to downclimb a hundred feet of 5.10 to get into the chimney system.
I broke off the normal route at a random point and started wandering upward, trying to find the 5.10 variation. But as I moved, I started to get confused about the line. The bushes I was climbing through gave me pause. There were no real signs of human presence here—no chalk marks from previous climbers, no fixed pitons, or even scars where they might have once been driven and removed. I started to worry that I was completely dropping the ball. I was literally in the center of Half Dome, a thousand feet off the ground, possibly off-route, on dirt.
I said to myself, Holy shit! This is hardcore. I hope I can find my way back. It wasn’t true panic that I felt—just an uncomfortable anxiety. It would have helped a lot if I had climbed this variation before. But I guessed this is what I’d bargained for when I told Chris Weidner I wanted to keep the challenge “sporting.”
• • • •
Fear. It’s the most primal element in cutting-edge climbing, or indeed, in adventure of any kind. Even nonclimbers can recognize that fact, when they watch footage of me free soloing. That’s why the first question out of their mouths is usually, “Aren’t you afraid . . . ?” (They don’t have to finish the sentence—“that you’re going to die?”)
I’ve done a lot of thinking about fear. For me, the crucial question is not how to climb without fear—that’s impossible—but how to deal with it when it creeps into your nerve endings.
Interviewed later by Sender Films, my Valley buddy Nick Martino claimed, “Honnold’s on another level than anyone else out there. It’s like he doesn’t feel fear or any of the normal emotions that anybody else feels. He has this ability to just shut his brain off and do the sickest climbs that have ever been done.”
Thanks, Nick, but that just isn’t true. I feel fear just like the next guy. If there was an alligator nearby that was about to eat me, I’d feel pretty uncomfortable. In fact, the two worst doses of fear I’ve experienced in my life so far—both the result of heinous misadventures that sprang from seemingly minor mistakes—didn’t come when I was free soloing. If I learned anything from those two screwups, it’s never to take for granted even a casual outing in the backcountry.
It was the day after Christmas, 2004. I was nineteen. My dad had died five months before, so I decided to hike up an easy peak that had been a favorite destination for both of us—Mount Tallac near Lake Tahoe. It’s all of 9,739 feet above sea level, but it rises a respectable 3,250 feet from its base. I’d climbed it a ton of times, but never in winter. We had actually scattered some of Dad’s ashes on the summit the previous summer, shortly after he died.
In Dad’s closet, I found an old pair of snowshoes. I’d never snowshoed before—never even done much of anything in the snow. As it turned out, they weren’t very good snowshoes for this sort of outing—they didn’t have crampons attached to the webbing. But I didn’t know any better.
As it also turns out, the snow had fallen about a month before, and it had been dry ever since. So the snow had turned to a hard, icy crust.
I didn’t want to take the slower, circuitous normal trail, with its ups and downs, so I just headed up one of the couloirs. I was tramping along, but the surface underfoot really sucked. And there was a crazy wind that day. I got most of the way up the couloir before I said to myself, This is bad. I tried to turn around to descend, and I just slipped.
I remember sliding down the hill, whipping out of control. I went at least several hundred feet. I had time to think, Oh my God, I’m going to die!
I came to in the rocks. I’d been knocked out cold, whether for mere seconds or for longer, I couldn’t tell. I think I must have hit the rocks with my feet, then rag-dolled over and crushed my face. I had a broken hand. I thought my leg was broken, but it turned out it was just badly bruised. I had a punctured sinus cavity in my face and several chipped teeth. I’d been wearing gloves, but the thumbs had torn off—I must have been trying to self-arrest with my hands. The skin on my thumbs was like raw meat, as if they’d been sliced with a carrot peeler.
My mom had given me a cell phone for Christmas. I got it out and managed to call her. I don’t remember this, but Mo
m later claimed my first words were, “Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing?” Mom called 911.
The normal rescue helicopter couldn’t get in to where I had fallen, so they brought in a California Highway Patrol chopper. It took a while. Pretty soon I was lucid again. I could see lakes in the distance that I recognized. But I was still asking myself, “Why am I here?”
I must have been in shock. All the fear had occupied those few seconds of whipping down the icy slope, in the form of sheer terror and the conviction that I was about to die, but now I felt a deeper sort of dread: How badly am I hurt? Am I going to get out of here all right?
There was an Indian family out snowshoeing who came along from below. Two strapping twenty-five-year-old lads and their parents. They helped load me into the chopper. Within minutes I was in an emergency room in Reno. It would take months for me to fully recover, especially because I kept climbing while my broken hand was healing. I still have scar tissue on my right thumb where the skin was scraped off.
This is still the only real accident I’ve suffered. And what a complete debacle it was, thanks to my ignorance of snow and snowshoes. If this happened today, I’d be mortified. But I’d also self-assess, then hike out under my own steam. It’s embarrassing to have to be rescued by helicopter. When I tell the story today, now that I’ve done so much serious climbing, the only way to treat it is as comedy. Maybe farce.
I’d started keeping my climbing “bible” the previous month. That day, writing left-handed because I’d broken my right hand, I recorded
Tallac
Fell, broke hand . . . airlifted.
