Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure
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After the expedition was over, for all my impatience with the old-school style the other guys seemed to think the route required, I realized that I owed a lot to Mark. He was probably right about my “Yosemite bubble.” In Borneo, I realized that climbing in remote ranges did entail all kinds of techniques I hadn’t had to learn on Half Dome or El Cap.
Mark had truly broadened my climbing experience. His whole thing—exploring, traveling the world, having adventures in exotic places—was new to me, and exciting.
Because, when all was said and done, we’d forged a good friendship. Mark invited me on his next media- and sponsor-supported junket, a truly exploratory climbing trip to an untouched desert landscape full of weird pinnacles and arches in northeastern Chad, in Africa. The trip was planned for November 2010. Without a moment’s hesitation, I signed on.
• • • •
Mark had discovered the Ennedi Desert by staring hard at satellite photos. On a previous expedition to Cameroon, he started wondering about the climbing possibilities in Chad, which borders Cameroon on the northeast. Civil war in the Sudan had provoked a refugee crisis in Chad, making it an inhospitable country for Westerners to visit, but Mark loves that sort of challenge. He knew that expeditions had been active in the Tibesti Mountains, near the northern border of Chad, but the much more remote Ennedi seemed untouched by climbers. And the satellite photos made it clear that the rock formations there were spectacular.
For his team, Mark put together two threesomes. What he called his “media team,” whose main mission was to film and photograph (even though all three were good climbers), consisted of Jimmy Chin, Renan Ozturk, and Tim Kemple. The “climbing team” was Mark, James Pearson, and myself. James is a Brit who’d made quite a splash on the gritstone crags of his native country, then had taken his act abroad. He was about the same age as me. I’d climbed with James for a day or two in the U.K., but I didn’t really know him. I sensed, though, that his outlook on climbing matched mine a lot better than the more old-school mountaineers I’d gone to Borneo with. By 2010, like me, he was sponsored by The North Face.
Sparsely inhabited today, the Ennedi had once been a thriving homeland to seminomadic pastoralists who herded everything from goats and cattle to camels. The vivid rock art of the region—pictographs painted in red, white, brown, and black—was first discovered in the 1930s. The human figures abound in archers leaping and dancing as they carry their bows. By now, archaeologists have been able to use the rock art to date and define a series of cultures ranging back all the way to 5000 BC.
We arrived in N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, in mid-November. One thing Mark is really good at is arranging logistics in developing countries. For our excursion, he’d recruited an Italian expat named Piero Rava, who at the age of sixty-six ran a trekking company taking foreigners on ambitious photo tours of places like the Ennedi. Piero was a veteran mountaineer himself, having participated in a bold Italian expedition to Cerro Torre in Patagonia in 1970. An amazing spire of granite and ice, Cerro Torre had once earned the reputation as “the world’s most difficult mountain.” Another Italian, Cesare Maestri, claimed to have reached the summit in 1959, only to have his partner, the Austrian Toni Egger, die on the descent when he was avalanched off the wall. Other climbers doubted the ascent, and it is now generally regarded as a complete hoax, with Maestri and Egger getting nowhere near the top.
The Italian team in 1970 got to within 200 meters of the summit. Had they succeeded, they would have claimed the true first ascent, which was finally pulled off four years later by a team led by Casimiro Ferrari, who had been Piero’s teammate in 1970. It was cool to have a Cerro Torre veteran leading our expedition, and even cooler to know that Piero had fifteen years’ experience in taking trekkers to the Ennedi. He had checked out lines on the arches and pinnacles, but he hadn’t climbed anything, and he assured us that no other climbers had touched the rock there.
Piero spoke almost no English but good French. So I ended up translating for the crew in the jeep. The whole process was kind of fun.
Borneo had been my first taste of a true Third World adventure, but Chad was far more intense. And the impact on me of those three weeks in Africa would be life-changing, in ways I never could have foreseen.
We set off from N’Djamena in a Land Rover and a pair of Toyota Land Cruisers. The Ennedi was 625 miles away as the crow flies, but a lot farther as we ended up traveling. In an essay about the trip, Mark later captured the surreal flavor of our drive:
We had been traveling Chad’s only paved road for less than an hour when Piero suddenly veered off into the sand. I assumed we were stopping, but Piero just pointed the vehicle northeast and kept going—for the next four days.
Sometimes we followed rutted tracks in the sand, while other times it seemed like we were driving across areas that had never seen a vehicle. In the softer sand, the only way we could maintain headway was to drive at 60 mph, with the vehicle skimming precariously at the limit of control. When we stopped to camp at night, our Chadian mechanic would work on the vehicles, cleaning out air filters and sometimes replacing or repairing various engine parts.
We put in long, grueling days of four-wheeling, sometimes going from sunup to sundown seeing nothing but flat sand. The key was to spend as much time as possible in Piero’s lead vehicle, because in the following vehicles you lived in a cloud of dust, which worked its way into every orifice of your body. It was the beginning of the Chadian winter, and the temperature hovered in the 90s during the day. In summer, Piero explained, it got up to 140°F.
The other guys tended to space out or try to sleep during this endless, monotonous journey, but I was transfixed. With my face glued to the window, I stared out at the emptiness, watching for any change in the horizon. On our second day in the sand, we had an encounter that turned into a minor epiphany for me.
Suddenly I saw two men riding camels in the desert ahead of us. Piero slowed down for them and stopped a short distance away. In retrospect, I wonder if he was stopping only because he was used to his tourists wanting to take pictures of such things, or if he was truly stopping out of courtesy to interact with them, the way hikers do when they’re out in the backcountry. Regardless, we piled out of the jeeps and approached the nomads, one of whom dismounted and poured us a large bowl of camel milk. Piero explained that nomads will always offer you something as hospitality, even though they don’t have much for themselves. We declined his offer, taking a few pictures instead. Piero gave the two men the leftovers from our breakfast, explaining to us that it was normal for them to travel for days without any real food. They mounted their camels and continued into the desert.
Later I asked Piero how those nomads could navigate so accurately in the desert, especially when the stakes were so high. A slight mistake in bearing would mean missing the next well and dying of dehydration in the middle of nowhere. Piero explained that they use the sun and the direction of the wind, which is constant in the winter, to navigate. When I protested that it seemed like too serious a situation to rely only on the sun and wind, Piero drew an analogy to climbing. Sometimes you find yourself in positions where falling would mean death. So you don’t fall. It helped me understand. The nomads just don’t make mistakes.
Occasionally, when we passed a small oasis, we’d run into native people, small clusters of men, women, and children living in mud huts or thatched dwellings. These were Toubous, so unused to seeing strangers—especially white-skinned Westerners—that Piero warned us not to approach them or take photographs of them.
Still, I stared in fascination at these seminomadic desert dwellers. And here I had another, more lasting epiphany. After the trip was over, it wasn’t the climbing that stuck foremost in my memory. It was the days of driving across the desert to and from the Ennedi. My lasting impressions were of kids beating donkeys to make them haul water faster, or of men riding camels through the middle of nowhere, or of other men working all day to turn mud into bricks. I was seeing a completely
different way of life from any I’d ever witnessed before, in a completely alien place. The simple facts of Chadian life—what it takes to survive in that kind of climate with nothing but a hut and some animals—stunned me.
And this made me realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy my life was compared to those of people in less privileged societies. That insight would lead me, a few years later, to redirect my goals toward something other than climbing. It took a while to sink in, but that was the epiphany.
Toward the end of the fourth day, we spied some rocks in the distance. We hadn’t seen so much as a hill since leaving N’Djamena. Anticipation ran high. All of us were thinking, Will the rock be any good? When we got close enough, we piled out of the vehicles and literally ran over to the nearest formations.
We knew from Piero that the pinnacles and arches were made of sandstone. But would it be the sharp, clean sandstone of Nevada’s Red Rocks, or chossy stuff like the Fisher Towers in Utah?
To our dismay, we discovered that the sandstone in the Ennedi ranged from terrible rock to truly atrocious, abominable rock. It was all bad. No matter what, however, the Ennedi was a photographer’s and filmmaker’s paradise, and the “media team” got images and footage like you see nowhere else in the world.
Our first major objective was a 200-foot-tall spire that we called the Citadel. As Mark described it, the tower was “shaped like a giant boxcar standing on end, featuring four distinct arêtes, one of which appeared to have decent holds. A rotten overhang guarded the bottom, but sported a crack that looked doable.”
James Pearson was psyched to lead it. (I thought it looked like a death route.) He tied in and started up as Mark belayed, with the media team in rapt attention. I didn’t want to just sit around and watch someone else climb—I hadn’t come halfway around the world and four days across the desert just to spectate—so I wandered off and started soloing up a random nearby tower.
Before this trip, Tim, Jimmy, and Renan had seen me solo a little bit on solid rock, but Mark and James had never watched me solo at all. I think what I was doing now freaked them out a bit.
ACHARACTERISTIC HONNOLD understatement. In his essay about the Chad trip, Synnott wrote,
I heard a noise behind me and saw Honnold emerging, ropeless, from a bombay chimney 40 feet up a nearby tower. Above him rose an overhanging fist crack into which he set some jams, then swung his feet out of the chimney. Flowing like a snake up the rock, he was soon manteling over the lip. He built a small cairn and then down-soloed the tower via an overhanging face. On his way down, he broke off several hand and footholds, and I was barely able to watch. He later admitted that the downclimb had been a little more than he’d bargained for.
According to Synnott, Alex made some six solo first ascents of untouched routes during the time it took Pearson, climbing brilliantly, to get to the top of the Citadel.
Interviewed after the team’s return from Chad, Jimmy Chin reported that when Alex was soloing, “It got so that we couldn’t watch. And we also didn’t want him to know we were watching, because we didn’t want to give him any extra motivation to push it.”
Several days after the Citadel climb, Alex started up—tied in, effectively toproping—on a beautiful sandstone arch. In his article, Synnott played this exploit up as zany hijinks:
We ended up one day sitting below a 100-foot-tall arch with a 180-degree rainbow offwidth crack splitting the underside of the formation. I had zero interest in climbing this heinous fissure, but Honnold was psyched. . . .
Ten feet off the ground, Honnold lunged for a basketball-sized hold that promptly exploded in his face, sending him winging across the arch. Once the route had spit him off, you could see in Honnold’s face that it was “game on.”
He jumped back on and for more than [an] hour, battled his way up, across, and then down the other side of the offwidth. He shuffled across the horizontal section by hanging upside down by foot cams. “That was the most disgusting route of my life,” Honnold exclaimed, panting, his body covered in dust and bat piss, but with a huge grin on his face. He looked happier than I’d seen him all trip.
Yet four years later, Synnott looked back on Alex’s free soloing in Chad with lingering misgivings, verging on disapproval. “In Chad,” he says, “Alex was cavalier about risk. Over-confident. On that first tower, what he was doing was just plain mind-numbing. As he down-climbed, he broke loose three of his four holds, so he was dangling by one arm.
“‘What was that all about?’ I asked him when he got down. He didn’t answer. He wouldn’t cop to it.
“As far as I can tell, Alex came very close to falling off in the Ennedi.”
Yeah, I’ve heard those guys’ comments, but only secondhand. I think one thing that freaked them a little was the assumption that if you’re going to free solo, you should do it on routes you’ve climbed before, even carefully rehearsed, so that there are no unwelcome surprises. As I had on Moonlight Buttress. To free solo rock that you’ve never touched before—a lot of it chossy and loose—might seem too out there.
But what I was soloing in Chad wasn’t that hard—maybe 5.7. As for breaking off holds as I downclimbed that first tower, Mark’s got it wrong. Yes, it was an overhanging wall, and I was hanging from two 5.5 mud jugs. Both my footholds broke off, but it wasn’t hard to hang on, and I definitely wasn’t dangling by one arm.
On a route called Royal Arches in Yosemite, I once pulled off a big hold on a 5.5 pitch I was soloing. My body swung backward, but I was able to grab the hold, shove it back in place, and recover. It was scary, but it was like magic. On 5.5, it’s easy to have magic. On 5.11, it’s not as magical.
We climbed for ten days in the Ennedi. The poor quality of the sandstone meant that bolts, and, for that matter, any of our gear, wouldn’t really hold, which added a lot to the adventure of the climbing. Mark and James had real fears about ripping all the pro on a pitch, including the anchors. I found myself retreating off as many lines as I finished, though it didn’t matter as much because it’s easier to bail when soloing.
In the end, as I mentioned, it wasn’t the climbing that made the trip so memorable. It was having an adventure in a completely alien landscape, and witnessing a way of life that would have been unimaginable to me beforehand. In Chad, I saw extreme poverty for the first time. It was hard for me to imagine living your whole life and never touching anything but sand. What we saw there were people surviving in a full-on Stone Age culture.
The trip coincided with a time when my own life was getting easier, thanks to sponsorship and recognition. Nowadays I can film a two-day commercial and make more money than those people in Chad make in their whole lives. That’s fucked up. And that discrepancy ultimately forced me to examine how I ought to live my own life, and what I could do for others who were less fortunate.
BY THE TIME ALEX WENT to Chad, in November 2010, he and Stacey were back together. But there would be subsequent breakups in their future. Looking back in 2014, Alex commented, “I find it really hard to see six months into the future, let alone a year or more. Stacey complains that that makes it hard for us to talk about our future together. She wants to know where we might live, or whether she should continue to work as a nurse, or just live with me on the road.
“We’ve talked about having children. I sort of joke that I’d like to have grandkids some day, but the thought of raising an infant seems heinous. Probably has something to do with my own childhood, but I don’t really want to go there.
“It bugs Stacey when I joke about dying. I might say something like, ‘You better appreciate me now, because I may not be around very long.’ I’m just goofing around, but Stacey hates it. I know that she believes that I won’t fall off soloing. She has faith in my ability and judgment.
“Some of our breakups got triggered by my feeling that I needed to be alone, that a relationship interfered with my climbing. When I told her that, she got really mad. She told me bluntly, ‘Okay, it’s over. Don’t talk to me. Don’t even tr
y to contact me.’
“Then a few weeks or even months go by, and I realize I miss Stacey. I’ll get all sheepish and call her up. ‘I know you didn’t want me to contact you,’ I’ll say, ‘but couldn’t we meet just to talk? Maybe have lunch?’ She gives in, because I insist that I’ve learned more about myself and have realized that Stacey does have a positive impact on my life. And after all, we really do love each other.”
In an unguarded moment, Alex admitted, “I think Stacey has had a lot to do with humanizing me.” What spurred that insight was a playback in 2014 of some comments that Alex made to this writer [David Roberts] in 2010, when I interviewed him for a profile published in the May 2011 issue of Outside magazine.
An example. In 2010, Alex referred to having to go to North Carolina for a North Face appearance as “a gong show.” He added, “I see all this stuff as media b.-s.” An upcoming appearance as the featured speaker at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival was “full-on b.-s. I mean it’s okay, but it’s time I can’t spend climbing.”
“You want this on the record?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“How are your Banff hosts going to react if they read that comment?”
Alex shrugged. “I just say what I feel. Maybe it’ll come back to bite me in the ass someday, and then I’ll just stop talking to people.”