Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure

by Alex Honnold

  Other comments in 2010 sounded like nonchalant bragging. “Yeah,” said Alex, “I crushed high school. I took a test once, and they said I was a genius.”

  Yet others sounded like cruel putdowns, as when Alex dismissed one of America’s leading female rock climbers as “a bit of a puss,” because she’d had to ask her partner to overprotect a scary traverse she was seconding. About this high-profile climber, Alex added dismissively, “She hasn’t done anything I couldn’t do.”

  In 2010, Chris Weidner, one of Alex’s best friends, complained, “When we started climbing together, he was very polite, very safety-conscious. Now, he’s more likely to bad-mouth you. About a year ago, I was trying to lead this pitch, and I kept falling off. Alex said, ‘Dude, what’s your fucking problem? It’s only five-thirteen.’ He may have been joshing, but it hurt my feelings. He’s got a certain attitude now, like, unless you’re a world-class climber, you suck.

  “I finally said, ‘Hey, give me a break. I’m trying as hard as I can.’ He may have realized he was hurting my feelings, but he just doesn’t want to deal with it.”

  When I reminded Alex of these comments in 2014, he was abashed. “That’s not me anymore,” he insisted. “I think back then I was pretty aggro. I thought I had something to prove.”

  By 2015, Alex Honnold evidently has little still to prove. Yet his intensity shows no signs of ebbing. Something still drives him to a kind of perfection on rock—and recently, on snow and ice—that goes beyond the frontiers established by his boldest predecessors.

  No matter what the difference in our styles and approaches—old-school versus new-school, mountaineer versus rock climber—Mark Synnott and I always got along well. Today I consider him one of my mentors, as well as one of the teammates I’m most indebted to. After Chad, I signed up for yet another Synnott trip sponsored by The North Face and Men’s Journal. This time, in July 2011, we headed off for Devil’s Bay on the south coast of Newfoundland, where big granite cliffs rise straight out of the ocean. We hoped to put up some good new routes there and document everything with camera and film.

  Two others of our gang from the Chad expedition—James Pearson and Tim Kemple—were returning, and it was good to renew our friendship in Canada. The other three were Jim Surette, Matt Irving, and Hazel Findlay. I’d climbed a bit here and there with Hazel and Matt but had never met Jim, though Mark spoke highly of him. Hazel is a really strong British chick who evolved from gym climbing (six times British junior champion in indoor competitions) to become—a rare thing for women—a very strong trad leader on dangerous runout routes. Sender Films would make a beguiling film about her called Spice Girl, and I would later climb with Hazel in South Africa for another film, called Africa Fusion, released in 2015.

  The only problem with the Newfoundland expedition was that the weather didn’t cooperate. It turned out to be a miserable washout. To kill the downtime, I jotted down notes almost like I was writing a diary. Some entries:

  It’s been raining on and off for 10 days and everything in my small tent is getting a little damp. Though I’m the lucky one on the trip, everyone else on the team had their tents either destroyed or damaged in last night’s freakishly strong wind storm. . . . So far we’ve climbed one route and sat in the rain and brooded. Well, to be honest, I’m brooding and everyone else is drinking a lot and making the best of it.

  Before coming on this trip I felt like I was in great shape, climbing my first traditional 8b+ [5.14a] and a few other hard sport routes. I was fresh off a good season in Yosemite in which I’d soloed some things I was proud of. . . . Things should have been going great for me, and yet all I could think about while I festered in my damp tent was that my fitness was slipping away and that I was wasting my time. I could be anywhere else in the world, climbing every day. Instead, here I was in a tent, in the rain, depressed out of my mind.

  I try to make the best of it and go for hikes despite the constant rain, just because the landscape is so beautiful. But then days of whiteout fog descend and it seems too dangerous to go wandering away from camp. I’m locked in my tent with nothing to do but read and do pushups.

  We spend most of the time in the communal mess tent telling stories and bantering. Not that there’s anything in particular to say after a week of rain, yet Mark has a distinctly entertaining way of telling stories, even if I have heard them all at least twice before. In many ways our trip to Newfoundland is what people who work normal jobs do for vacation: go somewhere exotic with a group of friends and then hang out all day eating and drinking.

  Several years later, looking back on our Newfoundland trip, Mark insisted that the expedition had been a success. He thought that we’d made a good short film by making “raininess” the central theme. It was titled Tent Bound in Devil’s Bay.

  Mark told other people that the rest of the guys had a running joke about me. That I would just sit in the group tent, muttering, “This is the grimmest place on earth.” Mark even called me a sort of Debbie Downer, almost a whiner. He thought I damaged the group’s morale. He also thought that a route the team free climbed, called Leviathan, was “awesome.”

  Well, sorry, Mark, but that’s not how I remember Devil’s Bay. Tent Bound is a horrible little film, because the guys didn’t have anything to work with. There was no story. James Pearson and I free climbed a route called Lucifer’s Lighthouse, which was the hardest thing on the wall. But the whole trip was grim. Not just because of the rain. If you were in Patagonia, it’d be worth waiting out the weather, just to get a chance to climb on some of the most epic peaks on earth. But I’d just come from the Valley, and I was losing my fitness day after day. And this place sucked. Wet, slabby granite, not featured, not that tall . . . worse than the stuff in Tuolumne. I could have been doing this kind of climbing in Tuolumne and eating pizza every afternoon. Newfoundland just wasn’t rad. It wasn’t the future.

  As for me being Debbie Downer, well, that’s not entirely fair. Everybody was bummed and bored. I went on hikes, but then we’d get those impossible whiteouts. You could get lost in the fog. It was hard to find the latrine, a hundred feet from camp.

  I was, I’ll admit, the most vocal member of our crew, saying early on, “We should just leave.”

  But I don’t hold any of this against Mark. Every trip I’ve gone on with him has been a life experience. I always learn something.

  • • • •

  Between my trips to Chad and Newfoundland, in the winter of 2010–11, I embarked on what I half-jokingly called my Sport Climbing Tour of the Antiquities. From Africa I went straight to Israel, then Jordan, then Turkey, then Greece. In Israel and Jordan, I stayed with a friend. Stacey joined me for Turkey and Greece.

  It wasn’t a true tourist vacation. I did all the hardest routes in Israel, and all the hardest routes at Geyikbayiri in Turkey. At Kalymnos in Greece, where the climbing is terrific, I got shut down somewhat because it had rained so much the limestone cliffs were seeping.

  As for the antiquities, I actually read some books about the histories of the countries where I was climbing. I did all kinds of cultural stuff. Got a pretty legit taste of the past. Saw a lot of old things. Saw a lot of people in funny dress.

  A trip like that serves as a kind of filler-in between real climbing adventures. I traveled, climbed, tried new things, learned new stuff, all while I was preparing for something big. Two thousand eleven, like 2009, was what I call a year of consolidation.

  In Alex Lowther’s profile of me for Alpinist (summer 2011), he writes about the pressure on me to keep upping the ante. He paraphrases the public’s response to my big free solos: “What’s next? Give us more!” And he adds,

  Expectations can be dangerous, and they only become more so when what you are famous for is risking your life.

  If he’s not careful, we could admire Alex Honnold to death.

  That’s a fair concern, but it’s not like I haven’t dealt with this pressure ever since folks started noticing what I was doing. The pressure only
nudges me if it’s about a project I want to do anyway. Actually, a bigger motivator than any media attention would be a hot chick at the base of a wall who I could impress. Though she probably couldn’t tell the difference between 5.10 and 5.13. But no matter how hot the chick is, say if I was standing at the base of El Cap, and she urged me to free solo some route, my answer would be “No way.”

  For example, I can’t tell you how many people over the years have pressured me to drink alcohol. We’ll be at a party, and somebody will taunt me, “Alex, just try this beer, it’s not gonna hurt you to take a sip.” I’ve never given in. Booze doesn’t interest me.

  Most of the media attention that has come my way so far has been focused on my free solos. But that’s not the only kind of climbing that compels me. Just as rad, in my book, are the big-wall linkups I’ve attempted, especially in Yosemite. And 2012 would be another watershed year for me, as I went after speed climbs on the big walls and linkups, both with partners and solo, of some of the most epic routes in North America.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TRIPLE PLAY

  Borneo, Chad, and even Newfoundland were novel experiences for me, but throughout my still relatively short climbing career, I keep coming back to the Valley when I want to push myself. Because of the sheer scale and difficulty of its soaring, clean granite walls, Yosemite offers almost limitless challenges to today’s best climbers—as it will, I’m sure, to the stars of the next generation. No one, for example, has yet attempted a free solo of any of the routes on El Capitan.

  One of the great landmarks in Valley history came in 1975, when three of the Stonemasters—Jim Bridwell, John Long, and Billy Westbay—pulled off the first one-day ascent of the Nose. The first route ever climbed on El Cap, the Nose was put up in 1958 in a monstrous siege effort stretching over forty-seven days by the legendary Warren Harding and a series of teammates. Bridwell, Long, and Westbay, climbing mostly free, surged up the route in about sixteen hours. There’s a famous photo of the trio shot in the meadow below El Cap after the climb. To get the wall as well as the climbers in the frame, the photographer has hunkered down to the level of the guys’ knees. Because of that angle, they seem to exude cockiness—gods sneering down on mere mortals. Cigarettes dangle from Bridwell’s and Long’s mouths. They’re dressed like hippies, in loose-fitting vests and shirts, but they could just as well pass for Hell’s Angels.

  By the time I first hit the Valley, almost thirty years after that landmark ascent, climbing the Nose in a single day was still a pretty big deal. In 2010, I managed to do that three times, paired with Ueli Steck. We’d talked about trying to go for the speed record, which was then held by Hans Florine and Yuji Hirayama, at an amazing 2:37:05—yes, just a little over two and a half hours. But things didn’t quite work out.

  Instead, in early June 2010, I took a big step upward when I soloed the Nose, also in a single day.

  As I mentioned above, no one has yet even attempted to free solo a route on El Cap. But there are other kinds of soloing that aren’t quite so extreme. The distinctions may seem arcane to nonclimbers, but they’re huge for those of us who go after big walls.

  Rope soloing is a process in which you belay yourself, usually by tying one end of the rope to an anchor, the other end to your harness, then leading more or less conventionally, placing pro or clipping fixed gear as you go. Instead of a belayer to catch your fall, you minimize the potential plunge by using one of several different devices. I generally use a grigri, the same autolocking belay device that I use to catch a friend at the sport crag or gym, though in this case I’m using it to catch myself.

  The trouble with rope soloing is that it’s extremely tedious. You have to negotiate each pitch three times to make progress—leading it with pro, rappelling to “clean” (retrieve) the pro, then “jugging” back up the rope (climbing the line itself with ascenders, metal devices that grip the rope under a downward pull but slide easily upward). Way back in 1971, Peter Haan climbed the Salathé route on El Cap—along with the Nose, one of its two most storied lines—in a monumental rope-soloing effort spread across six days. Haan used some kind of combination of prusik knot and Jumar (then the most popular ascender) to belay himself. What’s pretty amazing is that he had never done a big wall before. I don’t know Haan, but I can appreciate how rad his exploit seemed in its day.

  In 2010, when I soloed the Nose, I carried a thin sixty-meter rope in my pack only because I knew there were a few pitches that I’d have to rope solo. They included the King Swing, a massive pendulum that allows you to escape from the apparent dead end of the Boot Flake. I lowered myself from my anchor a hundred feet, then started running and scrabbling sideways across blank granite, so that I could build up longer and longer swings. Finally I was able to grab the edge of a crack far to the left that leads to the crack system that continues the route. It’s quite a daunting maneuver to pull off solo. The King Swing is like the biggest pendulum in climbing. At least it’s the biggest one I’ve ever done.

  It was a tough trade-off to burden myself with the weight of a sixty-meter rope that I’d use only a few times on the Nose, but I doubt that I could have gotten up the route without it. Most of the time, what I was doing was daisy soloing.

  A daisy chain is a loop of nylon webbing, a little longer than an arm’s reach, that’s sewn into as many as a dozen regularly spaced miniloops. You keep one end firmly attached to your harness, then you clip whichever miniloop is at the right length to a cam or nut you’ve placed or a piton or bolt that’s already in place. Then you can hang safely on aid from the gear, or just use it as a handhold to get past a tricky move. I carried two daisies, so that I could alternate clips without ever interrupting the security of my static connection to good pro. On the very hardest aid pitches on the Nose, like the crux of a big overhang called the Great Roof (rated 5.13d), I used the daisies to hang from either cams I placed or fixed gear—some of it pretty old and nearly worthless.

  During most of the climb on the Nose, however—all but the very hardest passages—I was truly free soloing. The transition from daisy soloing to free is scary. I have to constantly remind myself, Now I’m safe. Now I’m not. It’s tough mentally. But you never forget, never think you’re clipped to pro when you’re actually attached to nothing. You’re fully aware during those long stretches when only your hands and feet finding the right holds keep you from taking the big plunge.

  Even though by 2010 I’d already free soloed Half Dome and Moonlight Buttress, the feats that seemed to put me on the climbing map, this daisy solo of the Nose felt like a big deal for me. I was proud of how efficiently I climbed, too, since the whole ascent took me only five hours and fifty minutes.

  Still, I had even grander ambitions for Yosemite that season.

  • • • •

  When I was still a young gym rat in Sacramento, I saw a film called Masters of Stone 5. One episode covered the daisy-solo linkup by Dean Potter of the Nose on El Cap and the Regular Northwest Face on Half Dome in a single day—Potter’s elapsed time was twenty-three hours and twenty-three minutes. I thought, That is fucking cool. Just the idea of climbing two big walls in a single day filled me with awe.

  Dean has since become a friend of mine, but back then he was a role model and an idol, both for his speed climbs and his audacious free solos. He’s thirteen years older than me. We’ve bouldered together a few times but never gotten to climb anything big. Unfortunately, the media have tried to paint us as rivals, with him as the aging guru being challenged by me, the young upstart.

  Anyway, after climbing the Nose with Ueli Steck in May and June 2010, I had the moves pretty well dialed. And I thought the Regular Northwest Face on Half Dome should be pretty mellow if I used daisies to protect myself at the hard parts—the sequences that had scared me two years earlier, when I’d free soloed the route.

  Late on June 21, I headed up the long approach to the base of Half Dome, planning to bivouac there and get started at first light. Somehow, though, I mistimed th
e sunrise, waking up at 4:45 a.m. and having to sit around waiting for the lights to come on. I had a minimal rack and a thirty-foot line that I use to tow my van, which I figured could work for the Robbins Traverse—the only time I expected to use a rope.

  Once it got light, I scrambled up the huge snow cone at the base of the wall—still there in June, courtesy of an unusually heavy winter. Halfway up the first pitch, I changed into climbing shoes and switched to rock-climbing mode, after tossing down my jacket and headlamp. I had a small pack with my shoes, food, and water, figuring it was important for me to stay well fed and hydrated since I was going to have a long day.

  The climbing itself was pretty uneventful. It felt mostly moderate, compared to my free solo two years before—especially since I used the bolt ladders to avoid the hard free climbing, the same bolt ladders I’d had to detour around in 2008 to keep my free solo pure. Farther up, I climbed the chimneys with my pack hanging down below me on a daisy. The only time I really had to pay attention was on the Zig-Zags, where I climbed with two pieces clipped to my daisies on all the hard parts. As it turned out, I never used my thirty-foot towline.

  The final slab, which had been quite stressful for me free soloing two years before, felt totally casual. Instead of insecure friction moves on almost invisible footholds, I could just pull on the bolts and swing between them on my daisies when need be. It was an entirely different experience.

  I topped out among a handful of hikers. It was about 7:00 a.m. and the summit was still quite peaceful, a pleasant change from the usual gong show. I savored my climb for a few minutes while eating some food, then started my descent.

  I’d timed the climb at two hours and nine minutes, which made it a new solo speed record for the route. It’s sort of funny, but I can convince myself that speed for its own sake isn’t a high priority for me. On Thank God Ledge, for instance, I wasted ten minutes trying to “booty” a brand-new #4 Camalot that somebody had recently gotten stuck in a crack. Just the day before, I’d learned a trick about hitting the individual lobes a certain way and walking cams around. I wanted to make it work. But after a while I gave up. For all I know, the Camalot is still there.