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

by Alex Honnold

  On the way down from Half Dome, I stopped to look at two amazing birds. I hate to have to hurry. The whole timing thing, I’ve claimed in print, is not a strong point for me.

  Yet if that were really true, why did I time my ascent? Why was it important for me—not only on that day, but on many climbs thereafter—to go after speed records? I suppose it all comes back to purism. A speed record on a big wall is the ultimate validation that I’ve climbed as efficiently as I know how. It’s consistent with my philosophy of life, my emphasis on simplicity, on paring away extraneous stuff. I also like speed records because they give a baseline for improvement. It’s nice to know that I can improve on a route. It’s gratifying to find that I can go faster.

  From the summit of Half Dome, I hustled down to Mirror Lake, where I’d stashed a bike, then rode it back to my van. I reached El Cap Meadow around 10:00 a.m. There I spent some time reracking and trying to eat and drink. I didn’t really know what I would need on the Nose, so I went a little heavy on gear: pretty much a double rack of cams. I had a skinny rope that I’d borrowed from a friend, something like an 8.5 millimeter. I figured it would be enough for my purposes. I wasn’t planning on whipping huge on it.

  All told, my gear weighed more than I would have liked. I hadn’t really thought about it beforehand, but the problem with soloing is that you carry everything, all the time. Climbing with a partner, normally you burn off the rack as you go, so by the end of the pitch you only have a little left. And conversely, the rope weighs nothing at the beginning of a pitch. But when you’re daisy soloing, you have the whole weight of everything on you all the time.

  At the foot of the Nose, there were a bunch of parties converging from different directions. Some Frenchmen who were hauling bags, some Russians who were only hoping to climb to Sickle Ledge (a mere four pitches up) to check it out, some Americans who were at the very bottom and said they were taking up a lot of beer. I was a little weirded out by the whole show and took off climbing as soon as I could. I felt super self-conscious to start free soloing up a crack that people were lined up to aid climb.

  It was surreal to look up the Nose and think that I would be scrambling the whole thing by myself. I had a good supply of food and water as well as a headlamp. I was prepared for anything, though I was planning on climbing in the same style as I had on Half Dome. Free soloing everything I could and daisy soloing anything hard. I had the rope for a few pendulums, the King Swing, and the Great Roof.

  Everything went smoothly on the first three pitches, which seemed easier than I expected. On the fourth pitch, I got a pleasant surprise. Someone had fixed an extremely bomber line up across the two tricky pendulums to Sickle Ledge. I could see that the rope was fixed to the bolt on Sickle and refixed to a half-dozen pieces along its way down, so I happily hand-over-handed up and saved myself a lot of ropework. I figured that something useful like that makes up for all the times that you go up on a pitch and discover that someone has cleaned all the fixed gear or ripped a crucial piece that’s supposed to be left in place, either by falling and pulling it out or by deliberately scavenging it. And then sometimes you get lucky and find a rope left in place!

  Dolt Tower, ten pitches up, was my first real stop. It was time to eat and drink again, and I checked my timer. It read something like 1:15, which was a pretty damn good pace. I realized that I wouldn’t be needing a headlamp after all. I waved down to the meadow, knowing that my friend Tom Evans was probably watching on his telescope, and I wondered if any of my other friends were around. Then I took a leak and wondered if they watched that, too. I figured if they could see everything from down in the meadow, then I had nothing to be ashamed of. . . .

  I rope soloed the short aid section up to the Boot Flake, but then I took myself off belay before I free soloed the actual Boot itself. It’s simpler for me not to deal with a rope, especially on something secure like a hand crack. Still, it’s exciting to take yourself off belay on El Cap.

  Everything went uneventfully up to the Great Roof, which is where I planned to do my only full pitch of traditional rope soloing. I’d even brought a single Jumar for the occasion. This was one of my first real pitches of rope soloing ever, but it went smoothly. I started to notice how tired I felt as I jugged, so I told myself I wouldn’t do any more rope soloing. From here to the top, I was going to daisy solo, even if it took longer. I couldn’t bear to go up and down to clean pitches.

  At the base of the Pancake Flake, I put my rope in my pack. That was one of the more memorable moments of the day. As I unclipped my daisies from the anchor and started free soloing the easy lieback above me, I felt absolutely heroic. The sheer exposure of twenty-three pitches dropping off beneath me filled me with glee. I’d spent a lot of the season posing for photos on various routes for a couple of different projects. Now I found myself doing the most exposed climbing of my life all alone. It was invigorating.

  The last six pitches are mostly hand cracks, so I largely free soloed them, but I was getting more and more tired. I started grabbing fixed gear a little more—“French freeing,” we sardonically call it, after the traditional style in the Alps. As I climbed into the Changing Corners, I passed into the shade, which brought me new life. Climbing in the full sun all afternoon had left me a little wilted, and my feet hurt from hot, tight climbing shoes. And then, on the last two pitches, I finally caught up to the parties I’d seen from the base. I stopped at an anchor to eat some food and chitchat with a cute belayer. But as much as I felt like hanging out and chilling in the shade, I still had to get to the top. So I climbed through the leader, with permission of course, and didn’t stop again until the summit.

  I was massively psyched to reach the top. My timer said 5:50, but I rounded up to six hours, since I hadn’t started it until the top of the first pitch. I’d been distracted by the mob at the base and hadn’t remembered to start the timer.

  Now I couldn’t quite believe that I’d actually done the linkup, and in roughly half a day. Having thought about it with awe for so long, I found it a little surreal to actually do it.

  Honestly, I don’t remember anything about the hike down or what I did on the ground. I guess none of that stuff was as important to me as the actual climbing. Weird that I can remember individual placements I used on the Glowering Spot, but I can’t remember where I went for dinner, or with who.

  ALEX’S LINKUP OF Half Dome and the Nose had taken him only a little over eleven hours, including hiking down from Half Dome and biking, driving, and hiking to the foot of El Cap. That was less than half the time of Dean Potter’s daisy-solo linkup in 2002, the feat that had first inspired Alex to “go big” (one of his favorite mottoes). Of course a decade in Yosemite is an eternity in terms of speed climbing on the classic routes. Between 1991 and 2002, for instance, the speed record on the Nose—achieved by roped pairs simul-climbing, or moving at the same time without belays—dropped from six hours and one minute to two hours and forty-nine minutes.

  Still, Alex was justly proud that on his June 2010 marathon day he’d set not only the solo speed record for both routes but also the speed record for the linkup, with or without a partner. Yet this formidable accomplishment didn’t generate the kind of buzz that had greeted Alex’s free solos of Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome. The climbing magazines paid him dutiful homage: Alpinist cadged what its editor called “a characteristically nonchalant e-mail” out of Alex, summarizing his big day in the Valley. Stewart Green, a prolific commentator on the climbing scene, tipped his cap: “It’s hard to know what to make of Alex’s astounding ascents. No words can describe the difficulty and dangerousness of these ascents. It’s simply pure brashness. Let’s face it—the kid has a lot of chutzpah. Climb high, Alex, and be safe.”

  Alex’s Valley nickname—Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold—helps explain the muted response to his pathbreaking linkup. The narrative he wrote a few weeks after the climb for Black Diamond, one of his sponsors, is short on gee-whiz superlatives and long on phrases such as “pre
tty uneventful,” “easier than expected,” and “totally casual.”

  Throughout his career, it’s been a source of mild amusement to Alex that the public goes gaga over his free soloing but seems to undervalue his massive linkups on big walls at record paces. Of course, for a nonclimbing audience, the stark simplicity of free soloing—if you fall, you die—comes across instantly in a few seconds of video footage. It’s a lot harder for that audience to grasp the rigors of daisy soloing, especially the way Alex performs it, with the grueling mental ballet of switching constantly, as he puts it, from Now I’m safe to Now I’m not. The unspoken fallacy beneath a casual observer’s take on one of Alex’s bold daisy solos is that because he clips in to fixed gear or to cams he places on all the hardest parts, he’s taken the extreme challenge out of the game. Nothing could be further from the truth. And though he can say, “I hate to have to hurry,” Alex strives for speed on the big walls, even as he has to make shrewd calculations as to which pitches he will free solo and which he will cruise with his daisy chains. For that matter, even trusting your life to a fixed piton can be a gamble, as some of the pro placed years ago has weathered out and can no longer safely support a climber’s weight, let alone a leader fall.

  After his record-setting double, Alex still wasn’t through with Yosemite linkups. The ultimate prize, he knew, was the Yosemite Triple—back-to-back climbs not only of El Cap and Half Dome but also of the south face of Mount Watkins. Those three walls stand as the biggest trio in the Valley. To enchain them would require not only technical perfection but the stamina of a world-class distance runner.

  Once again, the role model showing Alex the way was Dean Potter, who in 2001, climbing with Timmy O’Neill, scaled all three walls in a single day. On their linkup, Potter and O’Neill mixed free climbing with “French free,” aiding on pro to surmount the hardest stretches. It was a landmark achievement, pushing the boundaries of what in 2001 was considered possible. (Even today, the authoritative site Supertopo.com lists “normal” times on the south face of Mount Watkins as two to three days, three days for the Regular Northwest Face on Half Dome, and five days for the Nose on El Cap.)

  By the spring of 2012, Alex was back in Yosemite. This time he would pair up with another of his role models, Tommy Caldwell. Despite Caldwell’s being seven years older than Alex, the two would soon form one of those rare partnerships destined to make climbing history, like the French duo of Lionel Terray and Louis Lachenal in the 1940s and ’50s or the German brothers Alex and Thomas Huber in the 1990s and 2000s. Each would bring out the best in the other, complementing one another’s particular strengths as climbers. And they got along like great friends just hanging out and having a good time, even when they were in the midst of a serious battle.

  Even as a teenager in Sacramento, I was aware of Tommy Caldwell’s stellar record in big-wall climbing. He seemed to specialize in first free ascents of routes on El Cap, including the Dihedral Wall and Magic Mushroom, both rated 5.14a. Yet he’d also excelled as a sport climber, solving a short route called Flex Luthor at the Fortress of Solitude in Colorado—rated a possible 5.15a, which remained throughout my childhood the hardest single route climbed in the United States. And in 2006, on his first trip to Patagonia, Tommy and two partners made the first free ascent of a beautiful route on Fitz Roy called Línea de Eleganza. (The first ascent, with heavy reliance on aid and fixed ropes, took an Italian party nine days. Tommy’s team onsighted every pitch and got up the wall in only two days.)

  I think a big key to Tommy’s success is his incredible work ethic. He’ll hike four hours to a route, then spend eight hours working it in the rain. Or he’ll haul huge loads to the top of El Cap, then rap down just to check out a potential project. By the fall of 2014, Tommy had been trying for seven straight years to complete the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall on El Cap, which he knew would be the hardest big wall free climb in the world. I could only imagine the tenacity and drive it would take to work on a single route nearly every season for most of a decade. I don’t think I’d have the patience for such a long-term challenge.

  Tommy’s also had some experiences you wouldn’t wish on anybody. In 2000, at the age of twenty-three, with his girlfriend (and later wife), Beth Rodden, as well as two other climbing buddies, Tommy was forced off a big wall in Kyrgyzstan when terrorists shot bullets at the climbers’ portaledge a thousand feet off the deck. Once on the ground, the four were taken prisoner and then forced for days to march and hide as their captors evaded army soldiers hunting them. An unfortunate soldier whom the terrorists had also captured was executed just out of sight of their bivouac. Tommy, Beth, and their two teammates believed they would be executed themselves. They succeeded in escaping one night when Tommy pushed off a cliff the sole terrorist charged with guarding them. (Amazingly, the guy survived, only to be captured by the army and imprisoned under a death sentence.) The four young climbers then ran for the government front line, coming close to getting shot at by mistake. The whole wild adventure is chronicled in Greg Child’s dramatic book Over the Edge.

  The very next year, 2001, Tommy accidentally cut off his left index finger with a table saw. That kind of mishap can end a climbing career. Tommy had the finger sewed back on, but when it simply got in the way of his climbing, he had it removed. Today, at age thirty-seven, he’s climbing as well as he ever has, despite the missing digit.

  So I had always admired Tommy from a distance, but when we started climbing together, it was a joy to discover what a kind, generous, unegotistical guy he is. Unlike some professional athletes, Tommy never toots his own horn, and, as a result, I think he’s gotten less credit for what he’s done than he deserves.

  In May 2012, Tommy’s idea for the Yosemite Triple—the south face of Mount Watkins, a route called Freerider on El Cap that weaves in and out of the standard Salathé line, and the Regular Northwest Face on Half Dome—was not simply to pull off the linkup in a single day but to free climb every single foot of all three routes. I knew that would be a tall order, but I was psyched to give it a shot with such a strong and motivated partner.

  We started up Watkins at 4:45 p.m. on May 18. It was already hot in the Valley, so we arranged our schedule to maximize time in the shade. The technique we all use nowadays for speed climbing big walls is called simul-climbing. It works like this. One guy takes the rack and leads continuously, not for a single pitch but for as much as 800 or even a thousand feet. He doesn’t stop to belay. Once the rope comes tight to the second, he starts up, too. Both guys climb simultaneously—hence “simul-climbing.” The leader places cams or nuts every so often, or clips fixed gear, so that if either guy falls, the gear catches them in a kind of yo-yo effect, when the rope comes tight between them. You can take some pretty horrendous whippers simul-climbing and still not get hurt, as long as the pro is good.

  Ironically, the most dangerous situation in simul-climbing arises when the second falls. If the leader falls, the rope coming tight to the second arrests the plunge, the second acting as a kind of unwitting anchor. But if the second falls, he can pull off the leader. Not good if both guys are falling at once, no matter how good your pro!

  But part of what allowed Tommy and me to climb the Triple was using devices like the Kong Duck or the Petzl Micro Traxion, single-directional pulleys that allow the rope to go one way but not the other. When placed strategically, they allow the second to climb through terrain that would otherwise be considered much too hard—too close to the edge of falling off. Tommy and I could climb such big blocks—sometimes over a thousand feet at a time—because the devices made it safe for the second to climb as hard as 5.12.

  Tommy and I led in what we call blocks—big stretches covering as many as twelve or thirteen conventional pitches of, say, eighty to 150 feet each. It’s inevitable that as the leader places pro, he’s going to run through his rack at some point. That’s when you change over and give the rack and the lead to the other guy. We planned beforehand the places where our blocks would end, o
n ledges where a pendulum or a downclimb or some other unusual maneuver meant you had to manage the rope more carefully than in normal simul-climbing.

  We got up Watkins in the excellent time of two hours and forty minutes. Neither of us took a single fall, despite pitches as hard as 5.13a. From there, a combination of hiking, driving, eating, and rehydrating got us to the foot of Freerider at 10:45 p.m. As we’d planned, we hoped to cruise all of El Cap in the dark. That’s not quite as hard as it might seem, as long as you have the route sufficiently dialed so that your headlamp illuminates all the sequences and you don’t get off-route.

  In some ways, Freerider on El Cap was the climax of our adventure. One of the most memorable moments came in the wee hours. Tommy was leading up one of the harder corners. As he left his anchor, he said, “I’m too tired to lieback it, I’m just going to stem it,” and then he proceeded to just totally bust out the entire pitch. I didn’t even think you could do that! It’s the middle of the night and it’s really hard to see your feet because it’s dark, he has a headlamp, he’s standing on tiny little footholds that you wouldn’t even be able to see in the light, and he just stemmed it, one foot on each slab, trusting those minuscule holds.

  Tommy’s a technical wizard on that stuff. He’s really, really good on granite, so it was cool seeing how he could improvise like that and get away with it.

  We got to the top of El Cap just after 5:00 a.m., with the first light of dawn. We’d finished Freerider in 6:15, also a damn good time. Tommy fell twice on the crux face climbing section, but no harm done, since I was belaying him, not simul-climbing. I managed not to come off anywhere.