by Alex Honnold
Thus it came as a complete surprise to learn in the spring of 2013 that Freddie Wilkinson and Renan Ozturk, two of the best young big-range mountaineers in the United States, had persuaded Alex to join them on an expedition to Alaska. Their objective was the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier, southeast of Denali—a stunning corridor of flowing ice surrounded by sheer granite walls soaring as much as 5,000 feet from base to summit.
In late May and early June, the trio assaulted three long routes on Mounts Barrille, Bradley, and Dickey. I took a keen interest in their progress, for the route they tackled on Dickey was first climbed way back in 1974 by Ed Ward, Galen Rowell, and me. Ours, in fact, was the first big-wall climb completed in the Great Gorge.
It was Renan who talked Alex into going on the trip. Longtime friends, both sponsored by The North Face, they had not only climbed together, but Renan had filmed some of Alex’s free-soloing exploits. As Alex recalls, “I just thought it was a great opportunity to learn. I was single, had nothing to do myself, and two friends who are really good at what they do were willing to teach me something. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.”
The previous year, in May 2012, Renan and Freddie had completed the Tooth Traverse, one of the greatest challenges in Alaska mountaineering, as they made a five-day enchainment of five savage spires linked by knife-sharp ridges, culminating in the Mooses Tooth, a dramatic monolith of granite and ice that stands like a sentinel guarding the northeast corner of the Great Gorge. The traverse required three bivouacs in wildly exposed positions and culminated in a nonstop thirty-eight-hour push on the Mooses Tooth itself.
Despite having fulfilled a dream that was four years in the making, Renan and Freddie were still drawn to the Ruth Gorge. For 2013, the men decided to explore the western side of the great glacial corridor. And instead of an all-out commitment like the Tooth Traverse, they set their sights on routes that had already been climbed by others, hoping to apply a pure, fast alpine style to test their own finely honed skills against those of their predecessors. “We decided to go after classics,” says Freddie, “rather than one massive time-consuming project like the Traverse. Alex was our hired gun. We figured he could lead the long rock sections as efficiently as anybody we knew.
“We weren’t trying to set record times per se. But we had a goal to try to do those routes in one long day each. Alex was coming off his big-wall Yosemite climbs where almost everything he did was within the confines of twenty-four hours.”
At only 7,650 feet, Barrille is dwarfed by its neighbors, the Mooses Tooth at 10,335 feet and Mount Dickey at 9,545. Still, it has serious rock and ice routes on its eastern and southern faces that rise a full 2,500 feet from base to summit. In late May 2013, Freddie and Alex climbed the Cobra Pillar on Barrille. Nursing a cold, Renan sat this one out, as he had climbed the same line in 2009. The route had been put up by two legendary American alpinists, Jim Donini and Jack Tackle, in 1991. The first ascent had required a five-day push, of which two and a half days were spent marooned in a bivouac during a typical Alaskan storm. Now Alex and Freddie bombed up the route in a mere nineteen hours, in a relatively straightforward ascent.
Next the three men turned to a more serious, longer route on Mount Bradley, the impressive 9,104-foot peak just south of Dickey. The Pearl, a long, zigzagging, committed route on the mountain’s south face, had been established in 1995 by a trio of Austrians—Helmut Neswadba, Arthur Wutscher, and Andi Orgler. The alpine-style ascent had taken five days to complete.
Making the Pearl’s second ascent, Freddie, Renan, and Alex dispatched the route in forty hours round trip, including a complicated descent of the mountain via its southwest ridge. On the crux A3 aid pitch, Alex came into his own. According to Freddie, “There were some fixed copperheads on the pitch [nuts that are hammered into cracks, rather than slotted]. Alex stood on two or three of those pieces, which weren’t very secure. We were halfway up the route, and because of the traversing down low, retreat would have been desperate. Alex was facing an ankle-breaker for sure if he came off.”
Says Alex, “From the two fixed copperheads, the only pro on the whole long pitch, I made a few 11-plus or 12-minus free moves—which was very scary—until I got to a more continuous crack. So it was only a small section of hard free climbing, but it was actually pretty heroic. If I hadn’t been psyched to free climb, we would have been pretty fucked. Rapping off from there would have been horrendous.”
If Alex was indeed the hired gun on crux rock pitches in the Gorge, he was the acolyte on snow and ice. Says Freddie, “Renan and I gave him a pretty good intro to alpinism. He was a bit uncertain with the ice axe, and I don’t think he ever got really comfortable wearing crampons.” Alex concurs: “I didn’t feel comfortable on skis, in crampons—even walking around camp felt wrong. I had no idea what I was doing.”
In fact, growing up in balmy California, Alex had spent so little time in the snow that a glacier whose icy depths plunged invisibly 4,000 feet below his feet to bedrock was so novel that he treated it at times like a playhouse. According to Freddie, “At base camp we built a snow kitchen. Alex couldn’t get enough of the shoveling, as he crafted benches, shelves, nooks and crannies. He has this frenetic need to exercise. Renan and I were happy to turn him loose on the shoveling. It was a real Tom Sawyer moment.”
Yet Alex’s manic impatience came to the fore during a five-day storm the men endured after Bradley. Freddie: “There was this typical Alaskan low-grade scud day after day. Alex was jumping out of his skin. He kept saying, ‘What are we gonna do today?’ He was like a golden retriever—we had to give him a job to do. So I told him, ‘Today we’re just going to lie in our sleeping bags. Your assignment is to read a book.’ He finally settled in. Read The Prize, this nine-hundred-plus-page book by Daniel Yergin about oil and power, cover-to-cover.
“We basically got along great,” adds Freddie. “But during those down days, Alex could become a bit of a whiner. He was always comparing everything to Yosemite. ‘God,’ he’d say, ‘I could be wearing shorts, sport climbing at Jailhouse.’” (Jailhouse Rock is one of Alex’s favorite crags, near Sonora, California.)
At last the weather cleared, and with only a couple of days left in their Alaska “vacation,” the trio set their eyes on the southeast face of Mount Dickey.
Ed Ward, Galen Rowell, and I had been proud of the fact that in 1974 we got up the 5,000-foot wall in only three days, as we accomplished one of the first alpine-style ascents in the Alaska Range. The second and third ascents of our route, three decades later, also took parties of crack climbers three days. Alex, Renan, and Freddie would be attempting the fourth ascent.
On Dickey, Renan led the first pillar, steep and beautiful climbing on decent granite. Then he turned the lead over to the team’s hired gun on the giant headwall. The insidious potential trap posed by the southeast face lies in the fact that about two-fifths of the way up the wall, the granite turns into horrible “brown sugar.” On our second day of climbing in 1974, as the weather started to deteriorate, we had pushed up into that potential blind alley, not at all sure that we had enough hardware to rappel off should we run into a dead end.
Our crux came on the thirty-second pitch, where Galen, improvising wildly, drove a couple of baby angle pitons directly into the crackless brown sugar, then drilled a dubious bolt into the junk—the only bolt we placed on the route. It was obvious that there was no way to scale the blank cliff above the bolt. Instead we lowered Ed, who pendulumed to the right. Out of sight of our partner, Galen and I waited anxiously. At last Ed yelled, “It goes!” He had found the good granite again in a series of chimneys and cracks, the key to our upward escape.
On June 6, 2013, Alex surged up the wall in the lead, dispatching one difficulty after another, fixing the rope so that Renan and Freddie could follow on their ascenders. Alex climbed in rock shoes, while his partners followed in mountain boots. According to Freddie, after several hours Alex said, “I can’t believe how easy this climbing is. But why am I s
o tired?”
Freddie reflects, “That crappy rock in the middle of the face would have freaked out most climbers. But Alex had plenty of experience with bad rock in places like Chad.”
Both the second and third ascent parties had thought they were off-route in the middle of the face, until they ran into Galen’s bolt. As we had done, they used it to lower one climber, who pendulumed to the right to reach the good chimney system. But Alex thought the bolt, which had now been in place for thirty-nine years, looked, as he put it, “pretty terrible.” As he recounts, “Instead of rappelling, penduluming, and then aiding the chimney, I face climbed sideways across the rock and effectively skipped that pitch.”
Alex, Freddie, and Renan took most of the aid out of our route. We had rated the climb 5.9 A3. They graded it 5.10c A0, meaning that what little aid they resorted to was as easy as aid climbing gets—little more than pulling on gear from time to time. Most of that 5.10 free climbing—child’s play for Alex—would have been beyond our abilities in 1974.
According to Alex, “I led about a thirty-pitch block without really stopping. I kept thinking, One more pitch, then I’ll turn it over to Freddie, but then I’d make an anchor, look up, and decide that I could climb at least one more pitch before I gave up the lead.
“Freddie led the last five hundred feet on scary mixed terrain. He was our ice ninja!”
The trio’s elapsed time—nineteen hours—made a hash of our three-day push in 1974. On the other hand, those three climbed Dickey on a perfect, windless, sunny day—the finest during the previous several weeks. In 1974, we had finished the climb in a raging storm, with snow lashed by a forty mph gale, and we were glad to have survived our ascent.
A few weeks after their climb, I sent Alex a congratulatory e-mail. His return message was a model of magnanimity. “Your route on Dickey was awesome,” he wrote, “and I can only imagine how crazy it would have felt to set out up a wall that big so long ago. I come to walls like that having soloed bigger linkups in a day, but back then it must have been truly grand.”
In a Q&A with his friend Jimmy Chin, Alex was asked what had been the most “eye-opening experience” during his Alaskan sojourn. “I learned tons of little things,” Alex answered, “like how to put my crampons on and how to use my ice tool, but in a general sense it was still just climbing. I guess the thing that surprised me the most was how much shit—rock and snow and ice—is constantly falling down the faces. Alpine climbing is dangerous!”
Even after the expedition to the Ruth Gorge, Alex insisted that he had no intention of becoming a mountaineer. “Climbing a peak like Ama Dablam,” he says, referring to a stunning 22,349-foot mountain rising above the Khumbu Valley near Mount Everest, “has absolutely no appeal to me.” On the other hand, in his e-mail to me after Dickey, Alex confessed, “Anyway, I’m psyched to go back to the Ruth Gorge someday. Such massive walls. But I’m trying not to get too sucked into alpine climbing.”
Toward the end of 2013, however, Alex turned his rabid attention to a climbing objective that stood at the polar opposite of big walls in Alaska. It was a route on a limestone cliff in the Mexican state of Nuevo León. By 2013, Cedar Wright and Alex had become close friends and frequent partners on the rope, even though Cedar was eleven years older. They had met by accident on El Capitan in 2006, before Alex had won the fame he garnered from his one-day free solos of Astroman and the Rostrum. Cedar remembers being impressed by the shy young climber who seemed to come into his own the moment he started up a cliff: Who’s this kid? he wondered to himself.
The two were together on the trip to the Czech Republic that fueled Sender’s seminal 2008 film The Sharp End. Later, after Alex got sponsored by The North Face, their bond intensified. “We hit it off,” Cedar recalls. “We shared the same sardonic sense of humor.” And Cedar detected the modesty beneath Alex’s sometimes “aggro” exterior. “It’s just that Alex can’t understand why anybody would have trouble climbing anything,” he says.
Cedar was developing a career as a filmmaker himself, just as Renan Ozturk was doing at the same time, so it was almost inevitable that the three would collaborate on a major project. It all came together on El Potrero Chico.
Before January 2014, except for Moonlight Buttress, nearly all of my big free solos had been on granite walls in Yosemite. But I’d first climbed on El Potrero Chico—“The Little Corral”—in 2009 and immediately enjoyed the highly technical style demanded by its gray limestone. It may be the best crag in Mexico, and it’s certainly the best known. The whole ambiance of the place is congenial. There’s a website devoted to singing the praises of Potrero, which offers “a lifetime of well-bolted, multi-pitch sport routes with ratings from 5.7 to 5.14 and routes with up to 23 pitches. The climbs have very easy access with only a 5-minute walk from most campgrounds, eliminating any need for a car. The cost of living is very low and the friendly people wonderful.” Sounds like tourist hype, but those words match my own experience there.
Of all the routes on Potrero, the gem is a fifteen-pitch route that arrows right up the middle of the face, called El Sendero Luminoso—“The Shining Path.” The first ascent was put up by Jeff Jackson, Kevin Gallagher, and Kurt Smith in 1992. Two years later, Jackson, Smith, and Pete Peacock freed the whole 1,750-foot climb. They rated it 5.12d. But the climb is quite sustained, eleven pitches of 5.12 and four of 5.11. Jeff is the editor of Rock and Ice, and we’ve corresponded quite a bit over the years, including when I wrote for the magazine or its website.
I first climbed Sendero in 2009, and I’d immediately fantasized about soloing it. But when I came back in the winter of 2013–1 to revisit the route, I realized that it would take a concentrated effort for me to feel comfortable on it. Sendero climbs a north-facing wall with a lot of vegetation, and since the climbing is sufficiently difficult to keep the crowds away, there’s not enough traffic to keep the route buffed clean. Holds were full of dirt and plants, and even though I could climb around them or avoid the particularly prickly cactuses, it’s hard to commit when in the back of your mind you’re wondering if there’s an easier way. Potrero also has a reputation for being chossy, but I think that’s overrated. Yes, there are a lot of loose blocks on the wall, but you just have to avoid grabbing or standing on them. The smooth limestone texture of the wall is actually pretty nice.
Part of the appeal of Sendero for me lay in the technical complexity of the climbing. Potrero is made of slabby, gray, water-runnel limestone. It’s full of small holds and solution pockets. Really subtle features. All the holds tend to face the wrong directions. You get into tricky body positions that require real precision. It’s so stylish—such an old-school climb.
Of course limestone is more porous than granite. Holds just break off unexpectedly. It’s less predictable than granite. There are holds that are sort of “glued” to the wall. You have to trust that the one time you hold it is not the time it rips off the mountain.
The plan that winter was for Cedar and Renan to come down to Mexico to make a short film if I decided to solo Sendero. Almost at once, however, I had my qualms about the project. Ever since my “epiphany” in Chad, I’d agonized over the environmental impact of my climbing. To fly the three of us down to Mexico—not to mention other crew members to operate automated drones to capture footage high on the wall—would be to leave a sizable carbon footprint. Could I really justify burning all that jet fuel and using pricey high-tech hardware just to capture my several hours of play on Portrero Chico? What if we got everybody down there, ready to film, and I chickened out because I decided I wasn’t comfortable going up on the wall without a rope?
In my mind, our Newfoundland trip in 2011 was a classic example of waste. Both a waste of our time and a waste of natural resources. We all flew to Newfoundland, drove to Devil’s Bay, and rented a boat to cruise around the fjords, and we didn’t climb shit. We made a huge impact on the environment—for nothing.
There was no guarantee I’d be up for the free solo. I’ve had other proj
ects I set my eye on—notably Romantic Warrior in the Needles of California, a nine-pitch 5.12b route on a steep granite crack system—that I rehearsed, planned, and then backed off. It was too hot that June, my shoes didn’t feel quite right, I felt rushed by other engagements I’d committed to in the upcoming days, so I realized I wasn’t ready for it. Actually, there are tons of solos that I haven’t done! In such a situation, I have to pay attention to my feelings and my judgment, not to outside pressures. So there was a real possibility in January 2014 that I might be dragging Cedar and Renan and the other guys down to Potrero Chico for nothing.
Starting on January 9, Cedar and I spent four days (with a rest day when it rained) climbing, fixing, and cleaning the route, using ropes and belaying to get the moves down pat and grigris to hold us in place while we cleaned. To get all the dirt, twigs, grass, and shrubs out of the cracks, we scraped away with our climbing brushes. They’re like toothbrushes with extra-stiff bristles. If we’d really been serious, we would have used something more heavy-duty, like a big scrubber.
Each day, we worked from sunrise to sunset. The more vegetation we pulled off the upper pitches, the more dirt rained down on the lower ones. The more big plants we removed from the route, the more the small ones stood out. Once we started, we couldn’t stop until we saw a perfectly clean slab of limestone. Some of the plants were particularly tough to get out, adapted as they are to rugged conditions. For a week after I returned to the States, I had thorns growing out of my hands. But Jeff Jackson e-mailed me, “God smiles every time you uproot a lechuguilla.”
