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

by Alex Honnold

  Purists or nonclimbers might think that by removing natural vegetation from a cliff, you’re altering or even trashing the landscape. I’ll confess to faint qualms along those lines. Cedar and I knew that plants grow back quickly on Potrero, and that the wall would eventually revert to a hanging garden. I didn’t worry much about our impact while we swung around plucking cactuses and ticking holds. I just felt a vague sense of unease that we were putting so much work into something that’s supposed to be so pure and simple.

  But at the end of the fourth day, as we rapped down a smooth, clean face, I couldn’t help feeling a giddy excitement. At some point, a switch had flipped from “Maybe I’ll solo it eventually” to “So psyched! Must solo immediately!” I have no idea what flipped that switch, though the climbing did look more inviting without the dirt and plants obscuring the holds. For whatever reason, I was ready, and I knew that I would solo the route the next morning, if the conditions allowed.

  That’s the strange paradox, for me at least, about free soloing. It’s the waiting beforehand that’s anxiety-producing. The vacillating over “Should I do this?” When I finally commit, the stress goes away. It’s actually a big relief to go up there and do it.

  January 14 dawned clear. I wasn’t going to delay any longer. I wanted to go up on the route alone, which is sort of the point of soloing. I was seeking out a personal adventure, and the filmmakers knew that any intrusion would fundamentally alter the experience. Renan took up a position far out in the desert at the base so he could get a long shot. Cedar spent several hours guiding the drone pilots up to the summit of El Toro so they could meet me on top and film some summit footage.

  I was and felt completely alone. I didn’t know where the other guys were positioned or if they were even watching. I just went climbing, knowing that we could go back up on the route during the next few days to get all the filming done.

  The high-tech gear was brought to Mexico by a Boulder-based firm called SkySight. The drone was a small octocopter, maybe half the size of a coffee table, with a super-expensive gimbal that held a RED camera steady. Between the high-quality drone and the top-of-the-line cinema camera, and the fact that the guys at SkySight are among the best in the industry, we were pretty sure we’d capture some amazing scenes. The drone was flown by a pilot using a big controller—a lot like a toy truck. The camera was operated by the pilot’s brother. And they brought along their sister as an assistant to help carry gear and catch the craft on landing.

  Renan was there shooting for Camp 4 Collective, which had been hired by The North Face to make a film of the ascent. Camp 4 owns a RED camera, so Renan had been shooting with it for years. And Renan had brought his girlfriend to be a camera assistant, so that brought the filming crew to a total of five people. And then Cedar and me as climbers.

  The morning of the solo, nobody said much of anything, because they didn’t want to influence me one way or another. Earlier, though, everybody had assured me that I should climb only what I felt comfortable with, and that they could shoot any other, easier route if I changed my mind. But it was hard not to feel a little pressure.

  We’d rented a small casita sitting atop a hill above one of the many camping areas, which provided a glorious view of the whole area. That morning I opened my eyes lazily, gazing up from the pile of jackets I was using as a pillow through the worn, faded blinds to see the tops of the mountains just catching some morning sun. Despite the pressure, I’d slept well. I almost always sleep well, even before big solo climbs. From the sofa I used as a bed I could easily see Sendero weaving its way up the wall. There was no way of escaping. I followed my normal routine—cereal poured into the yogurt tub, news on my phone. But I lingered, trying to stay patient and let the morning humidity burn off. I focused artificially on my phone, using it to ignore the people around me with cameras and questions, but not really understanding what I read. The only thing that mattered was Sendero, just coming into the light.

  Finally, I made the fifteen-minute stroll over to the base of the route, weaving through scrubby, prickly bushes and struggling up a loose scree slope. My light backpack made me feel buoyant as I scrambled up the hill. My shoes, chalk bag, energy bars, and water felt weightless compared to the 600 feet of rope and full rack that we’d been carrying the past few days.

  One of my favorite aspects of soloing is the way that pain ceases to exist. The previous four long days of climbing and cleaning had worn out my fingers and toes, but now, as I pulled on the first few holds, I felt none of the soreness. Each edge seemed perfect and crisp, each fingerlock felt like an anchor. Foot jams that had been hideously painful the previous afternoon felt rock solid. Hold after hold, I worked my way up the wall, smoothly and perfectly.

  What seemed to me to be the crux of the route came at the top of the second pitch, maybe 250 feet above the ground. The standard sequence involves opposing side pulls with small and slippery footholds, but I’d found a small two-finger pocket out to the side that felt slightly more secure. As I chalked up, I felt a little nervous. Or maybe just excited. Or maybe just my awareness was heightened. It’s hard to untangle the various feelings, but I definitely felt alive. I knew that this was the only moment on the route where I’d have to try really hard. And that’s exactly what I did, completing the sequence exactly as I needed.

  Once I calmed down a little from overgripping, I knew I’d finish the route, even though there were still thirteen pitches to go.

  A second crux comes on the fifth pitch, about 600 feet off the ground. The pitch ends in a huge ledge where you can stop and take a breather. On the crux sequence, I was connected to the wall by only a small, sharp limestone undercling above my head. Trusting a tiny smear for my left foot, I raised my right foot almost to my waist, and I levered off it to reach my left hand to a distant jug.

  It was by no means the hardest climbing on the route, but the stark simplicity of the movement stayed with me long afterward. To me, that is soloing at its finest: to be nearly disconnected from the wall with the air all around. There’s a certain purity to that kind of movement that can’t be found with a rope and gear. But for all my love of simplicity, it’s not always simple to get to those positions. Here on Sendero, everything came together—a perfect mixture of aesthetics and challenge, hard enough climbing to demand total concentration and commitment on a line of strength that goes straight up the biggest face on the massif.

  From there to the top, I climbed easily, trusting my feet more with each step. I used new sequences on a few pitches, trusting myself to find the easiest way through the seemingly blank sea of limestone. On the midway ledge, I popped my shoes off, and again five pitches higher, just to let my toes relax after hundreds of feet of technical slab climbing. But all in all, I’d found exactly the experience I was looking for: I was only a small dot on a vast, uncaring wall, but for those two hours, I got to taste perfection.

  • • • •

  We spent the next two days reclimbing and reshooting various pitches of the route. It’s anticlimactic to go back up a route to pose all over it. The triumph of the actual achievement gets lost in what follows. But as I slithered in and out of my harness on various ledges, climbing different sections for the camera and clipping into anchors in between, I tried to remind myself that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to climb a wall like this one without doing some work, and at least I was having fun with my friends.

  From the start of our trip, Cedar had wanted to try to redpoint Sendero—lead it free but roped, with no falls. I owed it to my buddy to be his belay partner on such an effort. The trouble was, we had return flights booked for the following morning. So we set out on the evening of January 16 to try to climb the route in the night.

  The full moon rose as he started up the first pitch, casting a pale glow across the whole wall. There’s something eerily calm about moonlight. I left my headlamp off, and I fed out slack in the darkness, pondering the last week. Was it worth it? What had we really done?

  For t
he first five pitches, Cedar moved steadily up the wall, the silence punctured only by the occasional “I’m off belay. Line’s fixed!”—my cue to start jugging as fast as I could up the rope he’d tied to his anchor. That way, Cedar could conserve the energy he otherwise would have wasted on belaying and rope management. I tried to jug each pitch in four minutes flat.

  It was at this point, however, that the ethical dilemma of my little “project” started to nag at me. Traveling to places like Chad has made me acutely mindful of my own impact on the world around me. At first, I’d assumed that my carbon footprint would be much lower than that of the average American, because I lived in a van and didn’t own many possessions. But as I read more about the issue, I realized that the amount of flying that I did still left me near the highest percentile of environmental impact. My next thought was to buy carbon offsets—until I researched them and discovered that they weren’t the cure-all I was hoping for. Paying someone to plant trees in the First World seemed far less beneficial than providing clean energy in the developing world, though both could be considered to be offsetting carbon emissions. The first basically pays the rich while the second not only reduces fossil-fuel use but also improves standards of living by saving people money and reducing the health problems associated with burning things for fuel.

  I’ve tried to approach environmentalism the same way I do my climbing: by setting small, concrete goals that build on each other. That was the idea behind starting the Honnold Foundation. I also worked on smaller projects, such as setting up my mom’s house with solar panels and giving up meat in an effort to eat lower on the food chain. In some ways it might seem silly even to make the effort, since the environmental problems facing our world are so much bigger than any one person’s actions. But some walls also seem so huge and impossible that it appears pointless to work toward them. The beauty of climbing has always been the reward of the process itself.

  While Cedar struggled through the intricate slabs, I couldn’t help wondering whether making a whole production out of climbing went against all the environmental principles I wanted to stand for. Could radio-controlled heli shots and minimalism really go together? Was it worth the impact of flying a whole crew down to Mexico for me to enjoy one three-hour climb? Or could I possibly use the climbing to do more good than harm? Might the platform I’ve gained through climbing be harnessed toward more useful things?

  The problem with worrying too much is that it can be crippling. Somehow, I thought, it must all come down to balance—finding that line between minimizing impact but still maintaining an acceptable quality of life. But who’s to judge an acceptable life? I don’t even know what I truly require to be happy. Do I have to be traveling all the time? Or soloing walls? The circle of Cedar’s headlamp drifted slowly away, leaving me alone in the moonlight to swim with my questions.

  Then, when we were halfway up the wall, a mariachi band started playing loudly just down the road from the cliff, filling the still desert night with the blaring sounds of horns and accordions. We couldn’t help laughing. I told Cedar they were rooting for him. The moon tracked across the sky as I jugged to the rhythm of live music. At the belay, I pulled my hood closer against the cool night air. The summit loomed hundreds of feet above, silhouetted against the starry blackness. Though it seemed impossibly far off, there was nothing to do but carry on. Cedar continued tiptoeing up into the night, savoring the voyage.

  THE CAMP 4 COLLECTIVE FILM that Renan Ozturk crafted to feature Alex’s solo of El Sendero Luminoso, a mere six minutes and twelve seconds long, is a minor masterpiece. If it lacks the gonzo zaniness of the Sender Films celebrations of Alex’s deeds, as well as the humorous riffs in van or campground, it captures the grace of Alex’s movement on rock better than any previous footage has. The camera work, zooming fluidly in and out, or floating gently through space (thanks to the SkySight drones), paints a lyricism that mirrors Alex’s state of mind and body when he’s doing what he does best.

  There are moments in the film that bring home the seriousness of free soloing in novel ways, such as a bit when Cedar Wright, in the days of cleaning the route before the climb, says, “It’s kind of weird, helping your friend do something that you know could potentially lead to his death”—this, as the camera pans over the graveyard in the nearby town of Hidalgo. But the closing footage captures Alex standing on what look like “nothing” holds, his hands dangling free at his sides, as a slow grin takes over his face.

  Shortly after the climb, Mary Anne Potts of National Geographic Adventure Online interviewed Alex. She asked, “Why did you smile at that moment on the wall?”

  Alex’s characteristic answer: “I have no idea since I haven’t seen the film, but I’d assume because I was happy.” To underline the point, he appended a happy face.

  Indeed, in the makeshift register on the summit of El Toro, with a pencil stub Alex scribbled a note that a later visitor photographed. It read:

  1/14/14

  Solo!!

  In two hours

  Alex Honnold

  Great day out!!

  (Two hours on the fifteen-pitch climb, another hour to scramble to the summit of El Toro.)

  The Camp 4 film closes with the bald statement: “It could be the most difficult rope-less climb in history.” Almost two years later, no one has come forth to dispute that claim—except Alex. In outtakes filmed by Renan just after the ascent, he insisted, “It’s not like this is the physical limit of my climbing. Not like the hardest thing I could do. It was well within my comfort zone.” (“No Big Deal” Honnold at his deadpan best!)

  Others weighed in less equivocally. On Supertopo.com, posters expressed their awe. Wrote one, “The dude is so scary good. . . . All you can do is shake your head in wonderment and amazement.” Another: “Compartmentalizing fear is a very real thing, and he excels at it. Or is he just so good that he’s not afraid?” Yet another, tongue in cheek: “I’d be way more impressed if he was human.”

  Jeff Jackson, editor of Rock and Ice and the author of the first (roped) free ascent of El Sendero Luminoso in 1994, editorialized, “What do I think? Well, honestly, I try not to think about it. . . . The Sendero free solo is a different realm entirely—so bad it makes me wonder if Honnold will ever get another visit from Santa.”

  Less ironically, Jackson—one of the strongest rock climbers of his generation—analyzed the feat by comparing it to his own experience on the route. “To my knowledge,” he wrote,

  no one has ever soloed a wall with such sustained technical climbing—11 pitches rated 5.12a or harder. The pitches are long (the first five are 50 meters or longer) and unrelieved by big features where you can chill and shake out your feet. The wall is a slab, mostly just under vertical, and if you’ve ever climbed a difficult slab you know how mentally trying that kind of climbing can be. To me, climbing a 5.12 slab is a little like pulling a rabbit out of a top hat. There are elements of magic at work. Though it has been 20 years since I climbed the line, I clearly remember the feeling of getting away with something when I redpointed [climbed free without falling] the second pitch. I skated through on updraft, sticky rubber and whispered petitions to demons. . . .

  And Honnold soloed that pitch! And all the others! Shit me! How is that even possible?

  Alex was not about to rest on his laurels. Less than a month after his Mexican triumph, he was off to a part of the world he had never visited, to try a climb of the sort he’d never before attempted.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FITZ

  The Fitz Traverse was Tommy Caldwell’s idea. As soon as he mentioned it, I said, “That sounds rad! Let’s do it!” I was on board, even though I’d never been to Patagonia. I didn’t even know anything about Patagonia.

  Though it stands only 11,168 feet above sea level, Fitz Roy is the tallest peak in a tight cluster of amazing granite spires in southern Patagonia, on the border between Chile and Argentina. It’s named after Robert Fitzroy, the captain of the Beagle on the famous 1830s voyage t
hat gave Charles Darwin his first inklings about the theory of evolution. The first ascent, by the great French mountaineers Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone in 1952, may have been the most technical big-range climb performed up to that date anywhere in the world.

  That cluster of peaks, which also includes Cerro Torre, Torre Egger, Aguja Poincenot, and many other agujas (Spanish for “needles”), probably comprises the ultimate collection anywhere on earth of steep, soaring, and breathtakingly beautiful mountains. The granite is shockingly good—as good as Yosemite—but Patagonia is notorious for bad weather, for shrieking winds that don’t let up for weeks, and for humongous mushrooms of rime ice plating nearly vertical slabs and cracks.

  Tommy first climbed in Patagonia in 2006. Even though most of his prior experience had been on rock, he put up some formidable lines that season. As mentioned in chapter five, Tommy, with Topher Donahue and Erik Roed, freed the Línea de Eleganza on Fitz Roy. Tommy and Topher also tried another massive route, Royal Flush, on the east face of Fitz Roy. The peak was pissing wet that February, and other climbers gave up on the climb, declaring it hopeless, but Tommy went up there in the same conditions and damn near freed the route onsight (on his first time on the route) before he and Topher had to back off.

  By 2014, Fitz Roy had really gotten under Tommy’s skin—so much so that the year before, when his wife, Becca, gave birth to a boy, they named him Fitz.

  Though a formidable peak in its own right, Fitz Roy doesn’t stand alone. It’s the centerpiece of a chain of seven connected towers, starting on the north with the Aguja Guillaumet and ending on the south with the Aguja de l’S. The obvious challenge was to connect them all in a single continuous ridge climb—the Fitz Traverse.