by Alex Honnold
We pitched our tent again just below the summit of Poincenot on the south side and managed to get another few hours of sleep. That night, Tommy tried to build a little tent platform out of rocks so we’d have something level to sleep on while I cooked dinner. He finally gave up about halfway through because he couldn’t make it work. The ledge we were on was just too rocky and misshapen. So we wound up sleeping with our legs hanging over this big drop and a bunch of rocks sticking into our backs. There was always a junk show inside the tent. But we slept well enough. Fatigue does wonders. Still, I remember that bivy as the worst of the traverse.
By now we looked pretty haggard. We weren’t eating nearly enough food to match the calories we burned, and our meal breaks were pretty on-the-run. I remember at one point both of us eating polenta with Tommy’s broken sunglasses because we couldn’t find our spoon. We were able to stay hydrated, however, by using straws we’d brought along to suck the standing water out of little huecos (natural pockets) in the rock. Or we’d eat snow while we were belaying.
By now, our gear and clothing were in tatters. Our shoes were falling apart, and our tent floor was full of little holes from pitching it on uneven rocks. Our pants had rips and tears in them. We’d managed to burn a hole in our sleeping bag. Our packs were trashed from dragging them through chimneys. Somewhere along the way, Tommy dropped one of his climbing shoes. We didn’t even see it disappear into the abyss—it just suddenly went missing. On the Fitz Traverse, you could say that we product-tested a whole line of equipment.
Getting down the 3,000-foot south face of Poincenot proved to be the second crux of the whole traverse. That wall isn’t climbed very often, but we absolutely had to find the fixed anchors left by other parties to continue our traverse. If we couldn’t find those anchors, we’d easily use up our rack—and then some—making anchors of our own. And then, if we could get down, we’d have to abort and hike out. It’s a scary business to rappel blind down a wall you’ve never seen before, looking for those fugitive pitons. I’d get fifty-five meters down and start thinking, Boy, I hope I find an anchor! We downclimbed as much as we could, but we had to rap most of the way. At one point, Tommy just picked up a stone and wedged it into a four-inch crack for an anchor. I said, “Wow. Did you ever do that before?” Tommy reassured me: “It’s bomber.”
In the end, we never got off-route. We pretty much nailed that descent.
By now, we were sort of flying on autopilot. Tommy described our state well in Alpinist:
At times, a kind of mutual delirium builds like the electric charge of a thunderstorm. Chemicals release from our brains: dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins. Our focus narrows and intensifies. More and more, we appear to think as one. A sixth sense seems to warn us of each loose block or hidden patch of black ice. . . . Each footstep is sure and precise. The absurdity of our situation makes us giddy.
We were beginning to think we could really pull off the traverse. There were only three towers to go, none as tall or as serious as Poincenot. We tackled the Piola-Anker route on Aguja Rafael Juárez. It’s another thousand feet, rated by the 1989 first-ascent party 5.11a A1, but the rock is mostly good. I led in rock shoes, while Tommy alternately jugged or simul-climbed. Near the top of the route, though, I ran into a 150-foot-long 5.10b crack that took only number 4 cams. One edge of the crack was coated with ice. I didn’t have a number 4 cam on my rack, so I kept pushing a number 3 in front of me and pulling on it. Because it was too small, it was tipped out, with the plates barely catching the edges of the crack. It would never have held a fall, but at least it helped with the climbing. That just goes to show that in an international arena like Patagonia, you never know what the ratings are going to wind up meaning.
Even so, we got up the Piola-Anker in two long pitches, taking only two and three-quarters hours. A little more than two hours later, we’d traversed the sharp ridge and climbed two longish pitches to the summit of Aguja Saint-Exupéry.
By now, though, our climbing rope was shredding, thanks to the countless abrasions we’d subjected it to as it rubbed against the gritty granite. One section was so badly damaged that we finally had to cut it, leaving us with only thirty-eight meters of usable rope. The other twenty-two meters we carried with us to cut into smaller pieces for slings for our rap anchors. What this meant, however, was that we could make only pitifully short rappels with our doubled remnant of rope—a maximum of nineteen meters. If it hadn’t been so windy, we could have used our eighty-meter tag line to make longer rappels. We tried to use it, but it got so tangled up that it drove us insane trying to sort out the snarls. So we coiled it up, stuck it in a pack, and just resorted to shorter but safer raps on our thirty-eight meters of good lead rope.
Tommy would head down first, get to a stance, and yell, “I’m off!” I’d say, “I know, I can see you right below me”—scarcely sixty feet from my own stance. On a bunch of the gear anchors that we constructed, after Tommy rapped I would remove one of the pieces just to save gear. So I’d rappel off a single cam or nut, which can be a bit risky. (If it pops loose, you’re dead.) I did that a few times in random places. It was all about preserving the rack for as long as possible.
On the ridge between Rafael Juárez and Saint-Exupéry, we were simul-climbing with the twenty-two-meter section of our lead line. (We were trying to save the longer part for climbing later, and twenty-two meters is long enough for ridge climbing.) In the lead, I got up to a little tower that dropped off maybe eighteen feet. No place to get in any pro. So I told Tommy to hang back a bit, and I climbed over the tower and rappelled off the other side, using his body weight as my anchor. Then, when he got to the tower, he just looped the rope around a little horn on top and rapped off the other end. So we were each tied into one end of the rope, rapping off each other’s body weight. There was no actual anchor, just a little natural horn that the rope ran behind. When we were done, we just flicked the rope loose and it fell down.
It was a really weird configuration. We did all kinds of improvising like that. Which is what made things go fast.
The rappel off the south side of Saint-Exupéry is down a major wall. But here we were in luck. A few years earlier, there’d been a serious accident on this wall, so it was covered with trash from the massive rescue effort. Anchors, fixed ropes, junk all over the place. It seemed as though it took us an endless number of nineteen-meter rappels, and we were so tired it felt like a nightmare, but we got down it.
It was late evening. In the col below the last tower, the Aguja de l’S, we pitched our fourth camp. This time Tommy finally got the puffy, so he was warm. I did okay myself, since we were at a relatively low altitude. That night, we got a solid six hours of sleep. But the alarming fact was that we didn’t feel at all recovered in the morning. By this point, we were just crushed.
On the fifth day, we got really blasted by the famous Patagonian winds, blowing out of the west, at our backs. It was so gusty as we pushed up the Aguja de l’S that we had to wait and time our bursts of climbing around the gusts. The wind was threatening to blow us off our feet. But we got over the Aguja de l’S and down to the glacier by 10:00 a.m. The relief was tremendous. All we had to do now was hike out. The only trouble was, my vision was blurry. Apparently I’d developed a minor case of snow blindness.
That five-hour stagger back to El Chaltén, crossing the glacier by postholing through knee-deep slush, was a real trudge. Once off the glacier, we stripped off all our wet clothing. Tired as we were, I was pretty frickin’ happy. Later, other climbers would hail our Fitz Traverse as “cutting-edge alpinism.” Rolo Garibotti himself, a man of few words and high standards, saluted us in print: “Respect, respect and more respect.”
It didn’t feel so cutting-edge to me. Tommy was always in good spirits, and we always got along. It felt like a really fun five-day camping trip with a good friend. I was proud of the fact that on the whole traverse—three and a half miles of travel, gaining and losing 13,000 feet of technical rock, snow, and ice—neither of us took a s
ingle fall.
• • • •
The first climber to greet us in El Chaltén said, “Man, we were starting to worry about you guys.” Something was wrong. Then we heard the news. Just two days earlier, Chad Kellogg, an extremely experienced forty-two-year-old American climber, had been killed on the descent from Fitz Roy, after climbing the Supercanaleta route. On rappel, he’d pulled loose a huge block that hit him on the head. He died instantly, with his partner, Jens Holsten, hanging right next to him. Holsten then had to complete the long descent alone.
Tommy knew Chad better than I did. In fact, I’d only barely met the guy. The tragedy hit Tommy hard. As he later wrote in Alpinist:
We can tell ourselves that we minimize the dangers. Pick objectives that we’re relatively certain we’ll live through. Alex can calculate every ropeless move with precision. I can choose to use a rope. We can approach our climbing as a series of athletic goals or as a quest for enlightenment. But the truth is, this kind of accident could have happened to any of us. For the next few mornings in El Chaltén, a hush appears to weigh on our little community of climbers. People wander the streets as if unsure of what to say. Each night, we still congregate under the dim lights and rustic tables of La Senyera and drink red wine. Gradually the laughter returns. But when we talk about our climbs, it’s with our heads down, our voices low. The night seems to press against the windows, and the wind shakes the door.
Kellogg’s death also seemed to make Tommy reconsider extreme climbing. He was thirty-five years old, and during the traverse he’d thought often about Becca and one-year-old Fitz waiting for him to return. As he concluded the essay for Alpinist,
On one hand I am still a kid, full of wonder at the world, chasing dreams of distant summits. But I’m also a father—and this means I am no longer allowed to die.
CHAPTER NINE
ABOVE AND BEYOND
Tommy Caldwell’s father, Mike, a serious climber in his own right, taught his son a lot of the tricks of the trade when he was very young. (Tommy was three years old when he started climbing.) A few years ago, he told me that his dad had said that he’d had about twenty-five close acquaintances die climbing. Now, in his midthirties, Tommy had his own grim roster of friends killed in the mountains or on the crags. On top of that, he’d undergone the nightmare ordeal of being kidnapped by rebels in Kyrgyzstan, marched through the mountains, and faced with the real likelihood that he was about to be executed.
It was Tommy who’d pushed the rebel entrusted to guard him and his three fellow climbers off the cliff, allowing the four to escape. That act had weighed excruciatingly on his conscience. To help assuage his guilt, the other three agreed not to make public which one of them had performed the push. But Tommy couldn’t live with that. Even before the four had reached the safety of a government camp, he’d insisted on taking responsibility for the critical act. When they found out later that the Kyrgyz guard had miraculously survived the fall, that news only minimally reduced Tommy’s guilt, for they also learned that the man had been captured by government soldiers. If the poor guy is still alive—nobody seems to know—he’s rotting away in prison for life.
By the age of twenty-eight, in contrast, I’d been relatively untouched by the tragedy of climbing buddies dying in accidents. The most significant death in my life up to that point had been that of my father, whose heart attack had taken him away when I was only nineteen. In some sense, I still hadn’t completely absorbed or processed his disappearance.
About a month after I got home from Patagonia, however, there was terrible news out of Zion National Park. The way it came down was really hard on everybody who cared—and there were a lot of us.
Sean Leary had been my partner on some memorable climbs in Yosemite, including the linkup of three big walls in one day in 2010. He was also the guy who filmed me for Sender on the Great Roof on the Nose, then accompanied me by jugging his fixed rope the rest of the way up El Cap and joining me on the hiking approach to Half Dome, filming the whole way. And we’d had our friendly rivalry as we sought the speed record on the Nose, Sean teaming up with Dean Potter to break the record before Hans Florine and I broke it back.
Everybody called him “Stanley,” a nickname he’d earned because he’d first climbed the Zodiac Wall on El Cap using a Stanley hammer—the kind you buy in a hardware store for carpentry. He didn’t have a proper climbing hammer, but he was way psyched.
By 2014, besides being a world-class climber, Stanley had become a great BASE jumper. On March 13, he hiked alone to the top of a big cliff in the West Temple area of Zion. Because jumping is illegal in the national parks, he told almost no one about his plans, and he decided to launch at night, by the light of a full moon. He was using a wingsuit, so that he could steer his flight more or less as he chose on the way down.
Stanley was thirty-eight years old, happily married to Mieka, who was seven months pregnant with their first child. A week passed with no word from Stanley. Mieka simply thought he was somewhere out of cell-phone range. Only after he failed to show for a rigging job for a film company did anyone get alarmed. Then the only friend to whom he’d confided his plans spread the word, and Zion park rangers, along with some of Stanley’s best friends, started searching the slopes below the cliff off of which they thought he might have jumped. All kinds of grim scenarios crossed their minds, the worst being that Stanley had died slowly and alone, hurt and disabled in the backcountry.
Ten days after Stanley had jumped, Dean Potter and others finally found his body. It was clear that he’d died instantly from some brutal blow. It was a jump that Stanley could have pulled off easily in the daytime, but, as Dean—a top BASE jumper himself—reconstructed the accident, he figured out what might have happened. Stanley had planned to fly through a V-notch formed by two buttresses a good ways down the cliff. As he approached the notch, he may have suddenly passed into the moon’s shadow, as it was eclipsed by the cliff. Unable to see the rock, with only a second or two to correct his course, he probably clipped one of the walls and then failed to clear the notch. If he only bounced off one of the walls, that might have been survivable, but if the impact caused him to lose height and not clear the notch, that was inevitably fatal.
I wasn’t very close to Stanley, but we were friends. His death seemed really tragic to me, especially with his first baby on the way. (Finn Stanley Leary was born two months after the accident.) At the same time—maybe I was rationalizing—I realized that a death like Stanley’s had no bearing on the risks I ran as a climber. Everybody thinks free soloing is dangerous, but I think BASE jumping is way too dangerous.
I first tried skydiving—conventionally, with a parachute out of a plane—in 2010. I was, I’ll have to admit, curious about BASE jumping. I thought that it might be a great way to make my linkups of big walls more efficient. I did eight or ten skydives and hated everything about them. I felt vaguely motion-sick on the bumpy plane rides up, crammed in with the other jumpers like sardines and breathing exhaust fumes. And I found falling out of a plane to be just plain scary. But mostly, the few jumps I did were enough for me to realize just how many it would take for me to feel comfortable and safe. A lot more skill and experience were required than I expected, and since I didn’t really enjoy the learning process, I just decided BASE jumping wasn’t for me.
I get asked all the time about risk. The usual questions are “Do you feel fear? Are you ever afraid? What’s the closest you’ve ever come to death?” I get really tired of answering those questions over and over again. In all honesty, though, I can say that so far in climbing I’ve never come at all close to death—except for my absurd snowshoeing accident near Lake Tahoe in 2004. I’ve actually had closer calls driving than climbing, like once in a pea-soup fog in California’s Central Valley, when I blew through a four-way stop I didn’t see, locked up my brakes, and just slid right through. Or another time, also in the Central Valley, when a multi-car pileup forced me to lock up my brakes and plow around the wreck on the shoulde
r.
I have a take on risk and climbing that surprises a lot of people. I don’t think it’s the superdifficult climbs—even free solos—that will kill you. I think it’s the sheer volume of moderate climbing that might cost you your life. John Bachar didn’t die at age fifty-two because he was trying a free solo that was at his upper limit. Instead, he fell off a route above his home in Mammoth Lakes that he’d climbed often, one that was well within his abilities. Whatever went wrong that day in 2009—whether it had to do with a back injury that had weakened his shoulder after his car accident, or whether he just slipped on a move he could normally have stuck, or whether a handhold broke—it may be that it was that sheer volume (three and a half decades of soloing) that finally caught up to him.
Paul Preuss, an Austrian born in 1886, was probably the first great free soloist. His idealism was so pure that he horrified his contemporaries, arguing, “With artificial climbing aids you have transformed the mountains into a mechanical plaything,” and insisting that using a rope to get up a route was cheating. He actually thought soloing was safer than climbing roped—which, given the primitive gear and technique of the day, may well have been true. Back then, guys who fell while roped up often pulled their teammates to their deaths along with them.
Preuss died in 1913, at the age of twenty-seven, on a free-solo attempt on a new route on the Mandlkogel, a peak in the Austrian Alps. No one witnessed his thousand-foot fall, and his body wasn’t discovered for a week, because new snows had covered it. But other climbers later found an open jackknife resting on the ridge crest near the point from which he must have fallen, which led them to propose an absurd but chilling scenario.
I can just picture it. Preuss stops for a lunch break. He takes out his knife, maybe to cut an apple or a hunk of cheese. The knife slips out of his hand, so he lunges forward to grab it, forgetting for an instant where he is. Goes off the edge, tries to grab something, and misses. Talk about the worst four seconds of his life!
