by Alex Honnold
The questions about fear also get tiresome, though I suppose they’re natural. Mark Synnott recently told me an amusing story. It was after Mark, Jimmy Chin, and I had given a presentation in the Nat Geo Live! series in Explorers Hall at National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, DC. There were three separate lines of folks wanting each of us to autograph posters. One of the guys in Mark’s line was a neurobiologist. He leaned in close to Mark and said solemnly, “That kid’s amygdala isn’t firing.”
The amygdala is the part of the brain that triggers the fight-or-flight response to danger. Apparently there’s a rare genetic condition that destroys the amygdala. There’s a famous case study of one such patient, called “The woman with no fear.” Nothing the doctors probed her with—real spiders, real snakes, film clips of monsters and haunted houses—scared her at all. It wasn’t surprising that by the age of forty-four, she’d gotten herself into, but managed to survive, all kinds of truly dangerous situations.
In my case, though, the neurobiologist had it all wrong. I’m every bit as capable of feeling fear as the next person. Danger scares me. But as I’ve told countless folks who ask, if I have a certain gift, it’s the ability to keep myself together in places that allow no room for error. I somehow know, in such a fix—like the moves above Thank God Ledge on Half Dome where I stalled out in 2008—how to breathe deeply, calm myself down, and get on with it.
WHEN A CLIMBER—OR, for that matter, any athlete or celebrity—gains such sudden stardom as Alex did after 2008, there’s usually a backlash. It can come from rivals who think they need to put down the upstart threatening their own premier status, or from skeptics among the public who are all too willing to poke holes in the persona of the new phenom. In Alex’s case, however, the backlash was faint and slow to materialize.
In part that might be attributed to Alex’s genuineness. One observer after another was struck by how gracefully Alex handled his fame. Hand in hand with Alex’s genuineness was his modesty, which at times could seem almost excessive. But “no big deal” was not a pose. Alex truly believes that there are better climbers than he in the cragging world—the Chris Sharmas and Adam Ondras who have climbed 5.15c, the Tommy Caldwells who have the patience and dedication to work a route for months or even years. And he believes that what he’s done so far comes nowhere near the limits of what he’s capable of.
Still, “no big deal” could strike even Alex’s admirers as, if not an affectation, a nearly neurotic self-deprecation. At a North Face event in Boulder in August 2014, titled “The Relativity of Risk,” Sender Films director Nick Rosen commented, “The only thing Alex does better than free soloing is downplaying. If that was a sport, he’d be in the Olympics.” The audience cheered. Alex grinned sheepishly.
Along with his loyal fans, Alex motivated critics who were waiting for him to slip up and lay bare the vanity—or at least the craving for publicity—that they assumed must lie just under the surface of his professed indifference to adulation. In April 2013, Alex made just such a slipup—or seemed to, in the view of those quick-to-pounce critics. For the La Sportiva website, he wrote up a recent triumph of free soloing. It didn’t help that the editors titled the piece “Alex Honnold—What a Day!” He began the piece: “On March 14th I free soloed three classic routes in Zion in a 12-hour day. It was the hardest free soloing effort I’ve put in.”
The three solos were a repeat of Moonlight Buttress, followed by Monkey Finger (nine pitches up to 5.12b), rounded off with Shune’s Buttress (eight pitches up to 5.11+). These were, Alex argued, “the three most classic free lines in Zion.” Alex’s original free solo of Moonlight Buttress in 2008 had thrust him into the media spotlight. Now, five years later, he had dispatched that climb as a mere one-third of a marathon day of soloing, the likes of which no one had dreamed of in Zion. “To sum it up in numbers,” Alex concluded, “I did something like 30 pitches up to 12+ with 7 pitches of 5.12 and 8 pitches of 5.11. But the real crusher was that I hiked around 20 miles, much of it jogging downhill.”
A fair assessment. The slipup, however, came in Alex’s second paragraph:
I could write several different essays about the day; it’s given me a ton to think about. One would be how funny it is that climbing media didn’t even touch the story and that no one seems to care about it. Soloing Astroman and the Rostrum in 2007 generated all kinds of news and video bits. This Zion link-up, which is infinitely harder and more cutting edge, doesn’t get mentioned. That’s what I get for soloing so much.
Alex’s detractors seized upon these words, reading them as the petulant complaint of a superstar who, even as he pretended not to care about media plaudits, was hungry for more. Commenters on the La Sportiva site lavished praise on the deed itself. One blogged, “Awesome awesome awesome feat.” But others demurred. “While it is an impressive feat of athletic skill and endurance,” ventured one commenter, “it seems sad that the first impression I got was disappointment that the media hadn’t been as impressed as you hoped, and that the climbing community wasn’t standing in the aisles, cheering.” Another blogger wondered, “Did anyone else find this obnoxious or condescending or whiny?”
Alex was stung by the reaction. Though he made no rebuttal to those jabs in print, privately he maintained that he had been misunderstood. “I wasn’t complaining about lack of media attention,” he says today. “What I was doing was really just pointing out how fickle the media can be. It just seems to be random what they single out for praise, what they ignore. If somebody’s filming me on a solo, it becomes a media big deal. If I just go off and solo something by myself, nobody even asks me about it. That’s fine with me. Media stuff honestly doesn’t mean much to me.”
Cedar Wright seconds this assertion. “There’s so much amazing stuff Alex has done,” he says, “that nobody knows about.”
With fame and sponsorship came a ratcheting-up of demands on Alex’s time to appear at company events, take part in panels, and speak at festivals. The “aggro” Alex of 2010, who could dismiss all those obligations as “media b.-s.,” has since been tempered by the realization that the clamor of his fans is the price he has to pay for fame, and that fame is what allows him to lead a life as close to his heart’s desire as he could concoct.
Even in 2010, for all his private griping about having to attend a North Face event or the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, Alex was unfailingly courteous when approached by fans. He never turned a cold shoulder on a kid wanting an autograph or an adult asking for a selfie shot with his hero in a café or campground.
If there was a single media event that elevated Alex’s renown from the relatively insular climbing world to the arena of the general public, it was his appearance on 60 Minutes in October 2011. Alex had come onto the radar of the producers of the CBS news show after they had seen Sender Films’ Alone on the Wall. In a serendipitous pairing, they assigned the beautiful (and sometimes starstruck) Lara Logan to interview the climber, then twenty-six years old. The thirteen-minute segment 60 Minutes delivered, though necessarily dumbed down for the nonclimbing audience, was a deft and appealing tribute to Alex.
Logan opens the piece with a tantalizing thesis: “From time to time we run across someone who can do something so remarkable that it defies belief . . . and in this case, seems to defy gravity.” Rather than rely on footage from Alone on the Wall, the show organized a new free-solo climb by Alex: the north face of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite, via the 1,500-foot-long Chouinard-Herbert route, rated 5.11c. With the help of Sender’s crew, the producers got fourteen different cameras in position beforehand to document Alex’s feat.
Like Alone on the Wall, the 60 Minutes piece toys with the conceit of Alex as a “dorky, awkward goofball” (Cedar Wright’s appraisal in the Sender film) before he gets on the rock, where he’s transformed into a genius. A photo of Alex as a young kid pops on the screen, to Logan’s comment: “Back then, he was a shy, skinny kid with big ears.” “The Ascent of Alex Honnold,” as CBS titled its segme
nt, skillfully intercuts climbing footage with tête-à-tête exchanges, some of them powerfully blunt. Logan asks, “Do you get an adrenaline rush?” Alex responds, “There is no adrenaline rush. If I get an adrenaline rush, it means that something has gone horribly wrong.” The piece uses John Long as the Yosemite veteran and talking head. Logan asks Long what he considers Alex’s greatest achievement. Long answers, “That he’s still alive.”
There’s a priceless interlude in which Logan asks Alex about his unusually big hands. “Yeah, I have pretty big fingers,” Alex admits, “so they’re hard to get into a thin crack.” “Show me,” Logan coyly asks. Alex holds his hands out, palms up. Logan takes them in her own fingers, virtually fondling them. “Were they like this before you started climbing?” she asks girlishly. Alex seems oblivious to her flirtation.
From the perspective of 60 Minutes, Alex’s lifestyle seems unduly Spartan. Logan credits him for being “slow to cash in on his success,” visits his van (expressing incredulity that he lives inside it), and seems astonished that he “survives on less than a thousand dollars a month.” The day before the big show on Sentinel, Alex impulsively goes up to try to solo the Phoenix, the wildly overhanging 5.13a pitch above a drop to the Valley floor of at least 500 feet. Logan claims that he does so to “calm his nerves,” but anyone who knows Alex recognizes that he’s simply impatient and eager for yet another challenge.
As he recalls today, “I had been working on the Phoenix as a personal side project. I wanted to wrap it up before we got into full film mode—to do something truly hard for me before spending four or five days posing and filming and interviewing and generally fluffing about.”
Only Peter Mortimer goes up to record the Phoenix. Beforehand, on camera, face-to-face with Logan, Alex claims he doesn’t want “a bunch of people” hanging around that short but extreme free solo. “It’d be weird,” he says. Logan: “It’d be weird? Why?” Alex, smiling: “I don’t know. It would blow your mind. Just the positions [I’d get into] are outrageous.” Logan clearly doesn’t understand.
The climax of the segment unfolds on Sentinel Rock, with Lara Logan and John Long peering through scopes and binoculars from the meadow far below, as Long provides a blow-by-blow commentary. Long talks about a “point of no return” and the fifty-foot “crux of the whole route” near the top, while Logan cringes. Even Long gets freaked out when he sees that Alex has climbed into a runnel of flowing water on the route, and he watches as Alex tries to wipe dry the soles of his shoes on his opposite calves. As Alex heads into the key overhang, Long remarks that the footholds there are not good: “He’ll have to paste his feet and hope they stick.” Later, Alex himself will admit that getting his shoes wet was somewhat scary.
The close-up footage of the climbing, shot by pros, is superb, and there’s nothing hokey about it. Sequences that Alex performs on Sentinel have every bit the power to make hard-core climbers’ palms sweat that the comparable footage in Alone on the Wall and Honnold 3.0 did.
Logan manages to wring at least one new insight out of the climber, as she wonders how much longer Alex can pursue free soloing at this level. “I don’t think I’ll continue to do this forever,” Alex answers. “But I won’t stop because of the risk. I’ll stop just because I lose the love of it.”
During the filming, Logan, producer Jeff Newton, and the rest of the CBS crew were both charmed and befuddled by Alex’s lingo and his erratic behavior. So much so that they produced a 60 Minutes Overtime pastiche of outtakes, titled “Dude: The Quirky World of Alex Honnold.” The subhead read: “For 60 Minutes producer Jeff Newton, shooting Alex Honnold’s death-defying rock climbing was only part of the challenge. Jeff and the whole crew also had to learn Alex-speak, where everything is ‘chill.’ ” The amusing clip focuses on Alex’s possible overuse of four of his then-favorite words: dude, chill (both verb and adjective), heinous, and mellow. As Logan and Alex ride in his van, she interjects, startled, “Did you call me ‘dude’?” Alex laughs and answers, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to get used to that.” According to Newton, in Alex’s world, “everything is ‘chill.’ ” So Logan asks, “What is chilling for you? How long can you chill for?”
The cameras follow Alex into his mother’s house in Sacramento. Suddenly, he disappears. The crew finds him in a back room, opening boxes of free gear from The North Face. It’s like Christmas, Logan muses. These “disappearances” may have nettled the crew during production, but now they’re the source of mirth. “He was always doing pull-ups in the middle of the shoot,” Newton marvels. Welcome to Alex’s quirky world.
• • • •
From the little-known climber who once hoped that, as he put it, the attention of a sponsor might someday win him a free pair of rock shoes, Alex has by now developed into a thoroughgoing professional. One of his favorite quotes comes from the mouth of basketball legend Julius Erving: “Being a pro means doing what you love even on the days you don’t love it.”
Still, on any given Sunday, Alex would rather be climbing than signing autographs. In the spring of 2014, he agreed to serve on the film jury of the Trento (Italy) Film Festival. Only when he saw the schedule of presentations did he realize what he’d gotten himself into. “For Christ’s sake,” he confided in a few friends, “now I have to sit through thirty hours of Everest films. Totally heinous.”
Wherever Alex appears nowadays, the event ends with long lines of admirers hoping to exchange a word or two with him and get him to sign a piece of memorabilia, usually a poster. “My default signature,” Alex half-jokes, “is my name, plus ‘Go big!’” (The signature is an efficient scrawl in which the only decipherable letters in his last name are “H” and “d,” but Alex will lavish as many as three exclamation points on his touchstone injunction.) “I suppose,” he adds, “I could write something like, ‘Have a nice day climbing,’ but that’s just too many characters. ‘Go big’—five characters. Exclamation marks are easy.
“At this one event, a really busty chick asked me to sign her boobs. ‘Are you serious?’ I asked. ‘You bet,’ she said, and pulled down her blouse, right there in public. No bra. So I signed my name on her left breast with a Sharpie. But after I stepped back to admire my handiwork, I felt like something was missing, so I added a ‘Go big!!’ to the right breast to even things out.”
In November 2014, a bizarre turn of affairs rocked the American climbing world. Sender Films had completed Valley Uprising, a wild and woolly history of climbing in Yosemite that ran at nearly ninety minutes, mixing archival footage dating back to the 1950s with new clips shot for the movie. In a real sense, the film was Sender’s magnum opus to date, and it was received with universal acclaim, winning the grand prize at all eight of the first film festivals in which it was entered. Needless to say, Alex’s free soloing was prominently featured, as were Dean Potter’s highball slacklining and deploying a BASE-jumping chute as a safety valve when he falls off overhanging walls.
The film debuted in Boulder on September 11, before a long-sold-out house. After that, it was screened in venues all across the United States and in Europe. But suddenly, in early November, Clif Bar—one of Alex’s principal sponsors, as well as a sponsor of other leading climbers—announced that it was canceling support for five of its stars: Dean Potter, Steph Davis, Cedar Wright, Timmy O’Neill, and Alex. Apparently chief executives of the company had seen a showing of Valley Uprising in Berkeley, not far from company headquarters, on September 18, and they were not pleased. Ironically, Clif Bar was a major sponsor of the film itself. But it took the company almost two months to act.
In a carefully crafted statement, Clif Bar explained why it had fired some of its highest-profile adventurers: “We concluded that these forms of the sport are pushing boundaries and taking the element of risk to a place where we as a company are no longer willing to go.”
All five climbers were taken completely by surprise. Says Alex, “I was up on a four-day climb on the Muir Wall in the Valley, and all of a sudden I was getting all
these texts on my iPhone. I first heard about it from my mom. She wrote, ‘Did you know you just got fired by Clif Bar?’”
The reaction in the climbing world was incredulous and derisive. Did the Clif Bar execs have no clue what it was that the climbers they sponsored were doing? Did it take watching Valley Uprising for them to wise up? After all, the company had sponsored Alex for the previous four years, Dean Potter for more than a decade.
The New York Times covered the controversy as the lead story on its sports page on Sunday, November 16. A photo of Alex free soloing in Yosemite—a still from the Sender Films shoot—took up the full half page above the fold. Reporter John Branch tried to cover the story evenhandedly, but the brunt of the criticism inevitably fell on Clif Bar. Dean Potter lashed out, “[W]hat they did was a filthy business move. . . . It seemed sleazy that Clif Bar would use some of my best climbs, and some of Alex’s best climbs, as a marketing tool on one hand, but then fire us on the other.” Cedar Wright complained, “It shows a lack of understanding for the sport, and a lack of respect for the athletes who have helped build their brand.” As many observers pointed out, Clif Bar features a climber in silhouette on the cover of every one of its products.
Alex was asked to write an op-ed piece about the controversy for the New York Times. His piece appeared on November 20, four days after John Branch’s news story. In it, Alex took a tempered and philosophical view of the fracas. He wrote,
Of course, I was disappointed to be dropped by a sponsor, especially since I’ve always liked Clif Bar’s product and really respect the company’s environmental activism. And it did seem odd that after years of support, someone at Clif Bar seemed to have awakened suddenly and realized that climbing without a rope on vertical walls as high as 2,000 feet is dangerous.