by Alex Honnold
I suppose it’s inevitable that most of the media attention I get is for free soloing. But I’m just as proud of my speed climbs and linkups. Even though they aren’t as glamorous, and don’t really capture the public imagination the same way, they represent the same spirit as soloing. Covering a ton of ground as simply as possible. They are all just by-products of a desire to climb a lot.
A few years ago, when I was flipping past all the pictures in Alpinist with snow in them, I swore I’d never go mountaineering. But here I am, having already gone on two big-range expeditions—to the Ruth Gorge in Alaska in 2013 and the Fitz Roy massif in Patagonia in 2014. Tommy Caldwell and I had such a great time on the Fitz Traverse that we started planning another big Patagonian enchainment for February 2015. We wanted to attempt the Torre Traverse—a linkup of four amazing towers culminating in Cerro Torre (once called “the hardest mountain in the world”). It wouldn’t be a first, because Rolo Garibotti and Colin Haley nailed it in 2008. But there’s a lot more ice on the Torre Traverse than we ran into on the Fitz Traverse—especially the hideous rime mushroom cap on Cerro Torre—and Tommy and I aren’t veteran ice climbers.
It took Rolo and Colin four days to make the traverse, as they gained and lost almost 7,000 feet of elevation on steep rock and near-vertical rime ice. The scariest part of their marathon climb came as they headed up the El Arca route on Cerro Torre. As Rolo later wrote in the American Alpine Journal,
Then, suddenly, it was too warm. Ice fell around us, crashing against the rock with the sound of waves. For the next two hours we climbed as fast as possible, ducking our heads, until we found a rock prow under which we could find shelter. It was only 5 p.m., but we decided to stop and bivy.
The next morning, in colder, safer conditions, they climbed the El Arca route and completed the traverse.
Tommy and I thought it would be cool to see whether we could repeat the Torre Traverse, no matter how long it might take. If we managed to do it at all, it would be a crowning achievement in both of our climbing careers, largely because it would be so different from what we normally attempt.
But then, on January 14, 2015, Tommy and Kevin Jorgeson finally completed the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall on El Cap. Before topping out, they spent nineteen straight days on the wall, sleeping on a portaledge, as they painfully worked their way through each of the route’s thirty-one pitches, including the 5.14 cruxes on pitches 14, 15, and 16. I was not only rooting constantly for those guys—I jugged up the fixed ropes to chat with them and supply them with snacks.
The climb got huge attention worldwide, including front-page coverage several days running in the New York Times, as well as a shout-out from President Obama. Nobody argued with the indisputable fact that Tommy and Kevin had put up the hardest free big-wall rock climb in the world. My admiration for Tommy simply swelled to a new dimension. The guy’s an amazing hardman, climbing better than he ever has at age thirty-six.
In the frenzy of media attention that the Dawn Wall stirred up, however, with Tommy besieged by agents wanting him to write a memoir and producers hoping to film his life story, he had to back out of Patagonia. I decided to head down there anyway, still hoping to find a partner to attempt the Torre Traverse.
During a stormy three weeks last February, I paired up with Colin Haley, who was game to try to repeat his own Torre Traverse with me. The weather didn’t cooperate, though we made several good ascents, including Torre Egger in fast alpine style. Colin had not only first completed the Torre Traverse with Rolo Garibotti in 2008, but he had since repeated it in the opposite direction (south to north), so it was only for my sake that he was willing to give it a third go. During our weeks together, he and I had a whole list of objectives. I suggested trying to do the Torre Traverse in one 24-hour blitz. (Colin’s two previous jaunts had taken about four days each.) We agreed that that was the most exciting project to focus on.
Despite mists, wind, running water on the rocks, and lousy ice conditions, we got over Standhardt, Punta Herron, and Torre Egger in really good time. At 7:30 p.m. we started up Cerro Torre in the waning light. Halfway up, it got truly dark, so we climbed on with headlamps. We got only two pitches short of the summit before the storm really socked in.
For two hours, we hung out in a wretched nook, half-hanging from our harnesses. We were waiting for the first light of dawn, so that we could see how stormy it really was. In the dark all we could tell was that there was a crazy strong wind and we couldn’t see any stars. It felt like it was about to snow. According to the forecast, the storm wasn’t due for another 24 hours, but it had actually arrived way ahead of time.
At last we decided to bail. Colin thought that rapping the complicated and exposed north face in these conditions would be too dangerous, so we made an emergency descent of the west face. Then we had a soul-destroying march through the Paso Marconi. The whole adventure lasted 53 hours, with no stove or bivy gear the whole way, and the last twenty hours without food, before we got back to El Chaltén.
As Colin wrote the next day, “It’s unfortunate that we didn’t quite get to finish the goal, but I’m very pleased with our performance, knowing that if the weather had held out we would’ve easily finished within a cool 24 hours of starting. Despite failing, it is probably the best day of climbing I’ve ever done in these mountains, and it certainly turned into the most epic experience I’ve had here.”
• • • •
If there’s a great range I haven’t visited that intrigues me, it’s the Karakoram. I could see trying big walls in the Trango group. I’d love to bring Yosemite-style in-a-day tactics to some of the biggest faces in the world. The highest I’ve been so far is only 19,341 feet, on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, at the end of what amounted to a long stroll. I’d kind of like to see if I could still perform well above 20,000 feet.
The media are fond of talking about the “ultimate limits” of adventure. I sort of follow other “sports,” like big-wave surfing, or huge waterfall drops in kayaks, or crazy mountain biking. Guys (and gals) are doing unbelievable things in those realms. It’s hard to imagine improving on what they’re pulling off.
But I believe there are no real limits to adventure. Each wave of athletes just takes it a step further, then another step further. After all, before Warren Harding and his gang of siege climbers got up the Nose in 1958, El Capitan itself was widely believed to be unclimbable. By now, fifty-seven years later, the Nose has been climbed free (Lynn Hill), free in a single day (Lynn again, as well as Tommy Caldwell), and in two hours, twenty-three minutes, and forty-six seconds (Hans Florine’s and my speed record).
I’m sure there will come a time in the future when everything that I’ve done will be regarded as mundane. Someday climbers will consider 5.12 totally casual. They’ll warm up on 5.14a. Ascents such as my free solos of Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome will be relegated to the history books, interesting for their time but no longer a big deal.
• • • •
A criticism you sometimes hear about climbing is that it’s selfish. Putting up a new route, after all, does nothing to improve the human condition. Yet there’s a kind of paradox, as I see it, in the fact that the public’s enthusiasm for the kinds of climbing I’ve done since 2008 has led to sponsorship, commercials, and media coverage, which in turn have allowed me to pour money and motivation into trying to improve the lives of some of the least fortunate people on earth, those living marginalized lives in Africa or on Native American reservations in this country.
It was climbing, starting with our expedition to Chad in 2010, that awakened me to the plight of those impoverished peoples, and it was the money I made as a high-profile climber that allowed me to try to do something about it. Long before I started the Honnold Foundation, when people asked me which nonclimbers I most admired, I cited guys like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Billionaires who used their riches to address problems of environmental degradation and income inequality, and to provide educational opportuni
ties to the disadvantaged. Today I’d add Elon Musk to the list—a business magnate and engineer who’s reinventing the world.
With my Honnold Foundation, what I really hope to do in the coming years is to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in the world in a way that helps the environment. To support projects that both help the earth and help lift people out of poverty.
I feel obligated to do something along those lines just because of the privileged life I’ve been given. But I’m doing it publicly in the hope that it will inspire more good deeds from others. Either way, I’d be donating some of my income, just so that I could sleep well at night. But by doing it publicly through the foundation, I’m hoping to inspire others to do the same—or at least to think about the issues more and reflect on their own lifestyles.
And in a more self-serving sense, it’s good to have a hobby, particularly as I get older and pure rock climbing becomes less of a dominant force in my life. It’s fun to work on a side project and learn new things.
Hand in hand with the critique that climbing is selfish is the claim that climbing is useless. But I think that perfecting your skills on rock (or ice and snow) ends up improving you in other ways. I fully believe that what I’ve learned from climbing translates into other aspects of life. Figuring out how to suppress my fear while free soloing, I’m pretty sure, has helped me suppress my fear of, say, public speaking. It’s certainly helped cure my shyness, which, if you can believe my childhood pal Ben Smalley, was close to pathological. And if the kind of climbing I do inspires others to push their own limits, that’s not a bad thing.
At the same time, I’d never set myself up as an “inspirational speaker.” It’s just not in my nature to turn my own experience into a soapbox from which to preach to others how they should live their lives. Some climbers have no trouble doing just that. For instance, Reinhold Messner, the first guy to climb the fourteen 8,000-meter peaks and the first guy to climb Everest solo without bottled oxygen, published a book in 1996 whose English title is Moving Mountains: Lessons on Life and Leadership. Each chapter ends with very didactic advice, under the headings “Application” and “Action.” A sample: “Devise a wise risk management plan of action.” Or, “Pursue a course of action that demands the exercise of your best qualities of character.”
You can turn this whole inspirational thing on its head. Every once in a while, I hear that somebody thinks I’m a bad role model for kids. The argument goes something like this: Some kid sees a film like Alone on the Wall and decides he wants to try free soloing. Doesn’t have the judgment yet to know how to stay safe. In the worst scenario, the kid gets on some route right at his limit, loses his cool, and falls off.
Well, I challenge those critics to cite a single case in which a climbing accident has been caused by some youngster trying to emulate me. It just doesn’t work that way. If you’ve never free soloed before, you’re likely to get twelve feet off the ground, freak out, and back off.
Climbers pushing the limits of their “sport” are pretty self-motivated. They’re driven by the challenge itself, not by the urge to imitate some badass hero. For that matter, sailing across the Atlantic in 1492 was a pretty dangerous business. A scholar has calculated that on any voyage from Europe to the New World during the Renaissance, you stood a one-in-three chance of dying. But I doubt that anybody in Spain accused Columbus of being a bad role model for kids.
Anyway, I’ve never told anyone else (except maybe Tommy) that they ought to try free soloing or speed linkups involving simul-climbing or daisy soloing. I’ve even done the opposite, like throwing in that little disclaimer in a voice-over in Honnold 3.0. In effect, “Don’t try this at home”—though that was also sort of a joke.
If what I do inspires others, that’s fine. But that’s not why I do it. No matter how much pressure sponsors or the media might put on me to try something rad (and by and large, they don’t apply that kind of pressure), the ultimate decision is mine. I’ve walked away from more climbs than I can count, just because I sensed that things were not quite right. It’s a deeply subjective decision, a combination of my mood and the vibe of the place and the weather. It’s nothing I can precisely quantify, more like a vague feeling that some days are just not the right day.
• • • •
As the milestone of turning thirty fast approaches, I’ve had to think long and hard about my personal life. In the end, do I want to “settle down,” move into an apartment and stop living in my van, get married, have kids, and inevitably scale down my ambition—and if so, when? How soon?
Whatever the statistics are about athletes being past their prime at thirty, in climbing there are stellar counterexamples. At thirty-seven, Tommy Caldwell is still cranking as hard as he ever did. Whether or not little Fitz convinces him to cut back on his risk-taking—and so far, there’s little evidence of that—I remain in awe of his accomplishments, his determination, and his talent. Peter Croft is another climber I deeply admire. At fifty-seven, he’s still climbing nearly as hard as he did in his late twenties, when he free soloed Astroman and the Rostrum in a single day. He has a circuit of 5.13 sport routes that he does in the Owens River Gorge every week. He’s still shockingly fit. When I was an up-and-coming young climber, Peter seemed like a rock god—he was “the Man.” Now I respect him not so much as a hero as for his whole climbing career. He’s still passionate, but he only climbs what he cares about. I hope I can be like him when I get to that age.
In the fall of 2014, Stacey and I had another one of our periodic spats. The same old issues reared their heads—the questions of marriage, of kids down the line, of where and how to live. She really wanted to get on with her career as a nurse, not just follow me around from crag to crag or country to country. Our quarrel basically revolved around the idea of commitment. She wanted more commitment to the relationship on my part, while I still cherished the freedom to roam and see where things might take me.
So I sat down and made two separate plans for 2015. One was a program of traveling and climbing, tempered with Stacey time. The other was a program of pure climbing.
Stacey finally pulled the plug for good in December 2014, though we’d been talking about the issues for weeks and her decision came as no surprise. Having completed a graduate program in nursing the previous summer, she now moved to Salt Lake City and got a full-time job. And this time, when she said it was over, it felt final in a way it never had before.
Thank God it wasn’t a bitter breakup. We didn’t scream at each other. There was no major drama. We parted because in the long run what each of us wanted out of life was incompatible with the other’s plans. We’ll still be friends, eventually.
There was a lot of sadness on both sides. I felt the loss of something I might never find again. I had felt for years that I wanted to be with Stacey for a very long time, and she was the one woman I could imagine having kids with some day. I’ve never had a girlfriend I was half so serious about. I continue to admire and respect her as a person.
At the same time, I felt an unexpected surge of liberation. Ahead of me stretched another full year of great adventures and new climbs. Patagonia, Australia, maybe Pakistan. . . . I used to say that I couldn’t think six months ahead, let alone five years. For the first time ever, I can now see five years into the future. I’ve got at least five years of climbing and exploring at my highest level ahead of me. Maybe more.
A shrink might accuse me of clinging to my boyhood, of refusing to grow up. But boyhood, in the best sense, is all tied up with adventure. Climbing as well as you can for as long as you can is a boyhood dream, even if you’re about to turn thirty.
What matters most to me right now is that climbing is still totally involving. I’m still learning new tricks of the trade, from direct aid to mixed rock and ice in the great ranges. I’m still exploring my limits. I may talk about what it would mean to free solo El Cap, but I also have a whole notebook in my head of potential projects on my tick list. I generally don’t like to s
hare these publicly—not because I’m being coy, or because I’m afraid somebody else might poach them, but simply because I don’t like to create expectations. I don’t want to feel obligated to climb in any way, and I worry that creating expectations ahead of time would add external pressure.
What keeps me motivated is an insatiable hunger and curiosity. The best way I can sum it up is to paraphrase the ending of my op-ed piece for the New York Times.
The mountains are calling, and I must go.
Author’s Note
On May 16, 2015, as this book was headed to press, Dean Potter and his partner, Graham Hunt, died in a BASE jumping accident in Yosemite.
Though we were never close friends, news of Dean’s death shook me in a profound way. Especially when I was younger, Dean had a powerful influence on my own climbing, and I looked up to him as a role model. I’d always thought that he would live to an old age because, despite how his deeds may have looked to others, he was actually fairly conservative. But accidents happen, especially in BASE jumping, and although I was shocked I couldn’t say I was completely surprised.
The most striking thing about Dean was his uncompromising approach to his arts: climbing, BASE jumping, and highlining. He devoted himself to the perfection of his craft, pursuing each aspect with limitless passion. Never one to follow the herd, Dean was always out in front, forging a new path. His vision took the sport of climbing in entirely new directions, from speed soloing in the 1990s to freeBASE a decade later. He was the true nonconformist, devoted to his art but unconcerned about legality or other people’s opinions.
Dean Potter will live on through all of us whom he inspired.
Acknowledgments
