Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (10 page)

About halfway up the route, there’s a stretch of easy pitches, ranging from 5.4 to 5.8, that wanders up and to the right through ramps to a cozy perch on Over the Rainbow Ledge. Here, my mind turned back to “real” life, with all the angst I had carried with me from the Valley, but fortunately, that “down” interlude was fleeting. Soon enough, I was facing the crux tenth pitch.

I was about 750 feet off the ground. I was palming and stemming up this corner on really small ripples in the sandstone. All of a sudden, I realized what the crux required. You’d have to get your feet as high as you could, then jump to grab a jug. A true “dyno” move, but not such a big deal if you were roped and had placed some solid pro nearby. Maybe that’s why I didn’t remember it from my previous ascent. But now I got there, looked at the jug out of reach, imagined jumping for it, and said to myself
, Hell, no!

I could still have downclimbed to Over the Rainbow Ledge, traversed right, and finished the wall by the indirect Swainbow variation, which is only 5.10. But in the mood I was in, I wanted to finish what I’d set out to do. Four or five times I climbed up those ripples, surveyed the situation, and climbed back down. It was simply out of the question to jump for the jug. If you don’t catch the hold, you’re off and down . . . and dead.

Slowly an alternative dawned on me. Just in reach from the ripples was a tiny divot, a natural hole in the stone caused by a black iron-oxide intrusion. I could sink only about a third of the first digit of my left index finger into the divot, then stack my middle finger and my thumb on top of it. It would be the ultimate crimp, and I’m sure the divot had never been used before. Finally, I committed my whole weight to the jammed tip of my finger, smeared an opposing foot against the corner, and pulled. My finger in the divot held, and I grabbed the jug with my other hand. Strangely, instead of fear, I felt complete serenity as I made the move.

The next pitch was a 5.12 lieback. I thought it would be a lot easier than the pitch before, but it was pretty gnarly in its own right. Wait, I thought, this shouldn’t be so hard. And now I had no option of downclimbing, because there was no way I would ever reverse that crimp on the divot. But I kept it together and finished the lieback.

The last two pitches flew by in a blur. I finally felt completely
warmed up and climbed with ease. But as soon as I topped out on the summit, the driving wind nearly knocked me over. On the wall, I’d been protected from the gusts, but here I was fully exposed to the brunt of the gale. When you’re free soloing, of course, rappelling the route isn’t an option, since you don’t have a rope. Now I cowered in a little hole and changed out of my rock shoes into approach shoes that I’d carried in a small backpack, along with a little food and water.

The descents from Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome had been pretty routine, down trails that scores of hikers trod every day, and it wasn’t a strain to go down barefoot. The descent from Rainbow Wall, on the other hand, was heinous. It’s a series of technical scrambles on slick sandstone slabs, all the way back to the limestone mountains west of Red Rocks, to gain the upper drainage of Oak Creek Canyon. Then all the way down Oak Creek as you circle the peak of which Rainbow Wall is the northeast face. The whole descent is a bit of a bear, really heavy on the scrambling.

Then, hiking the flat desert back to my van, I felt like I was on a death march—no food or water. Just endless walking.

And now, in an instant, the sense of peace that had carried me up the climb vanished. Away from the tranquillity of the wall, my psyche started to fray. I was exultant at having soloed the wall but suddenly much less optimistic about my “real” life. As I thrashed my way down, I wondered if I really would be able to salvage my relationship with Stacey, and whether or not it was even worth the effort. As the canyon drew out in front of me and the afternoon heat bore down harder on me, the world seemed so much less beautiful than it had on the hike in. By the time I’d reached the flat desert and started circling back toward my van, I was much less pleased with my performance and fairly sure I would soon be single. My mind sank as low as it had gone high, and I seemed powerless to keep it under control. The whole experience had left
me a little raw. The constant howl of wind, the crushing heat of the sun, hunger, thirst, mental fatigue—they all left me feeling vulnerable.

As soon as I reached the van, my first thought was to check my phone to see if Stacey had called. I think we’d made some vague agreement to chat later. I hoped she had left a message. But I knew that she hadn’t. Unsurprisingly, no call, which I took to mean that Stacey just wasn’t very psyched about “us.”

The sandwiches I made helped ease my disappointment. I planned on soloing another route in the afternoon, just so I could finish all my business at Red Rocks in one day and keep on driving toward my real goal—Tucson.

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I was pleased with myself for soloing the Rainbow Wall. Maybe I should have called it a day, but I’d already decided I wanted to do more. My plan was to solo up Prince of Darkness, a seven-pitch 5.10 route that soars through a blank-looking face on Black Velvet Wall. Then I’d downclimb another 5.10 route, Dream of Wild Turkeys, which joins Prince of Darkness about 650 feet off the ground.

I chatted with some other climbers in the parking lot, joking about the terrible weather in Yosemite, then drove over to the trail-head for Black Velvet Canyon. But now the euphoria was long gone, replaced by lethargy and the deep fatigue of my worn-out mind. I’d always thought that Prince of Darkness would be a good challenge for me in dealing with the exposure of tiny holds on a smooth vertical wall. I never considered calling it quits, but on the way to the base I found that I didn’t really care. I was sick of the unrelenting wind and my feet hurt from hiking and edging. The wall didn’t excite me.

Since I was already warmed up and in a soloing mindset, I
expected the climbing to be smooth and effortless. But instead I felt jerky and slow. I wasted energy by overgripping the sandstone crimps and worrying about breaking footholds. I didn’t want to be there. Instead of relishing the process, the whole experience of being on the wall, I just wanted to have it finished. I wanted to be back in my van, out of the wind.

I kept trudging upward, though I never got comfortable. My feet hurt more and more, but I never passed a good-enough stance to adjust my shoes. By the time I reached the top of the route—the large ledge where Prince of Darkness joins Dream of Wild Turkeys—I hated climbing, hated the wind, and wanted to go home. On the ledge, I took off my shoes for a while, trying to allow some blood to flow back into my toes. I didn’t look around the canyon, I didn’t admire the shadows lengthening across the desert, I just looked at my feet and waited to start the descent.

I downclimbed Dream of Wild Turkeys, which turned out to be a pretty fun route. Or at least it would have been fun in a different time and place. As I descended, I would occasionally find myself having a good time. And then suddenly the wind would pick up and I would realize that I had only been enjoying a brief reprieve. But I suppose that the wind and my fatigue combined to blunt all my other emotions. I just didn’t care as much. Everything to do with “real” life, including Stacey, seemed a little less critical. What really mattered was sitting down in a sheltered place and eating. And maybe sleeping.

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That evening, I met some friends for dinner in Las Vegas. In the bathroom of the restaurant, I washed my hands for the first time and discovered I had a blood blister on my left index finger, where I’d jammed it into the iron-oxide divot, stacked a finger and a thumb on top of it, and made that pioneering move up to grab the jug.
I came back to the table and showed the blistered fingertip to my friends. It felt like a badge of courage.

That marathon day of veering emotions at Red Rocks was like a whole life in a nutshell. As it turned out, though, I didn’t wait for the rendezvous in Tucson. The next day I flew to Dallas, ostensibly to help Stacey pack for her move to L.A. But I really wanted to win her back. I basically re-wooed her. And it worked . . . for a while.

Two months later, we broke up—for the first time.

CHAPTER
FOUR

WORLD TRAVELER

A
LEX HAD PULLED OFF
his three-route tour de force at Red Rocks in the same purist, private style that he had wielded on Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome. No one had witnessed his climbing on Rainbow Wall, Prince of Darkness, or Dream of Wild Turkeys, and only the folks with whom he had chatted at the trail-head around midday had any idea that he was up to anything special. But the word got out quickly. On Supertopo.com, veteran Yosemite climber Peter Haan—who in the early 1970s had dazzled his peers with first free ascents and roped solos of classic routes (using a complicated self-belaying system)—reported Alex’s Red Rocks feat on May 12, 2010, only fourteen days after Alex had battled his demons in gale-force winds on those sandstone walls.

The response was another medley of disbelief, astonishment, congratulations, and cautionary screeds begging Alex not to risk his life so cavalierly. “You messing with us, Peter?” wrote another Valley veteran, invoking the kind of incredulity that had led some to dismiss Moonlight Buttress as an April Fools’ Day hoax. But a believer posted, “This fella should try walking on water.” Another
veteran weighed in: “Having done all 3 routes, this just makes me sick.”

Many of the responders expressed simple admiration. “Long live Alex Honnold,” cheered one. “Another amazing send by a super nice dude!” John Long, the Stonemaster who would bear on-screen witness to Alex’s genius in
Alone on the Wall
, posted simply, “Alexander the Great.”

The cautionary comments, however, verged on the avuncular. “I hope Alex is being careful, he’s such a great kid,” one observer ventured. “It seems that Alex has taken it to a new level only by cutting the safety margin drastically. I’d feel more comfortable if his solos were cracks [as opposed to small holds on otherwise blank walls]. One thing is for sure, he has courage beyond belief.”

So far in his career, the climbs that have won Alex the greatest acclaim have come in even-numbered years. Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome in 2008, Rainbow Wall in 2010, then other incredible breakthroughs in 2012 and 2014. Alex is aware of this pattern, referring to the odd-numbered years as periods of “consolidation.” But in some sense, this schema belies the nonstop virtuosity of Alex’s approach to climbing in all its forms.

In April 2009, for instance, Alex joined a team headed for Mount Kinabalu, at 13,435 feet the highest peak in Borneo. By its easiest route, Kinabalu is a tourist-thronged walk-up, but the mountain is actually a gigantic monolith of granite soaring out of dense rain forest. Some of its earliest explorers got lost in the jungle just trying to find their way to the mountain, and even today, Kinabalu still has untouched walls that challenge the best mountaineers.

The trip was the brainchild of Mark Synnott. Thirty-nine years old at the time, Synnott was a veteran mountaineer with a record of bold first ascents all over the globe. By 2009, he had perfected the art of getting magazine assignments combined with corporate sponsorship (usually by The North Face) to launch exotic adventures
in the far corners of the world, his teams comprising some of the top American climbing stars. For
Men’s Journal
and Borneo, he recruited Conrad Anker (who found George Mallory’s body on Everest in 1999), photographer Jimmy Chin, filmmaker Renan Ozturk, and Kevin Thaw—all four veterans of other landmark expeditions. Anker, who had become the team captain for The North Face, had recently anointed the wunderkind of Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome with TNF sponsorship.

Now Anker tried to convince Synnott to add the twenty-three-year-old Honnold to the Borneo team. Says Synnott now, “I was pretty apprehensive. I’d never met Alex. In general, I don’t like going off with guys I don’t already know. There’s a big potential for personality conflicts. And Alex had never been on an expedition.”

The team’s objective was an unclimbed, nearly vertical wall on the north side of the mountain, rising out of a forbidding abyss called Low’s Gully. The place had an evil reputation, cemented by a catastrophe in 1994 when a ten-man British army team out on what was supposed to be a six-day training mission got entangled in a thirty-one-day survival ordeal. That disaster was vividly recounted in the book
Descent into Chaos
, by journalist Richard Connaughton.

Synnott had another source for his misgivings. Aware of Alex’s deeds as a free soloist, Synnott worried “what kind of insane stuff” the young hotshot “might pressure me into doing.” As it turned out, the two got along well in Borneo. “We hit it off right off the bat,” Synnott remembers. “Alex has a wide-open personality. He deals with people well. There’s no pretense. No bullshit.”

Still, there were “quirky little things” that caused minor disputes between the leader and the rookie. “On his rack,” Synnott claims, “he set up all his cams the way he would in Indian Creek”—the crag in southern Utah famed for short, steep crack climbs. This meant that Alex couldn’t free up carabiners to use in all the different ways
mountaineering requires. “So I had to take his rack apart,” Synnott adds.

“‘What are you doing?’ Alex asked me.

“‘Dude, this doesn’t work here.’”

According to Synnott, Alex “wouldn’t use shoulder slings”—long nylon loops that minimize drag by redirecting the climbing rope as it zigzags from one piece of protection to the next.

“What do you do about rope drag?” Synnott asked him.

“I just skip pieces,” Alex answered. (In other words, he runs out his lead much farther than normal between points of pro, risking much longer leader falls.)

“Alex didn’t like to use little stoppers” (the smaller styles of nuts for protection). “He said, ‘I don’t need this shit.’ Then he’d get to a place where there were only tiny cracks, and he’d say, ‘Wow, nothing else fits.’