Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (23 page)

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 shoulder.

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!

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.

W
HEN 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:

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 segment, 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.