Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (27 page)

For a while, the media flirted with the idea that Dean Potter and I were rivals to pull off the first free solo on El Cap. I just shrugged off that talk, but it sort of pissed Dean off. “Let’s talk about it after it’s happened,” he told Outside in 2010. “The magazines want a race. But this would go beyond athletic achievement. For me, this would be at the highest level of my spirituality.”

By now, because I’m so well recognized in the Valley, it wouldn’t be possible to work a route—rehearsing all the moves with a rope and a partner in preparation for a free solo—without attracting a lot of attention. If the word got out—“Alex is getting Freerider dialed so he can try to solo it”—it would be a gigantic distraction. Back in 2008, when I free soloed Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome, nobody knew who I was. I had the good luck to rehearse those climbs without anybody making a fuss, and the even better luck to climb them when nobody else was on the routes.

For that matter, even El Cap wouldn’t be the ultimate free solo. On Nameless Tower, a huge granite spire in the Trango Towers group of the Karakoram Range in Pakistan, there’s an amazing
route called Eternal Flame. It’s as big as El Cap, and it starts at 17,000 feet above sea level. The route was put up in 1989 by a very strong German foursome, including Wolfgang Gullich and Kurt Albert. After lots of other climbers tried and failed, the Huber brothers, Alex and Thomas, succeeded in climbing it all free in 2009. They rated it 5.13a. Claiming they were lucky to have good weather and find almost no ice in the cracks, the Hubers called Eternal Flame “the best and most beautiful free climb on the globe.” If there’s a challenge for the proverbial “next generation,” it would be free soloing Eternal Flame.

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,

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.”

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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.

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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 opportunities 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.