Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (12 page)

The other guys tended to space out or try to sleep during this endless, monotonous journey, but I was transfixed. With my face glued to the window, I stared out at the emptiness, watching for any change in the horizon. On our second day in the sand, we had an encounter that turned into a minor epiphany for me.

Suddenly I saw two men riding camels in the desert ahead of us. Piero slowed down for them and stopped a short distance away. In retrospect, I wonder if he was stopping only because he was used to his tourists wanting to take pictures of such things, or if he was truly stopping out of courtesy to interact with them, the way hikers do when they’re out in the backcountry. Regardless, we piled out of the jeeps and approached the nomads, one of whom dismounted and poured us a large bowl of camel milk. Piero explained that nomads will always offer you something as hospitality, even though they don’t have much for themselves. We declined his offer, taking a few pictures instead. Piero gave the two men the leftovers from our breakfast, explaining to us that it was normal for them to travel for days without any real food. They mounted their camels and continued into the desert.

Later I asked Piero how those nomads could navigate so accurately in the desert, especially when the stakes were so high. A slight mistake in bearing would mean missing the next well and dying of dehydration in the middle of nowhere. Piero explained that they use the sun and the direction of the wind, which is constant in the winter, to navigate. When I protested that it seemed like too serious a situation to rely only on the sun and wind, Piero drew an analogy to climbing. Sometimes you find yourself in positions where falling would mean death. So you don’t fall. It helped me understand. The nomads just don’t make mistakes.

Occasionally, when we passed a small oasis, we’d run into native people, small clusters of men, women, and children living in mud huts or thatched dwellings. These were Toubous, so unused to seeing strangers—especially white-skinned Westerners—that Piero warned us not to approach them or take photographs of them.

Still, I stared in fascination at these seminomadic desert dwellers. And here I had another, more lasting epiphany. After the trip was over, it wasn’t the climbing that stuck foremost in my memory. It was the days of driving across the desert to and from the Ennedi. My lasting impressions were of kids beating donkeys to make them haul water faster, or of men riding camels through the middle of nowhere, or of other men working all day to turn mud into bricks. I was seeing a completely different way of life from any I’d ever witnessed before, in a completely alien place. The simple facts of Chadian life—what it takes to survive in that kind of climate with nothing but a hut and some animals—stunned me.

And this made me realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy my life was compared to those of people in less privileged societies. That insight would lead me, a few years later, to redirect my goals toward something other than climbing. It took a while to sink in, but that was the epiphany.

Toward the end of the fourth day, we spied some rocks in the distance. We hadn’t seen so much as a hill since leaving N’Djamena. Anticipation ran high. All of us were thinking, Will the rock be any good? When we got close enough, we piled out of the vehicles and literally ran over to the nearest formations.

We knew from Piero that the pinnacles and arches were made of sandstone. But would it be the sharp, clean sandstone of Nevada’s Red Rocks, or chossy stuff like the Fisher Towers in Utah?

To our dismay, we discovered that the sandstone in the Ennedi ranged from terrible rock to truly atrocious, abominable rock. It was all bad. No matter what, however, the Ennedi was a photographer’s and filmmaker’s paradise, and the “media team” got images and footage like you see nowhere else in the world.

Our first major objective was a 200-foot-tall spire that we called the Citadel. As Mark described it, the tower was “shaped like a giant boxcar standing on end, featuring four distinct arêtes, one of which appeared to have decent holds. A rotten overhang guarded the bottom, but sported a crack that looked doable.”

James Pearson was psyched to lead it. (I thought it looked like a death route.) He tied in and started up as Mark belayed, with the media team in rapt attention. I didn’t want to just sit around and watch someone else climb—I hadn’t come halfway around the world and four days across the desert just to spectate—so I wandered off and started soloing up a random nearby tower.

Before this trip, Tim, Jimmy, and Renan had seen me solo a little bit on solid rock, but Mark and James had never watched me solo at all. I think what I was doing now freaked them out a bit.

A
CHARACTERISTIC HONNOLD
understatement. In his essay about the Chad trip, Synnott wrote,

According to Synnott, Alex made some six solo first ascents of untouched routes during the time it took Pearson, climbing brilliantly, to get to the top of the Citadel.

Interviewed after the team’s return from Chad, Jimmy Chin reported that when Alex was soloing, “It got so that we couldn’t watch. And we also didn’t want him to know we were watching, because we didn’t want to give him any extra motivation to push it.”

Several days after the Citadel climb, Alex started up—tied in, effectively toproping—on a beautiful sandstone arch. In his article, Synnott played this exploit up as zany hijinks:

Yet four years later, Synnott looked back on Alex’s free soloing in Chad with lingering misgivings, verging on disapproval. “In Chad,” he says, “Alex was cavalier about risk. Over-confident. On that first tower, what he was doing was just plain mind-numbing. As he down-climbed, he broke loose three of his four holds, so he was dangling by one arm.

“‘What was that all about?’ I asked him when he got down. He didn’t answer. He wouldn’t cop to it.

“As far as I can tell, Alex came very close to falling off in the Ennedi.”

Yeah, I’ve heard those
guys’ comments, but only secondhand. I think one thing that freaked them a little was the assumption that if you’re going to free solo, you should do it on routes you’ve climbed before, even carefully rehearsed, so that there are no unwelcome surprises. As I had on Moonlight Buttress. To free solo rock that you’ve never touched before—a lot of it chossy and loose—might seem too out there.

But what I was soloing in Chad wasn’t that hard—maybe 5.7. As for breaking off holds as I downclimbed that first tower, Mark’s got it wrong. Yes, it was an overhanging wall, and I was hanging from two 5.5 mud jugs. Both my footholds broke off, but it wasn’t hard to hang on, and I definitely wasn’t dangling by one arm.

On a route called Royal Arches in Yosemite, I once pulled off a big hold on a 5.5 pitch I was soloing. My body swung backward,
but I was able to grab the hold, shove it back in place, and recover. It was scary, but it was like magic. On 5.5, it’s easy to have magic. On 5.11, it’s not as magical.

We climbed for ten days in the Ennedi. The poor quality of the sandstone meant that bolts, and, for that matter, any of our gear, wouldn’t really hold, which added a lot to the adventure of the climbing. Mark and James had real fears about ripping all the pro on a pitch, including the anchors. I found myself retreating off as many lines as I finished, though it didn’t matter as much because it’s easier to bail when soloing.

In the end, as I mentioned, it wasn’t the climbing that made the trip so memorable. It was having an adventure in a completely alien landscape, and witnessing a way of life that would have been unimaginable to me beforehand. In Chad, I saw extreme poverty for the first time. It was hard for me to imagine living your whole life and never touching anything but sand. What we saw there were people surviving in a full-on Stone Age culture.

The trip coincided with a time when my own life was getting easier, thanks to sponsorship and recognition. Nowadays I can film a two-day commercial and make more money than those people in Chad make in their whole lives. That’s fucked up. And that discrepancy ultimately forced me to examine how I ought to live my own life, and what I could do for others who were less fortunate.

B
Y THE TIME ALEX WENT
to Chad, in November 2010, he and Stacey were back together. But there would be subsequent breakups in their future. Looking back in 2014, Alex commented, “I find it really hard to see six months into the future, let alone a year or more. Stacey complains that that makes it hard for us to talk about our future together. She wants to know where we might live,
or whether she should continue to work as a nurse, or just live with me on the road.

“We’ve talked about having children. I sort of joke that I’d like to have grandkids some day, but the thought of raising an infant seems heinous. Probably has something to do with my own childhood, but I don’t really want to go there.

“It bugs Stacey when I joke about dying. I might say something like, ‘You better appreciate me now, because I may not be around very long.’ I’m just goofing around, but Stacey hates it. I know that she believes that I won’t fall off soloing. She has faith in my ability and judgment.

“Some of our breakups got triggered by my feeling that I needed to be alone, that a relationship interfered with my climbing. When I told her that, she got really mad. She told me bluntly, ‘Okay, it’s over. Don’t talk to me. Don’t even try to contact me.’

“Then a few weeks or even months go by, and I realize I miss Stacey. I’ll get all sheepish and call her up. ‘I know you didn’t want me to contact you,’ I’ll say, ‘but couldn’t we meet just to talk? Maybe have lunch?’ She gives in, because I insist that I’ve learned more about myself and have realized that Stacey does have a positive impact on my life. And after all, we really do love each other.”

In an unguarded moment, Alex admitted, “I think Stacey has had a lot to do with humanizing me.” What spurred that insight was a playback in 2014 of some comments that Alex made to this writer [David Roberts] in 2010, when I interviewed him for a profile published in the May 2011 issue of
Outside
magazine.

An example. In 2010, Alex referred to having to go to North Carolina for a North Face appearance as “a gong show.” He added, “I see all this stuff as media b.-s.” An upcoming appearance as the featured speaker at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival was “full-on b.-s. I mean it’s okay, but it’s time I can’t spend climbing.”

“You want this on the record?” I asked.

“Why not?”

“How are your Banff hosts going to react if they read that comment?”

Alex shrugged. “I just say what I feel. Maybe it’ll come back to bite me in the ass someday, and then I’ll just stop talking to people.”

Other comments in 2010 sounded like nonchalant bragging. “Yeah,” said Alex, “I crushed high school. I took a test once, and they said I was a genius.”

Yet others sounded like cruel putdowns, as when Alex dismissed one of America’s leading female rock climbers as “a bit of a puss,” because she’d had to ask her partner to overprotect a scary traverse she was seconding. About this high-profile climber, Alex added dismissively, “She hasn’t done anything I couldn’t do.”

In 2010, Chris Weidner, one of Alex’s best friends, complained, “When we started climbing together, he was very polite, very safety-conscious. Now, he’s more likely to bad-mouth you. About a year ago, I was trying to lead this pitch, and I kept falling off. Alex said, ‘Dude, what’s your fucking problem? It’s only five-thirteen.’ He may have been joshing, but it hurt my feelings. He’s got a certain attitude now, like, unless you’re a world-class climber, you suck.

“I finally said, ‘Hey, give me a break. I’m trying as hard as I can.’ He may have realized he was hurting my feelings, but he just doesn’t want to deal with it.”

When I reminded Alex of these comments in 2014, he was abashed. “That’s not me anymore,” he insisted. “I think back then I was pretty aggro. I thought I had something to prove.”

By 2015, Alex Honnold evidently has little still to prove. Yet his intensity shows no signs of ebbing. Something still drives him to a kind of perfection on rock—and recently, on snow and ice—that goes beyond the frontiers established by his boldest predecessors.

No matter what the difference
in our styles and approaches—old-school versus new-school, mountaineer versus rock climber—Mark Synnott and I always got along well. Today I consider him one of my mentors, as well as one of the teammates I’m most indebted to. After Chad, I signed up for yet another Synnott trip sponsored by The North Face and Men’s Journal. This time, in July 2011, we headed off for Devil’s Bay on the south coast of Newfoundland, where big granite cliffs rise straight out of the ocean. We hoped to put up some good new routes there and document everything with camera and film.