Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (16 page)

A strange thing about climbing in the dark is that all these creatures come out. Bugs, mice, bats, even frogs that live in the cracks. And these giant centipedelike insects. I’ve always worried that I’d step on one and splooge off. Then, all of a sudden, I heard this loud “whoosh!” and a scream. I nearly peed my pants. It took a moment to realize it had to be a BASE jumper. In fact, it was a friend of mine—I won’t name him here, since BASE jumping is illegal in the park, which was why he flew at night.

At the Great Roof, I met up with Stanley—Sean Leary is his real name, but everybody calls him Stanley. After filming me on the roof, he climbed with me the rest of the way up the Nose, Jumaring next to me as I daisy soloed. We actually chatted about other things, such as the speed record on the Nose, which he was keen
to go after. I didn’t have to concentrate too hard, except for spots here and there where I’d say, “Hold on a moment. I need to focus.”

Finished the Nose at 3:30 a.m., still in pitch dark. Six hours for the climb, fifteen minutes faster than Tommy and I had climbed Freerider.

The psychological crux of the whole linkup was actually on the grueling hike up to Half Dome, where I started to bonk. I felt agonizingly slow on the route, but I knew I was in the home stretch. Near the top, I ran into Mike Gauthier, who was chief of staff in the park and, unlike most of the rangers, a good climber. (Traditionally, in Yosemite there’s been a constant antagonism between rangers and climbers.) He was roped up with a guy from the Access Fund—a nonprofit devoted to preserving access to climbing areas across America. We sort of climbed side by side a couple of pitches together. I hadn’t met Mike before, but he seemed like a really nice dude. I thought it was cool—an NPS bigshot who was a serious climber, an Access Fund partner, and all that. Then I pushed on.

I topped out at 10:55 a.m. to a whole gong show of hikers on the summit. I was really tired, and the scene felt weird, out of control. My total time was 18:55. It was another speed record, but mainly I just felt psyched to have done it.

Four days later, when he topped out, Steve Denny recovered his chalk bag, which I’d tied to a tree.

H
ONNOLD
3.0,
WHICH SENDER
packaged with four other films for its Reel Rock 7 anthology, released in 2012, is every bit as skillful and impressive as
Alone on the Wall
. The Yosemite Triple solo takes up only a little more than half the film, but it forms its inevitable climax. Picking up where the earlier feature ended,
and segueing through Alex’s appearance on
60 Minutes
and his role in a clever Citibank commercial, in which he belays Katie Brown (a former infatuation of Alex’s) on a sandstone tower in Utah, the film poses the question of whether fame might corrupt or endanger Alex. As his good friend Cedar Wright puts it, “How do you do this when it becomes a public spectacle?”

The footage covering the Triple solo smoothly intercuts action sequences with friends as talking heads and Alex’s own voice-overs. Anticipating the linkup, Wright pronounces, “If he pulls it off, it’s the most monumental feat of soloing in Yosemite history.”

On Watkins, the camera powerfully captures the scary dance of switching from daisy solo to free solo, especially where the bolts are far enough apart that Alex must unclip and climb a stretch without a safety net before he can clip in again. The alternation of “Now I’m safe. Now I’m not” comes across vividly. In voice-over, Alex says, “I guess I should have a disclaimer on this, because basically you should not do this, even though I love it and I think it’s so fun.” He grins at the paradox.

A thousand feet up the south face, there’s a film moment that’s already become as famous as the freakout on Thank God Ledge in
Alone on the Wall
. Free soloing, Alex traverses toward the camera, which is less than a dozen feet away. There’s a bolt he hopes to clip. In the frame, you can’t see either Alex’s feet or the fingers that clasp a sloping ledge high above his head. He lets go with his left hand and reaches toward the bolt to measure how far away it is. His fingers stop an inch or two short of the bolt, but he knows he can clip it with a daisy. Carefully he reaches back to his harness, seizes the daisy, and puts the middle loops of it between his teeth as he reaches down for the biner.

All at once Alex’s whole body jerks downward several inches. It’s obvious that his foot has slipped off its hold. How had he kept his purchase on the wall, with only the fingers of his right hand gripping
the out-of-sight sloping ledge? How close had he come to the fatal fall everyone worries he’ll someday take?

Audiences invariably gasp, or even shriek out loud, at this moment. But on film, Alex’s face registers nothing. He reaches down again, clasps the biner, clips it to the bolt, then swings across with his weight on the daisy.
Now I’m safe.

When asked how Alex had felt about that terrifying close call, Mortimer later reported, “He didn’t even remember it. But later, he gave me grief about it. He said, ‘How come with all the great footage you got on the Triple, you put that single clip up on YouTube?’”

According to Alex, “In that moment, I wasn’t even close to falling off. I had a really good handhold. The foot that slipped was not on a weight-bearing hold. I didn’t want to lurch for the bolt. That wouldn’t look good on camera.”

Yet in the film, Alex’s voice-over immediately after the slip on Watkins seems to acknowledge a close call. “Having little things go wrong,” he says. “That’s just part of the game. Those kinds of things shake you for a second, but then you just keep climbing.”

Of necessity, because of the widely scattered positions where the cameramen had stationed themselves on the three walls, the film could not cover all the highlights of the linkup. Because there was no way cinematically to recount the drama of the forgotten chalk bag, Sender simply ignored it—even though there’s footage of Alex gearing up with rack and rope in the dark as he heads toward El Cap.

Some of the best footage documents Alex climbing up the Nose in the dark, with the cone of his headlamp bathing the microworld of hand- and footholds, the void an inky blackness all around him. And fortuitously, at the Great Roof, the audio captures the “whoosh!” and joyous shout of the BASE jumper. A voice-over about the crux moves on the Great Roof perfectly complements the visuals. “The fixed nuts are hanging half out,” Alex comments, “and they pull straight down, so it looks like it’s all going to fall out. There’s always running
water, and slime coming out of [the crack]. It’s a pretty intimidating position.”

By accompanying Alex not only to the top of El Cap but also on the arduous approach up the “Death Slabs” to the foot of Half Dome, Sean Leary captures the extreme fatigue and dispirited mood of Alex as he gets ready for the last wall. He complains about the cold and looks as though all he wants to do is go to sleep. In voice-over, Alex admits feeling out of it on the “trudge” up the first half of the route. Then, miraculously, he finds his groove again. The last few hundred feet of climbing look effortless and triumphant.

The film ends with the “gong show” on top. Dozens of hikers, knowing he’s near the top, lean over the edge of the precipice. “He’s coming,” one voice intones, and another, “That’s so sick.”

As Alex sits exhausted on the flat bedrock summit, hikers ask to take his picture and shake his hand. If he thinks the scene is weird, it doesn’t show. Gracefully, he assents to their requests, shakes their hands, poses for a group photo with four awestruck teenage girls.

The final voice-over is a winning one. “I think of all the people who inspired me as a kid,” Alex reflects, “and I sort of realize they were all normal people, too. I just do my normal life, and if people choose to be inspired by the things I’m doing, then I’m glad they’re getting something out of it.”

•
•
•
•

In the short span of two months, 2012 had already become a breakthrough year for Alex. But even after the Triple Crown solo, he still had one more project in his sights for Yosemite that season. Less than two weeks after topping out on Half Dome, Alex would enter the fiercest Valley competition of all—the race to set a new speed record on the Nose.

CHAPTER
SIX

THE SPEED RECORD

T
HE ONE-DAY ASCENT OF THE NOSE
in 1975 by Jim Bridwell, John Long, and Billy Westbay dazzled the climbing world. Their time on the wall—a shade under fifteen hours—shaved an astounding twenty hours off the previous record, set just the year before.

It was inevitable that someone would show up and climb the Nose even faster than the trio of legendary Stonemasters. In 1979, a French ace, Thierry Renault, came to the Valley and surged up the route in under thirteen hours. His ascent was notable in view of the fact that most European climbers get shut down cold on their first visits to Yosemite, either because they’re unused to severe crack climbing or because they’re simply intimidated by the sheer, sweeping granite walls. Renault made so little fuss about his deed that the name of his climbing partner seems lost to history (the compendia of speed climbs simply cite “Thierry ‘Turbo’ Renault + other”).

Five more years passed before Renault’s time was bettered. Again, the new record was claimed by climbers from abroad. On the summer solstice in 1984, the Brit Duncan Critchley and the
Swiss Romain Vogler pulled off the ascent in the remarkable time of nine and a half hours.

Then along came Hans Florine.

An All-American pole vaulter in college, Florine started climbing in his native California at the age of nineteen and almost at once realized that his forte was speed. Early on, he won virtually every speed competition on artificial walls that he entered, including three gold medals in the X Games. It was logical that Florine would turn his attention to the Nose.

In 1990, at the age of twenty-five, Hans paired up with Steve Schneider to lop nearly an hour and a half off the Critchley-Vogler record. Their time on El Cap, from base to summit, was eight hours and six minutes. But the new record didn’t last long, as Peter Croft and Dave Schultz cut the mark to 6:40.

As mentioned in previous chapters, Peter Croft was one of the climbers a young Alex Honnold most admired, because of the bar he set with his solo climbs. Alex’s free solos of Astroman and the Rostrum in a single day in 2007 gained him his first fame in the Valley, since no one had dared to try to repeat Croft’s blazing feat during the previous twenty years. Six years older than Florine, Croft was a creaky thirty-two when he set the new record on the Nose.

With that, the race was on. Times were now clocked to the minute, not the more casual “slightly under X number of hours.” Unlike most of his peers, who tend to minimize the role that competitiveness plays in their lives, Florine has always unabashedly confessed to relishing head-to-head combat. In 1991, with Andres Puhvel, Florine took back the crown with a time of 6:01—only to have Croft return with Schultz and reduce the record to a mind-boggling 4:48.

It was always, however, a friendly competition, so it was apropos that the two masters paired up and went for an even faster time. In 1992, Florine and Croft set the mark at 4:22.

That record stood for the next nine years. Perhaps no one in the
Valley could imagine improving on such a stellar performance, or perhaps the speed record simply fell out of vogue. It was not until Dean Potter emerged on the scene that Croft and Florine saw their record challenged. In October 2001, climbing with Timmy O’Neill, Potter broke the four-hour barrier—just barely. Their time was officially noted as 3:59:35. For the first time, seconds, not minutes, were required to measure the race up the Nose. And for the first time, the rules were codified. The stopwatch started when the first climber left the triangular ledge at the bottom of pitch 1 on the route topo. It clicked off only when the second climber tagged the “official” tree about forty feet above the topmost anchors on the route.

By 2001, at the age of forty-three, Peter Croft was no longer keen to compete for the Nose speed record. Instead, he turned to the mountains, blithely putting up severe new technical, multipeak routes in the High Sierra. But Florine felt the burr under his saddle. In the same month as Potter’s breakthrough, he teamed up with Jim Herson to knock exactly two minutes and eight seconds off Potter’s mark. Florine was now thirty-seven years old, but apparently fitter than ever. Undeterred, Potter came back in November and, climbing with O’Neill again, blew the record out of the water with a time of 3:24:20.

Florine bided his time for eight months. In September 2002, paired with a new speed demon, the Japanese Yuji Hirayama, Florine trumped Potter’s feat. The duo not only broke the three-hour barrier: their time of 2:48:55 bested Potter and O’Neill’s mark by 34.5 minutes.

The race was now a pitched battle. Out of nowhere, it seemed, the German brothers Alex and Thomas Huber jumped into the fray. In October 2007, they lowered the mark to 2:48:30—a mere twenty-five-second improvement on the Florine-Hirayama watershed. Only four days later, the Hubers improved their own record by two minutes and forty-five seconds.

All this rivalry only served to wave a red flag in Florine’s face. Pairing again with Hirayama, he improved on the Huber brothers in July 2008 with a time of 2:43:33. Three months later, the duo broke their own mark, lowering it to 2:37:05.

Hans Florine, then forty-four years old, had held the speed record on the Nose seven times, losing and regaining it five times, and capping his amazing run by trumping his own best time by more than six minutes. Had the ultimate limit been reached? Dean Potter didn’t think so.

At this point, Sender Films decided to document the whole show. Their twenty-two-minute film
Race for the Nose
, appearing as part of the Reel Rock Tour in 2011, captured the outlandish characters of the leading competitors and covered the action in scintillating you-are-there footage.

I really liked Sender’s
Race for the Nose when I first saw it in 2011. Besides all the great action footage, which vividly captured just how hairy simul-climbing against a stopwatch can get, the film pitted these two great climbers—Hans Florine and Dean Potter—against each other in a classic mano-a-mano duel. They have such different personalities that the contrast only enhanced the drama.