Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (25 page)

The same
New York Times
editor who would later assign to Alex the op-ed piece about the Clif Bar imbroglio asked this writer [David Roberts] in early 2014 to structure an op-ed piece around the very question of whether the skyscraper project was evidence that Honnold was selling out. I declined. When I e-mailed Alex to tell him about this development, he responded, “I wouldn’t actually mind if you wrote something like that. I think it’s fair enough to take criticism for those kinds of projects. I think you would be wrong, but it never hurts to have a spirited argument.” In the same way that he would later rise above the Clif Bar controversy, Alex welcomed a debate about whether Taipei 101 was corrupting his values as well as those of the climbing community.

In the end, the whole controversy became moot. National Geographic started to freak out about the cost of the production, and when the institution undertook a periodic cleansing of its house in the spring of 2014, new personnel less enthusiastic about the skyscraper climb pulled the plug on the society’s support. Even before that, though, Alex had balked at some of the conditions. “They wanted me to wear a parachute, which is ridiculous,” he says. “I tried to tell them that a chute wouldn’t do a bit of good if I fell off, because I’d hit one of the projecting balconies long before I could deploy it, but they just didn’t get it. They were all hung up on risk. They didn’t want me dying on live TV.”

But Peter Mortimer isn’t giving up. He envisions filming Alex’s solo of Taipei 101 sometime in 2015 or 2016—not for live TV but
for a film like
Alone on the Wall
. And Alex is still enthusiastic about the challenge. “I don’t think the climb would be super-hard,” he says. “Climbing on a building is a lot like training in a climbing gym—repetitive moves that emphasize pure fitness more than anything else. But it’s still cool to get on top of such a big building. And in some ways the view is even better than in the mountains, just because the urban environment has so much going on.”

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In the first two months of 2014, Alex had accomplished two of the greatest challenges of his climbing life—the free solo of El Sendero Luminoso and the Fitz Traverse. He didn’t have anything else quite that big on his agenda for the rest of the year, but he wanted to climb as much as he could. The hunger was still there.

In March, Alex and Cedar Wright met up near Grand Junction, Colorado, to attempt what they called
Sufferfest 2
.
Sufferfest 1
had been shot in June 2013 in California, as Alex and Cedar climbed all fifteen of the state’s 14,000-foot peaks—from Mount Shasta in the north to Mount Langley in the south—biking between peaks rather than using any motorized transport. Adding to the challenge was the fact that both men were basically novice cyclists. In the hands of a more solemn filmmaker, the ordeal could have been staged as a heroic marathon, but Cedar’s vision was to portray the trip as an exercise in absurdity, with “suffering” as a comic end in its own right.

The pair pulled off the challenge, biking some 700 miles, hiking about 100, and climbing a total of 100,000 vertical feet in twenty-two days. All the climbing on the 14-ers—most of it by nonstandard routes—was free soloing, up to grades as stiff as 5.10c. Alex and Cedar pretty much wrecked their bodies in the process. On White Mountain, the guys had to bike ninety miles round trip and gain and lose 11,000 vertical feet. As Cedar told
Climbing
magazine, “It was
brutal
. Even Honnold had a moment of wanting to give up.”

The film played the two warriors as innocents abroad, trying to figure out how to make their bikes work but cavorting gleefully on sometimes chossy arêtes and ridges in the Sierra Nevada. The tone was manic and playful. Yet there was no ignoring the severity of the punishing ordeal. As Cedar reflected for
Climbing
,

For
Sufferfest 2
, Cedar would craft a film around another zany, self-imposed endurance challenge: The idea was to try to climb forty-five desert towers in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona in three weeks, bicycling between objectives as he and Alex covered more than 800 miles on paved highways, marginal back roads, and single-track trails.

To make the film, Cedar hired a small crew of riggers and cameramen, including Hayden Kennedy, one of the best alpinists and rock climbers of Alex’s generation. But none of the filming would be rehearsed or reenacted—the crew had the task of capturing the action as it unfolded.

Nine months after their romp in the Sierra Nevada, Cedar and Alex concocted a similar orgy of self-mutilation via nonstop biking and climbing among the desert towers of the Southwest. But this time, the journey—and the film—would culminate with a project born of Alex’s philanthropic concerns, as embodied by the Honnold Foundation. At the end of their sufferfest, Cedar and Alex would join with a company called Eagle Energy to install solar-energy
panels in a number of hogans and houses on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, bringing power and light to traditional Native Americans, some of whom had lived their whole lives without electricity or running water.

The tone of the film, as of the adventure, is stamped on its title screen: “Thirty Four Pieces of Choss & Five Horrendous Life Experiences.” The online teaser summarizing the video goes on in the same vein: “Any terrible idea is worth repeating . . . especially if like Alex Honnold and Cedar Wright you have a terrible memory and seem to remember your last ‘sufferfest’ as not too bad.” And it salutes the “goofy duo” as they embrace “60mph winds, loose rock and even looser ideas of what is safe.” Alex appears on screen, predicting, “I think it’s going to be fun. . . . No, it’s definitely going to be bad.” Followed by Cedar’s take: “Oh my God, we learned nothing from the last trip?”

Cedar and Alex start
Sufferfest 2
with an ascent of what they hail as the first desert tower ever climbed—Independence Monument, a 450-foot sandstone spire near Grand Junction, Colorado. Therein lies a bizarre story. Way back in 1911, a madman named John Otto carved and pounded holds in the soft rock as he tamed the tower by creating an artificial staircase up it. On July 4, he flew the Stars and Stripes from the summit. The tradition persists more than a century later, as climbers tackle the spire on Independence Day and fly their own American flags from the top. Otto went on to become the first caretaker of Colorado National Monument, earning the princely salary of one dollar per month well into the 1920s.

Alex and Cedar scamper up “Otto’s Route” on Independence Monument, rating it solid 5.9, as they marvel over the holes and steps carved in the rock so long ago. As Alex later reported, “I thought it was an amazing route—historic and fun.”

Riding their hybrids (crosses between road and mountain bikes) into Utah, they get lost on the way to the Fisher Towers. Much of
the comedy of the film spins off the still somewhat rudimentary skills of the “goofy duo” as cyclists.

The Fisher Towers are the epitome of choss. Alex and Cedar set their sights on the Titan, the tallest of the several pinnacles—in fact, it’s the tallest freestanding tower in the United States. The route they choose, called Finger of Fate, was put up more than half a century ago by the legendary Layton Kor, who rated it 5.8 A2. It’s one of the great classic lines in the Southwest, but it’s seldom climbed free, because it goes only at 5.12d.

On film, gazing up at the Titan, Alex intones, “Choss is like the inclusive term for all things bad about rock climbing.” Cedar chimes in: “It’s like crazy melted wax. Petrified candles.” Alex: “It’s really beautiful to look at, but really frightening to climb.” On the route, as they come across antiquated bolts the likes of which they’ve never seen before, they chalk it up to a “history lesson.”

And then the wind—the predictable bane of hiking and climbing in the Southwest in the spring—starts lashing the spire. The partners have to scream to communicate. The rope trailing behind them sails out horizontally across the face. On the summit, Alex stares into the camera and pronounces, “It’s kind of apocalyptic. The world could be ending around us. And we are”—he searches for the word—“shell-shocked.”

The canny skill of Cedar’s filmmaking comes to the fore in scenes such as these. What could easily be played as epic melodrama comes across—suffering and all—as antic fun. Everything is part of the game. In their scariest and tiredest moments, the guys still keep tongues firmly in cheeks.

Looking back on the journey half a year later, however, Alex remembers a more serious mood that haunted the road trip as he and Cedar pedaled onward through the night. Three days into
Sufferfest 2
, they got the news about Sean “Stanley” Leary’s death while BASE jumping in Zion. Stanley had been Alex’s frequent partner
and good friend, but he had been even closer to Cedar—had in fact been the mentor who taught Cedar how to climb.

As Alex explains, “We found out about his death after we rapped off the Finger of Fate. The film crew had hung around to tell us the news, so as soon as we got down off the Titan and were about to pull our rappel ropes, Hayden Kennedy came up and told us what had happened in Zion. Cedar was super-choked. He threw some things around and cursed a lot. I was a lot more subdued, but I was pretty choked myself.

“We all hiked out together and talked a lot about life and loss. We decided that we would carry on to the next destination and keep on going with the Sufferfest, rather than bail to Zion to participate in the grieving and the body recovery. So we ate some dinner in camp, talking more about all these things, then Cedar and I got on our bikes and rode the fifteen miles west to Castleton Tower. It was cold and dark and it was just the two of us riding under the stars. Dark and stark in the desert. We’d spent all day getting worked with the cold wind and scary climbing, so we were feeling fragile anyway. So it felt like a really powerful thing to be questing through the night together, ruminating on what Stanley should have done differently and what it all meant.

“The desert is sort of a reflective place anyway—that’s why Jesus went there to do his heavy thinking. The loneliness, the darkness, the bleakness. It’s a poignant place to think about mortality and the meaning of life. Not that we came up with anything profound, other than the fact that Stanley would have kept climbing, and so would we. And that we wished he hadn’t been a BASE jumper.”

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Cedar and Alex climb Castleton Tower and then push onward to Monument Basin, where they get sandbagged on a weird leaning tower called the Shark’s Fin. A friend named Rob Pizem had recommended
the route. As Cedar complains in the film, “What he said was, ‘You should do it, it’s a super-fun, easy route.’ What he should have said was, ‘It’s a lot of hard, overhanging climbing, and you could die.’” Alex: “Next time I see him, I’m going to punch him in the nose.” Alex and Cedar were able to climb most of the spires in around one hour each. The Shark’s Fin took about six.

For days on end, the wind never lets up. Some of the best footage captures the guys biking through dust storms, or collapsed on the ground, trying to rub the sand out of their eyes. “Who needs Patagonia,” asks Cedar rhetorically, “when you can come to the desert in the spring?” By now the adventure has become an homage to extreme fatigue, as Alex and Cedar beg each other for a rest day. Forty-five towers in three weeks, of course, is an arbitrary goal, but so was the Triple Crown in under twenty-four hours. So the pair stick with the program.

Alex falls off his bike in the night and incurs a really nasty scrape on his right buttock. Fodder for more comic footage. The guys bike west to climb the twin Sixshooter peaks near Indian Creek and find superb crack climbing on Bridger Jack Mesa. Good rock instead of choss at last, but one of the scariest pitches of all comes in a body-size squeeze chimney that Alex leads near the summit of North Sixshooter. “This is awesome,” Alex announces, and Cedar rubber-stamps the pitch as “legitimately super-hardcore.”

Into New Mexico to climb the isolated volcanic dike of Shiprock, sacred to the Navajo. As Cedar steps off the dirt road to take a leak, he discovers a tiny black puppy in the ditch. It’s a classic “Rez dog,” abandoned by its owner. The roly-poly dog becomes the team mascot, following the men throughout the rest of the trip and earning its nickname of Sufferpup. Cedar holds the stupefied dog in his hands, shaking it as he brays, “I’m a bear! I’m a bear!” The men fashion a kennel out of a Tecate twelve-pack box, to be transported in the camera crew’s car.

As they had the previous year, Alex and Cedar meet their self-imposed challenge of forty-five towers in twenty-one days. But the levity of the film tends to disguise just how serious the climbing gets at times. In
Sufferfest 2
, the guys do almost no free soloing. You don’t free solo on choss, Alex’s manic pranks in Chad notwithstanding. One of the last towers the two climb is called the Whale, the quintessence of choss. Alex knocks loose huge chunks of sandstone as he leads, and the camera follows the plunging rocks as they strike ledges and burst apart, taking more pieces of the tower with them. “One of the most disgusting things I’ve done,” comments Alex about the climb.

Unlike
Sufferfest 1
, the desert film now turns to its more serious rationale, which Alex previews by pointing out, “Our trip is probably easier than most people’s lives.”

They’re done with climbing. Now the purpose of the voyage transforms into public service, as Alex and Cedar go to work on their solar-energy project on the Navajo Reservation near Monument Valley. They team up with Eagle Energy, a domestic offshoot of a nonprofit called Elephant Energy, whose main business is in Namibia. (Since there are no elephants in Arizona, the company adopted the eagle for its Southwestern program.) Further support comes from Goal Zero, The North Face, Clif Bar, and Alex’s own Honnold Foundation.