Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (26 page)

In 2013, Eagle Energy had distributed small-scale solar systems through local entrepreneurs near Tuba City, also on the reservation. There’s an additional educational component, as Eagle teaches kids about solar energy. What Alex and Cedar do in March 2014 is to hook up the houses and hogans of elderly and impoverished Navajos free of charge, as a way of demonstrating to the community that solar “works.” In the film, the two climbers clamber across rooftops fitting their panels, then turn on lights inside the dwellings, as the faces of the residents beam with wonderment and surprise.

The work on the reservation fits Alex’s broader environmentalist outlook. As he puts it, “You can take tiny little steps toward a bigger objective. With small efforts like our Navajo project, you can slowly work toward the bigger goals of transitioning to a carbon neutral world and lifting people out of poverty. Things that seem prohibitively hard when you look at the scale of the total problem, but more reasonable once you start to chip away at it.”

Seven months after their desert ramble, Cedar’s twenty-six-minute film,
Sufferfest 2
, dedicated to Sean “Stanley” Leary (“our guru in suffering”), wins the People’s Choice Award at the prestigious Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival. Cedar is delighted, even overwhelmed by the honor. He also feels that all the hard work he’d put in to make the film is validated by the award.

Sufferfest 2
, indeed, is a gem. Audiences laugh and cheer as they watch it, and when it’s over, they’re left wanting more. Above all, the film is a vivid testimony to friendship. Close friendship to begin with, made stronger and more lasting by adversity, uncertainty, risk, and—yes, the absurd point of it all—suffering in all its glory.

Four months after our biking
and climbing marathon in the Southwest, Dave Allfrey and I teamed up in Yosemite for what we called the “7 in 7” challenge. The idea was Dave’s, or at least it was suggested to him by a couple of friends. The challenge was to try to climb seven different routes on El Cap in seven days. It would be a gigantic test not only of our ability to simul-climb and jug efficiently but also of our stamina. Once Dave proposed it, I was all in.

Dave is the same age as I am, but he has a lot more experience than I do with alpine and big-range mountaineering. He’s also a much better aid climber than I am, and that would be vital on our
7 in 7 campaign. He loves to remind me that he holds more El Cap speed records than I do, owing to the fact that he’s climbed so many of the hard aid lines. In fact, I’m a pretty terrible aid climber. I’ve only hammered three pitons in my life—in the spring of 2014 on those rotten desert towers—and I have no idea how to place copperheads.

Dave and I had climbed together a fair amount in Yosemite before 2014. On El Cap, we’d teamed up to set speed records on three different routes—Excalibur, Lunar Eclipse, and the West Buttress.

On July 2, 2014, we headed up our first route, New Jersey Turnpike—the hardest of the seven, rated 5.10 A4. Unfortunately, the Valley was in the midst of a heat wave, and the temps got up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit each day. That just made everything harder.

On the Turnpike, we played to our strengths: I led all the free and mixed pitches, Dave led all the aid. Instead of the normal start, we chose the El Nino variation, which has some stiff 5.13b slab climbing on it. We chose this alternate start because we thought I could French free 13b faster than Dave could climb the A4 on the standard start. And it seemed like way more fun. Turns out it was pretty run-out, and I took a huge thirty-foot whipper on the first hard pitch, but after that I managed to squeak through.

The crux came high on the route, where Dave took the lead on back-to-back A4 pitches on nasty black diorite. A4 (on the scale that runs from A0 to A5) is serious. It means your gear is pretty crappy, and if you rip one piece there’s a chance you’ll rip a whole series. At worst, you’d take a long fall and have to count on your partner’s belay and anchor to stop you.

Here Dave came into his element, as he gingerly moved through loose rocks, sharp flakes, bad rivets (shallow boltlike doodads
driven only far enough into the rock to hold your body weight), and old copperheads left in place by previous parties. Each pitch took Dave forty-five minutes to lead. After that, we got back onto the more typical orange-and-white granite of El Cap. I led the rest of the way, including an infamous poorly protected 5.9 pitch led by Ron Kauk on the first ascent in 1977. We topped out in twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes—more than an hour and a half faster than the previous speed record.

Trying to beat the worst of the heat, we started each climb at 4:00 a.m. Even though we tried to go to bed each evening by 7:30 p.m., it never felt like we got enough sleep. Already on the morning of July 3, we were tired from the previous day’s effort.

Our second route was Tangerine Trip, a slightly shorter line on the southeast face of El Cap. It’s not super-hard—rated at 5.8 A2. I felt like I was getting into the swing of things, leading free and mixed pitches pretty efficiently. We got up the Trip in nine hours and twenty-eight minutes, also a new speed record. And on the third day we did Eagle’s Way in seven hours and fifty-six minutes—our third speed record in a row.

Part of what made 7 in 7 so grueling was that after each ascent, we had to hike down the East Ledges, nearly 3,000 feet to the Valley floor, then circle around to our car. Dave had a bad night after Eagle’s Way. As he later wrote for Alpinist, “I awoke in the night with numb fingers and a pain in my left hand and elbow. The ache kept me awake for several hours, stealing much-needed sleep. Luckily the pain receded with icing.”

Fortunately, in the morning Dave was still game to continue our quest. On July 5, our fourth day, we climbed the Nose. Of course we had no intention of going for the speed record there—after all, it had taken a lightning blitz by Hans Florine and me to set the record of 2:23:46 in 2012. Climbing well, Dave and I got up the Nose in five and a quarter hours. Since that was our fastest
route so far, it gave us the luxury of a much-needed afternoon of rest. Down on the Valley floor, we spent several hours hydrating, eating, and soaking our hands and legs in the Merced River. Then we headed to our friend Ken Yager’s house in El Portal, just outside the national park, where we took showers, ate dinner, and crashed for the short night.

Lurking Fear and Zodiac were our next two objectives. They seemed pleasant and even easy compared to what we’d already done, and we dispatched them both in exactly five hours and five minutes. As Dave later told Climbing magazine, “It was just grinding out trade routes as fast as we could, getting down to the river to ice our hands and legs, eating and sleeping. Then getting up way too early to do it all again.”

On July 8, we faced the last of our seven routes, the Triple Direct. It’s rated 5.9 A1, not too severe, but it’s a long route—3,200 feet of climbing over thirty-five pitches if you tackled it in conventional style. As tired as we were, we wanted to try to set another speed record, and when we got to the top in five hours and fifteen minutes, we pulled it off. I’m sure the route could be climbed faster, but Dave said he was pretty pleased that after 173 guidebook pitches spread over the seven days, we still had the stamina and drive to improve on the fastest time.

Even though 7 in 7 wasn’t the ultimate feat of marathon Yosemite climbing, it was pretty gratifying. We got our partnership honed to close to perfection. As Dave later wrote in Alpinist,

Covering our 7 in 7 for Rock and Ice, Chris Parker asked me if I thought we could ever improve on that string of big-wall climbs. I answered, “I’m not sure how we would exactly. Of course I’ll want to do harder things in the future, but I definitely wouldn’t want to climb 10 in 7 or something. That would just be boring.”

For the moment, I’d had enough. “It’s been fun,” I told Parker, “but now that we’re done with the El Cap mission I’m going to become a sport climber again.”

A couple of days later, Cedar Wright phoned me for an interview for the North Face website. He asked some straight questions, such as what it was like to climb with Dave. I answered, “Awesome. Always motivated and always in high spirits. And more importantly, he’s probably one of the best aid climbers in the world. I don’t think a mission like this would have been possible with anybody else.”

Cedar knows all about speed climbing, but, playing the dutiful reporter, he asked me why I was drawn to it. “I think the thing that I like most,” I answered, “is how efficiently it all goes. Speed climbing forces you to trim all the waste out of your systems and to streamline all the processes. As a result, the climbing feels very smooth—and that’s a great feeling.”

Then Cedar stuck the needle in. “Why didn’t you guys do more difficult routes?” he deadpanned. I knew he was just trying to get my goat, but I gave him a straight answer: “We thought about ending with a hard aid line, possibly a route that had never been done in a day. But ultimately, it just seemed like more fun to finish the mission with Triple Direct and still be down in time to do a picnic in the meadow.”

Cedar wasn’t done with the needle. Now he asked me, “Have you found the contraband I stashed in your van yet from when I borrowed your wheels while you were in Europe?”

This for the normally straightforward and serious North Face
website! So I needled him back, “Other than the hideously disgusting throw pillows that you left on the bed, I don’t think there is any contraband in the van.”

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As I write these pages, I’m four months past my twenty-ninth birthday. Some folks have asked me whether I might have already reached my prime. After all, in professional sports, most athletes peak between about twenty-five and twenty-eight. That Roger Federer can still win a tennis tournament at age thirty-three is regarded as miraculous. A lot of baseball owners think that giving a pitcher or a shortstop who’s over thirty a long-term contract is a mistake. It’s a cruel reality, but the stats seem to back up those pessimistic assessments.

All it takes is the sudden arrival on the scene of a young hotshot to make you feel old. When I was climbing at Smith Rock in Oregon in the fall of 2010, a gang of top French climbers showed up. The prodigy in their ranks was a fifteen-year-old kid named Enzo Oddo. He’d already made a big splash in France, where he’d led seven 5.14d routes in the previous year. Too young to drive a car, he was chaperoned and belayed by his mother. He just seemed like a happy-go-lucky youngster having fun in the playground. But at Smith, he was climbing surely and beautifully.

I was twenty-five at the time. “Enzo’s the shit,” I told my friends admiringly. But watching him climb, I suddenly felt old. I remembered when I was that young kid on his way up.

I know there are plenty of folks—both friends and fans—who think I’m simply rolling the dice with my free soloing. As well as he knows me, and as fruitfully as we’ve worked together, Pete Mortimer talks about his doubts as to whether he should continue to film my solos. Last year he told a writer, “There’s a loud chorus out
there of people who are not comfortable with what Alex is doing. Even some of his partners think there’s a good chance he’s going to kill himself.”

When Stacey and I were first dating and I was teaching her to climb, she always said she wasn’t worried about me killing myself. “I feel Alex is totally in control,” she told a writer in 2010. But then one day she was watching me as I tried to onsight solo a 5.12a stem corner. I went up and down as I worked it out. Naturally, it was scary to watch. And scary to do, for that matter. After that, Stacey decided she didn’t want to watch that kind of stuff any more.

The odd thing is, it’s harder to watch free soloing than to do it.

I gave a talk at the Harvard Travellers Club in Boston in 2011. Mostly it amounted to screening Alone on the Wall. I was sitting next to a woman in the audience who asked me a question that nobody else had yet posed. “I know that you don’t get anxious when you’re free soloing,” she said. “But what’s it like to watch yourself solo on film?”

“My palms sweat,” I had to admit.

There have also been people, including several writers, who have wondered out loud whether my sponsors and the media are pushing me to keep risking my life. But I think they’re wrong. Nobody says to me, “Hey, Alex, can you go out and solo harder and harder routes?” Nobody wants me to solo, except me.

I probably can’t judge objectively whether, at twenty-nine, I’ve reached or even passed my prime. You tell a baseball or football player that he’s over the hill at thirty-two, and he’ll get blue in the face trying to prove he isn’t. But right now, I really do feel that I’m just coming into my best years. I think my finest climbs are still ahead of me. I haven’t yet pushed myself to the limit, but, even more important, I’ve still got a burning desire to climb that’s as intense as it ever was. There are so many great challenges out
there, on walls and peaks all over the world. I feel just the way I did when I dropped out of Berkeley at nineteen, that there’s nothing else in life that’s half as interesting as climbing.

So what are those challenges that might inspire me in the near future? For years now, everybody’s been talking about the first free solo of El Cap. I’ve thought about it for years myself. In my journals, as early as 2009, there are entries like “Check out Freerider,” or “Check out Golden Gate.” The problem with free soloing El Cap is that it’s so much bigger even than Half Dome, and there are no all-free routes easier than 5.12d. I’m not surprised that nobody has yet even attempted a free solo of El Cap. I think it’s possible, but you’d have to be really ready. You’d have to really want it. The hardest thing would be just getting off the ground. But it would be amazing.