Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (3 page)

On September 19, I free soloed both Astroman and the Rostrum. I’d climbed both routes before roped up with partners, but I couldn’t say that I had either route dialed. I was glad that day to find no one else on either climb. I didn’t tell anybody beforehand what I was going to try. I just showed up and did them. They went really well—I felt in control the whole way on both climbs. In my “bible,” I noted only

I added a smiley face after Astroman, but no other comments.

That evening I called a friend (it might have been Chris Weidner) and told him about my day. That’s how the word got out. I’ll admit that the double solo stirred up a certain buzz in the Valley (as climbers call Yosemite), but only among the hardcore locals. In my mind, the fact that I did both routes in one day, just as Peter Croft had, wasn’t particularly significant. What was significant was committing to doing them at all. And succeeding gave me the confidence to start imagining even bigger free solos.

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Five months later, in February 2008, I drove to Indian Creek in southern Utah. The Creek is a mecca of short, beautiful cracks on solid Wingate sandstone. I was in terrific form there, climbing roped up with various partners. I onsighted the hardest routes, getting up them on my first try without falling. Routes up to 5.13b or c. But I’d been climbing so much, I’d developed a bad case of tendinitis in my left elbow. At first I didn’t even know what was wrong—I thought I’d hurt my biceps from sheer overuse. But at the Creek, after only two or three pitches, the pain was so intense I’d have to shut it down. One day on, then two days off. I’d go mountain biking with my friend Cedar Wright, just trying to mix it up. But it drove me crazy not to be able to climb more.

Weirdly enough, by contributing to my general angst, the tendinitis was good for Moonlight Buttress. It takes a certain hunger to be motivated to go do something big. At the Creek, I was so fit and climbing so well, but I was also hungry to do more, because I had to limit my days on rock to a lot fewer than I wanted.

And Moonlight Buttress was a project I’d been dreaming of for years, ever since Bill Ramsey and I had climbed it a few years before. Which is why I found myself in Zion, sitting in my van all day in the rain on March 30 and 31, 2008, visualizing everything that could possibly happen on that amazing route the next day.

All the soloing I had done during the previous several years had taught me the value of preparation. But I’d never prepared for a free solo as diligently as I did for Moonlight. Rehearsing the moves on toprope for two days until I had every sequence lodged in my memory was crucial, but so were those days of just sitting and thinking. Imagining every placement of each hand and foot all the way up the huge route. Visualizing everything that could happen. . . . In a real sense, I performed the hard work of that free solo during the days leading up to it. Once I was on the climb, it was just a matter of executing.

The dampness and sandiness of the lower part of the wall had addled me somewhat. And at first, I was confused as to whether I was actually on-route. I wasn’t truly scared—just hesitant and uncertain. In retrospect, I think I projected my anxiety about the whole project, as I’d sat in my van visualizing it for two days, onto the start of the climb. Now I was driven upward by pure excitement, which always has an edge of anxiety about it.

The second pitch is a clean splitter crack, and once I got onto that, I knew I was on-route. There’s really only one line to the summit. And after that second pitch, the rock dried out and the sandiness pretty much disappeared. As I climbed higher, I steadily gained confidence. The 5.11c rightward traverse on the third pitch went like clockwork. By the time I got to the Rocker Blocker ledge, it was “Game on!” I was making the moves with what felt like perfect execution.

As I started off the Rocker Blocker toward the tricky boulder problem, the scenario of coming off and trying to stick the ledge was in the back of my mind. But I was moving efficiently, and as soon as I made the little upward lurch and seized the crucial handhold, I knew I wouldn’t come off. My confidence surged even higher.

Above the Rocker Blocker, I started up the 180-foot 5.12d
inside corner that’s the crux of the whole route. That stern rating doesn’t derive from any single particularly hard move, but from the strenuous continuity of the whole thing. And here’s where my preparation paid off. I started up the corner stemming—placing the edges of my feet carefully on tiny wrinkles of sandstone on either side of the central crack, then moving smoothly upward from one hold to the next. The wall here is dead vertical, so you have to gauge those holds precisely. But I remembered every one from my toprope rehearsal. Also, as I had expected, the wall here, which is protected from the rain by a small roof far above, was totally dry.

I was able to rest here and there on small holds as I stemmed up the first eighty feet of the corner. But then I had to shift from stemming to liebacking. Now I grabbed the edge of the crack with both hands, leaned back to the left, and walked my feet up the opposite wall till the soles of my shoes were only two feet below my lower hand. Liebacking feels somewhat unnatural. The whole key to moving upward is the stability provided by the pull with your hands counterbalancing the push with your feet. The position you’re in is almost like sitting in a rowing shell and pulling hard on the oars. You methodically alternate feet and hand movements as you inch up the crack. Yes, it’s strenuous, but a clean lieback feels solid and secure. If the edges of the crack aren’t sharp or are flared outward, though, or the wall you place your feet on is too slick, liebacking is pretty scary. You feel like you could pop loose and plunge toward the void in an involuntary backflip. But if you don’t get your feet high enough, they can slip off and your hands holding the crack become worthless. Either way, you’re headed down.

The trick of that last hundred feet in the corner is not to let the overall pump get to you. You can’t lieback forever, because the strain on your arms keeps mounting. That’s what “pump” is all about. If you get too pumped, you simply can’t hold on any longer.
If I’d been climbing with a rope, or even with a harness and some gear, I could always have clipped in to something, hung for a while, and regained the strength in my arms. Bad style, of course, but better than coming off. But free soloing, I had no choice. I needed to get to the top of the corner before the pump took over.

By now I was in full game-on mode, so I scurried up the corner as well as I had on toprope rehearsal. Didn’t even come close to losing it. My only concession to the airiness of being up there without a rope or gear was that I cranked my feet a little higher than I had on my two toprope rehearsals. That meant more arm-pump, but it felt a bit more secure.

The three pitches above the crux are rated 5.12a, 5.12a, and 5.12b—pretty darned hard, but well within my abilities. In fact, those pitches follow a perfect finger crack. It was here that the true glory of free soloing came home to me. Sticking my first digits into the crack, I turned them slightly into perfect fingerlocks, and I felt bomber. At any given moment, I had only a tiny amount of skin inside the crack—like half of two fingers—and my toes weren’t on holds, but just pasted to the wall. So little of my body was actually touching the rock. There was air all around me. I felt like I was stepping into the void, and yet it was an amazing sensation. I was one hundred percent certain I wouldn’t fall off, and that certainty was what kept me from falling off.

And here, though I didn’t pause to look around and take in the view, the beauty of Zion came home. The whole world of the canyon is all red and green—red for the rocks, green for the forest. There’s the Virgin River winding so far below. No traffic sounds, that far up. Just peace and quiet.

A final 5.10d pitch leads to the summit, tough enough in its own right. But I climbed it as smoothly as the pitches just before. All the feelings of vague doubt I had on starting up the route had vanished.

Almost before I knew it, I stood on top of the cliff. I checked my time against the iPod. One hour and twenty-three minutes. It was the speed record, as well as the first free solo ascent.

Standing there, as I unlaced my shoes, I was superpsyched. Though I still had to hike down barefoot (rock shoes are so tight that it’s excruciating to hike in them), then circle back around and wade the river again to get my approach shoes and pack (it’s never smooth sailing off into the rainbow), I was totally jazzed. During that hour and twenty-three minutes, I’d climbed as well as I ever had in my life.

O
N APRIL 1, 2008
, no one witnessed Alex’s climb of Moonlight Buttress. As with Astroman and the Rostrum, Alex had told no one what he was planning to do, though he had confided in Chris Weidner that the free solo was something he’d
like
to do sometime. Now, after the climb, he called Weidner and told him about his glorious day. Weidner told others, and the news spread like wildfire.

Because the climb had taken place on April Fools’ Day, a substantial portion of the climbing cognoscenti wondered at first whether the whole thing was a joke, or even a hoax. But within days, the tide had swung in favor of Alex’s veracity.

On the website Supertopo.com, climbers who understood the magnitude of the ascent weighed in. “Holy living f#ck!” wrote one. “Unreal,” blogged another. “Just the thought gives me chills.” There were also commenters who saluted the climb as inspirational: “Amazing accomplishment, Alex. Reading this post motivated me to push way harder today than I would have otherwise.” And those who knew about Alex’s previous solos of the Rostrum and Astroman tipped their caps: “That is unbelievable. . . . I would have said
impossible, but since it has Alex’s name on it . . . just insane.” And: “Congrats on the send. . . . keep crankin’!”

On April 6, Jeff Lowe, who with Mike Weis had made the first ascent of Moonlight Buttress way back in 1971, posted on Supertopo that he had always known that the route would go free, and he had attempted to free it before Peter Croft and Johnny Woodward beat him to the prize in 1992. “But I never saw far enough into the crystal-ball,” Lowe added, “to foresee Alex’s inspired leap of faith. . . . Great job, Alex. Always take care, as I know you do.”

Along with this encomium from one of America’s stellar climbing pioneers, for the first time a larger media world, including the directors at Sender Films, sat up and took notice. A new phenom of the climbing world had emerged on the stage.

At twenty-two, Alex Honnold was just getting started.

CHAPTER
TWO

A VERY PRIVATE HELL

Once I told Chris Weidner
about Moonlight Buttress, I should have known the word would get out fast. He lives in Boulder, after all, right in the thick of the climbing scene.

I didn’t anticipate, though, the explosion of postings on the Internet about the climb. I went online to check them out. My first reaction was surprise. Oh, wow, I’m in print! That’s cool. Somebody had even dug up a photo of me climbing. That’s my photo! I bragged to myself.

There was also, of course, the undercurrent of posters who wondered whether the free solo of Moonlight Buttress was an April Fools’ joke. But one thing I’ve always appreciated about the climbing community, after so many of my climbs by now have gone undocumented by film or photos or unverified by witnesses, is that people have taken me at my word. In April 2008, no one on the Internet was accusing me of perpetrating a hoax. If the free solo of Moonlight Buttress was bogus, it was some poster who was lying about it—goofing on the credulity of the Supertopo audience, maybe.

I still could not have imagined ever becoming a sponsored professional
climber. If I got a little notoriety, I just hoped that maybe some gear company would give me a free pair of rock shoes.

The tendinitis in my left elbow hadn’t gotten any better. If anything, all the work I’d done rehearsing the moves on Moonlight Buttress and then free soloing it had probably made the condition worse.

I finally realized I had to knock off climbing for a while to let my elbow heal. That’s how I ended up spending the summer in the Sierra Nevada, doing long hikes and loops on big mountains like the Evolution Traverse. It involved a lot of scrambling, but as long as I could do it in tennies, I figured it didn’t count as real climbing. Meanwhile, I was getting into great shape.

Recently a journalist asked me if I could stop climbing for stretches at a time. “Sure,” I answered.

“You mean you could go for, say, a month without climbing?” he asked.

“Hell, no!” I blurted out. “Not a month! I thought you meant three days.”

That’s just the way it is with me. No matter what else I’ve turned my attention to over the years, nothing seems as interesting as climbing. I can’t do without it, even though by now I’ve been climbing in one way or another for almost twenty years straight.

That whole summer in the High Sierra, the idea of free soloing the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome floated around inside my head. It’s such an iconic formation, one of the most striking thrusts of sheer granite anywhere in North America, and I’d always loved the way it dominates the whole east end of the Valley.

By 2008, Yosemite had become my favorite climbing area in the world. Some climbers are drawn to towers and pinnacles, others to complex ridges. What I love is big, clean faces, and they don’t get any better than the ones in Yosemite—especially El Capitan and Half Dome. You stand at the base of El Cap and look up its 2,700-foot precipice, and you just say, “Wow!”

Granite is also my favorite kind of rock. And that’s what Yosemite is made of—more clean, sweeping walls of granite than anywhere else in North America.