Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (7 page)

I climbed almost in a daze. I knew what to do; I just tried not to think about it too much. I didn’t think about the next hard pitches
above. I didn’t think about the 5.11+ slab on top, a pitch above the Zig-Zags. I just moved steadily between small fingerlocks up the steep dihedral. The crux of the first Zig-Zag felt much easier than it had two days before, probably because now I had the sequence dialed. Every hold felt crisp and perfect, and I pulled really hard.

The second pitch of the Zig-Zags flew by in a frenzy of hand jams and hero liebacking. The climbing was secure enough that I could relax and enjoy it. With every zag of the crack, I found myself handjamming over big protruding blocks, the base of the wall almost 2,000 feet below me, the Valley floor itself 4,000 feet below. The pitch was a delight, compared to the thin liebacks above and below.

Handjamming is another essential technique for the rock climber, and it’s surprising that it took many decades to invent. If a vertical crack is between about two and five inches wide, but there are no edges inside it to grasp with the fingers, you can still use it for a hold, by inserting the whole hand, then flexing it to fit the crack, either by making a fist or by arching the back of the hand against the straightened fingers. Your hand acts like a wedge that you can put your whole weight on. Jamming is tough on the knuckles, and guys bent on a hard day of crack climbing will tape their hands to minimize the damage. I’ve never been into tape myself, though, mainly because my skin is so naturally resilient—I don’t tend to suffer from the little cuts and scrapes that other climbers do.

I stopped again for a minute below the last Zig-Zag. I felt good but wanted to be sure I didn’t get pumped. On a rope, you’re forced to rest at least fifteen minutes per pitch while you belay. But when you solo, you never have to stop, so I force myself to pause at stances and relax, just to make sure I don’t get ahead of myself. After a two-minute breather, I set out up the undercling lieback feature, a slight variation on the original aid line. The undercling
is somewhat pumpy but only 5.11c, not terribly difficult compared to the original corner, which is supposedly 5.12+ (though I’ve never tried it). The real crux of the variation is making blind gear placements in the flaring crack. But since I wasn’t placing gear, I was doing the pitch the “easy way.”

Still, it was another pitch of insecure liebacking, with both feet pasted against a smooth granite wall and flared jams for my fingers. Again, as on the whole rest of the route, the crux of the pitch was an extra-thin section. I knew exactly what to do and hurried through it. The nearly two thousand feet of climbing below me were beginning to take their toll. I was finding it harder and harder to give the climbing my complete attention. Part of me just wanted to get the climb over with.

With the last Zig-Zag below me, I was soon walking across Thank God Ledge, the amazing sliver of rock that traverses out from beneath the Visor, only about 200 feet shy of the summit. I could hear noises from above and knew lots of people would be up top on this perfect late summer morning. The easy Cable route up the other side of Half Dome is one of the most popular hikes in the Valley, culminating in a fifty-five-degree slab on which the National Park Service has installed a pair of metal cords to use like handrails. On a warm sunny day like this one, there’s a nonstop procession of hikers lined up on the cables like airport travelers in a taxi queue.

I could hear the chatter of the tourists on top, but no heads peered over the edge. I was glad no one was watching.

I walked across Thank God Ledge as a matter of pride. I had walked its thirty-five-foot length before, but I’d also crawled or hand-traversed it. It’s less than a foot wide at its narrowest, with the wall above bulging ever so slightly at one point. But I didn’t want to taint my solo ascent—I had to do this correctly. (Incidentally, walking Thank God Ledge is another of those things that’s
quite a bit easier with no harness, rope, gear, or pack hanging off you. The balance is more natural.) The first few steps were completely normal, as if I was walking on a narrow sidewalk in the sky. But once it narrowed, I found myself inching along, facing out with my body glued to the wall, shuffling my feet and maintaining perfect posture. I could have looked down and seen my pack sitting at the base of the route 1,800 feet below, but it would have pitched me headfirst off the wall. The ledge ends at a short squeeze chimney that guards the beginning of the final slab to the summit.

I paused for a moment beneath the ninety-foot slab, looked up to see if anyone was watching (still no one), and started up. The first few moves are easy enough, on somewhat positive holds with good feet. As you get higher, the holds disappear and the feet shrink. Two days earlier, I’d considered two sections “cruxy.” The first involved a step-through onto a miserly smear, while the second, thirty feet higher, involved a few moves of shitty hands and feet before reaching a “jug”—a big, positive edge I could wrap my fingers around that marked the end of the hard climbing, sixty feet up the pitch.

I also knew that it was this slab that had thwarted Higbee and Erickson’s attempt to climb the whole route free. So close to the summit, they’d had to use aid to surmount the last obstacle. Perhaps that should have given me pause.

I hardly noticed the first crux. I cruised right through it, feeling pretty good about myself. Twenty feet of thin cord hung from one of the bolts. I very briefly considered running the cord under my thumb—not weighting it but having it there just in case. But that felt suspiciously like cheating.

I climbed into the upper crux, feeling good about doing things legit. And then I ground to a halt. I’d expected to find some sort of different hold or sequence from the one I’d used two days earlier, which had felt pretty desperate, but perhaps I’d done it wrong. This time, in the same position on the same holds, I realized there
were no better options. I had a moment of doubt . . . or maybe panic. It was hard to tell which. Although I’d freed the pitch maybe two other times the year before, I could remember nothing of the sequence or holds, perhaps because there aren’t any.

A gigantic old oval carabiner hung from a bolt about two inches above the pathetic ripple that was my right handhold. I alternated back and forth, chalking up my right hand and then my left, switching feet on marginal smears to shake out my calves. I couldn’t make myself commit to the last terrible right-foot smear I needed to snag the jug. I’d stalled out in perhaps the most precarious position of the whole route. I considered grabbing the biner. With one pull, I’d be up and off.

Tourists’ oblivious laughter spilled over the lip. Tons of people were up top. I was in a very private hell.

I stroked the biner a few times, fighting the urge to grab it but also thinking how foolish it would be to die on a slab, sliding and bouncing almost 2,000 feet to my death, when I could so easily save myself. My calves were slowly getting pumped. I knew I should do something soon, since treading water was only wearing me out. Downclimbing never occurred to me—I was going up (it was just a matter of how high) one way or another. But now, real fear seized me. Once again, I took a deep breath, studied the holds in front of me, and tried to think rationally about what I had to do.

Although I never wanted to be on that slab in the first place, I had to finish what I’d started without invalidating my ascent. Finally, I compromised. I kept my hand on the pathetic ripple but straightened my right index finger just enough for the tip of my last pad to rest on the bottom of the oval. My thought was, if my foot blew, I could snatch the biner with one finger and check my fall.

I smeared my foot, stood up, and grabbed the jug. No problem. I was delivered, free from my little prison, where I’d stood silently for a good five minutes. And I hadn’t cheated by grabbing the biner.

I took the final 5.7 slab to the summit at a near run. Twenty or more hikers sat on the edge of the precipice, witnessing my final charge. But no one said a word. No yells, no pictures, nothing. Maybe they thought I was a lost hiker. Maybe they couldn’t conceive of where I’d come from, or maybe they just didn’t give a shit. When I mantled onto the actual top, I was met with a flood of humanity, a hundred-odd people spread across the summit plateau. Tourists ate lunch next to me. They made out, took scenic photos. People everywhere.

It was so weird. Like parachuting out of Vietnam into a shopping mall.

I was shirtless, pumped, panting. Psyched out of my mind. Flooded with conflicting emotions. I was embarrassed that I’d gotten scared on the slab. But I was thrilled beyond words to have finally done something that I’d been thinking about for months. Ashamed of myself for maybe pushing it a little further than I’d planned. Yet still proud of myself.

On the summit, part of me wished that someone, anyone, had noticed that I’d just done something noteworthy—though maybe it was better that I didn’t have to talk to anybody. How could I have expressed what my last few hours had been like? It was enough that I knew.

I didn’t make a sound. I took off my shoes and started hiking down the Cable route. It was only then that someone noticed. “Oh, my God,” this dude blurted out. “You’re hiking barefoot! You’re so tough!”

D
ESPITE ASCENDING AT A
“
SLOW JOG
” rather than a “sprint,” Alex completed the 2,000-foot climb, which spans twenty-three pitches for roped climbers, in the unthinkably short
time of two hours and fifty minutes. Seven years later, no one else has seriously contemplated, let alone attempted, a free solo of the Regular Northwest Face on Half Dome.

Along with the outpouring of incredulous and wacky shout-outs on sites such as Supertopo.com, there was praise of the highest order from the peers who could best appreciate the magnitude of Alex’s free solo. John Long, one of the original Stonemasters whom a younger Alex had regarded as a hero, commented, “There isn’t anything else I can think of that requires that level of concentration, for that length of time, with the penalty being certain death if you make the tiniest mistake.”

Sender Films got in touch with Alex, proposing to craft a twenty-two-minute film around reenactments of the Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome solos.
Alone on the Wall
would win prizes at mountain festivals all over North America and Europe, and turn Alex from a climbing prodigy into a minor celebrity.

None of this, however, went to Alex’s head. “In the days after Half Dome,” he reported, “any huge sense of gratification eluded me. I felt like I had kind of botched the climb. I’d gotten away with something. It wasn’t a perfect performance.”

In his climbing bible, he jotted his usual laconic entry to document the trailblazing free solo, downgrading the route even as he recorded it.

Alex closed the note with a sad-face emoticon, and the query to himself: “Do better?”

CHAPTER
THREE

FEAR AND LOVING IN LAS VEGAS

A
S ALEX BEGAN TO WIN
a small measure of fame for his bold free solos, he started to taste the rewards of sponsorship. The first company to put him on board, through the championing of his climbing buddy Brad Barlage, was Black Diamond, the Utah-based firm that manufactures high-tech climbing gear as well as ski equipment and outdoor apparel. In the years to follow, Alex would win sponsorship from La Sportiva, Clif Bar, New England Ropes, and, most important, The North Face, whose “dream team” (officially known as the Global Team athletes) constitutes a roster of stellar rock climbers and mountaineers that is the envy of young aspirants worldwide. In 2014, the Ball Watch company, whose wristwatches fetch prices upwards of $2,500, ran full-page ads in the
New York Times Magazine
featuring a photo of Alex standing on Half Dome’s Thank God Ledge, accompanied by the claim, “With no ropes and no protective gear, there is simply no room for error. That’s why a dependable timepiece like Ball Watch is important in an environment with truly adverse conditions.” Alex endorsed the product with the pithy phrase, “The
watch that rocks,” even though he never wears a watch of any kind on his wrist when he climbs.

In 2008, Boulder-based Sender Films, founded nine years earlier by Peter Mortimer as a bare-bones do-it-yourself video company, took notice of Alex. By then, Sender was putting out adventure films that were as well crafted and authentic as anything of their kind produced in this country or abroad. As Mortimer recalls, “We were hanging out in Yosemite a lot. Alex’s solos of the Rostrum and Astroman were on our radar. We always have our ear to the ground, hoping to find the next hot young climber. Then when he soloed Moonlight Buttress, he really got our attention.”

Mortimer adds, “Everybody else in our business was cranking out films about bouldering and sport climbing. I wasn’t so interested in that. What I wanted to film was ‘danger climbing’—big walls, big-range mountaineering on the cutting edge, and of course free soloing.” For a new film titled
The Sharp End
, Mortimer and partner Nick Rosen enlisted a corps of strong young American rock climbers and set out for the Adršpach, a massif of steep sandstone towers just inside the Czech Republic near the German border, where it merges with the legendary Elbsandsteingebirge. (The “sharp end” is climbing jargon for going first on the rope, as the leader typically takes all the serious risks.)

The Sharp End
is a glorious smorgasbord of wild exploits performed by adventurers in the United States and Europe. The episodes include trad “death routes” (extremely deficient in protection) in Eldorado Canyon near Boulder; long and sketchy aid climbing routes in Yosemite; alpine ventures on untouched spires in the Shafat Fortress of India; wingsuit BASE jumping off precipices in Switzerland; and free soloing, though the star in the film is not Alex but Steph Davis, who solves the 5.10+ Pervertical Sanctuary on the Diamond on Colorado’s Longs Peak. Alex’s role in the film is little more than a cameo appearance, but it dramatically foreshadows the
stardom toward which he was headed. In fact, Sender chose for its movie jacket a still photo of Alex leading a desperate-looking pitch.