The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  In the aftermath of his father’s passing, Alex became, in his words, “a born-again atheist.” Dierdre had been raised Catholic and had taken Alex and Stasia to mass a few times, but Alex knew that neither of his parents believed in God, and neither did he. Years later, when I asked him about his spirituality, he said, “All this talk about intelligent design—‘Like, wow, look how incredibly well designed the eyeball is’—that’s all bullshit. I’m totally happy ascribing it all to chance. You just need enough bits and random events and eventually crazy things happen.”

  That winter, when he wasn’t getting lost in video-game fantasy worlds, Alex thought about what might constitute a good life. It all boiled down to a few simple facts. He did not believe in an afterlife, which meant the most precious commodity he possessed was time. So how to spend his capital? Climbing was the one thing in his life that lit his fire. Nothing else inspired him, no other interests, not friends or girls, certainly not school. Climbing allowed him to get lost in the joy of the moment. And he was good at it. When he climbed, people noticed him.

  After only a week on the couch, he rode his bike to the climbing gym, where he tentatively tested how it felt to pull on his broken hand. Only his pinky and ring finger stuck out of the cast. It hurt when he pulled himself up the plastic holds with his two weakest fingers, but not enough to stop him. “Should you really be doing that?” people asked. “It’s no big deal,” Alex would reply. His wrist took months longer to heal than it should have.

  He was still climbing indoors on plywood walls covered in textured paint, a medium as far removed from the real world as the landscapes of Azeroth. But the books and magazines by his bedside showed a whole world beyond indoor climbing where a man could leave his mark. Alex devoured every new issue of Climbing and Rock and Ice and, like every other climber, saw that among all of the sport’s various disciplines, from indoor climbing to bouldering to high-altitude mountaineering, it was the free soloists like Henry Barber, John Bachar, Peter Croft, and Dean Potter who were lauded as climbing’s heroes. Alex watched videos like Masters of Stone, over and over, in which these guys climbed into the stratosphere on fairy-tale cliffs, clinging to existence with nothing but a few fingers and a sliver of boot rubber.

  One image in particular captured Alex’s imagination: a photo of John Bachar, sans rope, high off the deck on a steep and slippery Yosemite crack called New Dimensions. The photo was taken in 1982, six years after Bachar made history when he free soloed it for the first time—Yosemite’s first 5.11-rated free solo. The fingers on Bachar’s left hand are sunk into a crack that splits a soaring, vertical open book, three hundred feet above the ground. He leans into the left page of the book with his shoulder while his right hand tucks behind his back into his chalk bag. His left toe is boxed in the crack while the right is pasted against the opposite wall, blank but for a peppering of black lichen. He wears a pair of white track shorts with blue stripes on the hip and a red long-sleeve collared shirt. His wavy blond hair sticks out from under a backward-facing pinstriped train engineer’s cap. A thin mustache traces his firmly closed lips, which are neither smiling nor frowning. Piercing blue eyes look directly into the camera. He appears utterly relaxed and nonchalant, with more than a hint of arrogance in his expression; he stares you down like a street hooligan lounging against a lamppost on his home turf. It’s a photo that inspired a generation of climbers. A picture of a man unchained.

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  JOHN BACHAR GREW UP A few miles from Los Angeles International Airport in Westchester, California, in the 1960s and early ’70s. He was a precocious boy who excelled in both academics and sports. In high school he played baseball and tennis and was an all-conference pole-vaulter. Bachar dreamed of being an Olympian and trained for a few years under Joe Douglas, whose Santa Monica Track Club would go on to produce world record holders like Carl Lewis. But Bachar soon became disillusioned with the rigid structure of traditional sports, and while casting about for something new into which he could pour himself, he found his way to the graffiti-covered boulders at Stoney Point, a small climbing area in the hills north of Hollywood. On these rocks, Bachar, having no idea what he was doing, tested himself on the same short but strenuous boulder problems that iconic climbers like Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard had used as their training ground back in the 1950s and early ’60s.

  When he got his driver’s license, Bachar headed for Joshua Tree National Park, where he fell in with a group of hard-core climbers that included Rick Accomazzo, Richard Harrison, and a boisterous, muscle-bound high school senior named John Long. A few months before Bachar first arrived on the scene, these three ruffians were passing around a joint in Harrison’s basement in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, when one of them gave voice to an idea that had been marinating in the stew of their collective unconscious. The Stonemaster. No one remembers who said it, but “just mentioning the name was to conjure The Stonemaster himself and his lightning struck us right between the eyes,” wrote Long, in an essay describing that fateful night. The Stonemasters, a group of climbers that would forever change the trajectory of the sport of rock climbing, had just been born.

  Months later, Long was showing Bachar his Stonemaster bouldering circuit on the granite eggs that lay scattered around the Hidden Valley Campground in Joshua Tree when he stopped below a three-inch-wide crack splitting the west face of a hundred-foot-tall rock called the Old Woman.

  “Want to try something a bit bigger?” asked Long, pointing toward the route called Double Cross. Long was proposing “bouldering” a full-pitch rock climb or, in other words, free soloing it (a pitch is the distance one can climb in a single rope length; in the 1970s, most ropes were 150 feet long; today, 200 to 230 feet is standard).

  “No way,” said Bachar, who had never climbed more than a few body lengths above the ground without a rope. “That’s crazy.”

  “If you climbed this route a hundred times, how many times would you fall?” countered Long.

  Bachar thought about it for a bit and then replied, “None.”

  The climb, which turned out to be well within Bachar’s comfort zone, was a revelation. Without the encumbrance of ropes and hardware, the feeling that Bachar got on Double Cross was better than doing drugs. He would later say that Long’s question that day changed his life and that afterward, “there was just this weird twitch inside of me.”

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  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS a new climber learns is the numerical system used to grade the difficulty of routes. There are several different systems in use throughout the world. The American version is called the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS). It categorizes terrain into five classes. The encyclopedia of all things climbing, a book called Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, breaks the classes down as follows:

  Class 1: A hiking scramble to a rocky gradient; generally hands are not needed.

  Class 2: Involves some scrambling and likely use of hands; all but the most inexperienced and clumsy will not want a rope.

  Class 3: Moderate exposure may be present; simple climbing or scrambling with frequent use of hands. A rope should be available.

  Class 4: Intermediate climbing is involved and most climbers want a rope because of exposure. A fall could be serious or fatal.

  Class 5: Climbing involves use of a rope and natural or artificial protection (anchors in the rock) by the leader to protect against a serious fall.

  The five before the decimal point of a rock-climbing technical difficulty grade simply denotes that it is fifth-class, that is, roped climbing. In the 1950s, when the Sierra Club first developed the system, fifth class was originally envisioned as including ten subgrades from 0 to 9, denoted as 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, and so on. The 5.0 grade was assigned to the easiest fifth-class climb, and 5.9 given to the hardest, which at the time was a route at Tahquitz in Southern California called Open Book. However, it quickly became
apparent that a closed-ended system was not going to work because soon someone did a climb harder than Open Book, and then another climber bested that effort. So the system was revised and made open-ended. Then climbers began parsing the higher subgrades into easy, medium, and hard. So, for instance, 5.10 had three additional subdivisions: 5.10–, 5.10, and 5.10+. Eventually the pluses and minuses gave way to four increments of a, b, c, and d. Thus, 5.11a is only one tick harder than 5.10d and three ticks, or letter grades, less difficult than 5.11d. (In some cases, climbers have sliced it even thinner, e.g., 5.11b/c.)

  Climbing grades are inherently subjective. A tall person might be able to reach past a featureless section to a beefy handhold, where a shorter climber might have to make creative use of faint ripples in the rock while stabbing desperately for the same hold. But over time, a consensus develops around a particular climb’s difficulty, and the system is remarkably consistent from one climbing area to the next.

  Currently, the hardest sport climb in the world is a route called Silence in the Hanshelleren Cave in Flatanger, Norway. The climb was first envisioned and bolted by Adam Ondra in 2012, but it wasn’t until 2016 that he began projecting the route in earnest. The bolts are spaced a body length or two apart, which means he’d fall anywhere from ten to thirty feet when the climb spat him off—something that happened hundreds of times. He finally found success, after some fifty days of working the route, in September of 2017. Ondra has tentatively rated the climb 9c, a French grade, which translates to 5.15d on the YDS.

  So how difficult is a 5.15d? The YouTube video of the first ascent is worth watching. Ondra clings like an insect to an overhanging rock wall, angling out from the bottom of the cliff thirty or forty degrees beyond vertical. He climbs feet first, twisting his shoes into a flaring crack over his head. At the crux he winds himself into a Houdini-like contortion so extreme it’s a marvel he doesn’t tear his body apart. In the video’s voice-over, you can hear Ondra joking that he actually used his own arm as a foothold. Higher up, he springs from one tiny hold to the next, going momentarily weightless, then catching himself, barely, with the tips of his fingers each time. After a sequence of several such moves in succession he reaches a larger edge, about the thickness of typical window-trim casing, where he “rests,” steeling himself for the upper half of the climb, which features similar acrobatics.

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  IN THE SPRING OF 1975, Bachar dropped out of UCLA after his freshman year and headed to Yosemite. The electricity from that stormy night in Harrison’s basement still crackled and, like an electromagnet, attracted a diverse group of individuals who shared the Stonemaster spirit. Now it was time for them to write the next chapter in the history of Yosemite climbing.

  By the 1970s, the pioneers of Yosemite’s golden age had come and gone. Royal Robbins and Warren Harding had left their marks with first ascents of the valley’s largest, most spectacular cliffs, Half Dome and El Capitan, in 1954 and 1958, respectively. Yvon Chouinard, Tom Frost, Chuck Pratt, and many others had helped fill in the gaps. But while all of Yosemite’s notable cliffs had already been scaled, these ascents were accomplished with the use of aid, meaning the climbers placed anchors—pitons, mostly—into cracks in the rock and hung from them in slings while hammering in the next steel wedge a few feet higher. For Bachar and the Stonemasters, the new game was to climb free, that is, without pulling on gear, resting on the rope, or standing in stirrups. Ropes and hardware were still used for protecting the climber against a fall, as a safety net, but never for upward progress. Every move had to be accomplished with the hands and feet alone.

  Free climbing had played a role in the big first ascents by Robbins and his contemporaries—certain sections weren’t difficult enough to require aid—but it had never been an end in itself when tackling the larger formations in Yosemite. The puzzle in unlocking the long snaking routes up 2,000 or 3,000 feet of rock wall was a tactical one: how much food, water, and gear to bring; devising systems for hauling it all up the cliff; where to camp on the wall; how many people should comprise the team. Warren Harding, who first climbed El Capitan over a span of two seasons, during which time he left his ropes “fixed” on the wall, had more in common with a skyscraper construction worker riveting I beams together than with this new breed of gymnast, who saw climbing as pure athleticism.

  The fall-protection gear had evolved as well, from heavy steel pitons to lightweight aluminum chocks that could be placed and removed by hand. A climber could carry a few dozen of these “nuts” on a sling around his shoulder and hardly notice the weight, which enabled a quantum leap in difficulty. Whereas the hardest free climbs in the valley in the 1960s were rated 5.9+, give or take, by the mid-1970s the grades had been pushed well into the 5.12 realm.

  And it was John Bachar, more than anyone else, who spearheaded the charge, not only by means of raw physical prowess but also by the panache with which he sought to imbue the whole free-climbing scene. He wore quirky hats, skinny shorts, and long tube socks with horizontal stripes that he pulled up to his knees. He also played the saxophone, having rescued the instrument from an ignominious death at the hands of Harrison, who was trying to convert it into a bong. At first, Bachar was all about Jimi Hendrix, but later, he found inspiration in jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Roland Kirk. He saw parallels between what these guys were doing with their instruments and what he was trying to do on the rock with his mind and body. He had surfed as a kid in LA, and the classic surf movies of his day depicting the Pipeline masters ripping down huge waves and always making it look easy—casual, even—left a lasting impression. Making a difficult climb look like no big deal, smooth and cool, just like jazz, became Bachar’s trademark.

  To Bachar and the other Stonemasters, smooth and cool meant moving fast, carrying a small rack of protection, and placing pieces far apart—“running it out,” as climbers like to say. It was a form of self-expression demonstrating both the inner calm of a Zen master and the tenacity of a martial artist. And indeed, Bachar kept a picture of Bruce Lee, in mid-punch, taped to a page in his climbing journal. It was natural, then, that the seed John Long sowed in Bachar’s psyche that day on the bouldering circuit in Joshua Tree would eventually sprout and flourish. The ultimate expression of nerve and daring by Yosemite’s self-styled highest-ranking black belt would be to leave the rope and gear behind altogether and venture up into the vertical abyss untethered.

  But the Stonemasters weren’t the first to climb rocks without a rope. Modern free-solo rock climbing can trace its roots back more than a century to an Austrian alpinist named Paul Preuss. In the early 1900s, Preuss authored more than three hundred first ascents—half of which he did solo. He disdained the use of equipment like pitons and even ropes because to his mind, they tainted the essence of alpinism, which was to climb mountains without the use of mechanical aids. But his boldness eventually proved his undoing. On October 3, 1913, while attempting a solo first ascent of the North Ridge of the Mandlkogel in the Austrian Alps, Preuss fell to his death. He was twenty-seven years old.

  There is no record of anyone besting Preuss’ free-solo feats until 1973, when a nineteen-year-old named Henry Barber, from Wellesley, Massachusetts—the same Boston suburb where I grew up—rolled into Yosemite after driving across the country in a Volkswagen bus. The jaunty newcomer, with his trademark white golfer’s cap, which never left his head, kicked things off by “on-sighting” the first ascent of a route called Butterballs, a finger crack so perfectly sculpted that it had already been named, despite the fact that no one could climb it. The term “on-sight” had been adopted from the French climbing term à vue, which means a route is climbed with no prior knowledge other than its rating. In its most perfect sense, the climber doesn’t even see the route until the moment he arrives to attempt it. Barber, wearing a few wraps of nylon webbing around his waist (proper sit harnesses with leg loops had not been invented yet) and a handful of nuts draped from a sling over h
is shoulder, waltzed up it on his first try. This was more than a first ascent; it was a statement: A kid from Boston had just put the West Coast climbers on notice.

  That year, Barber, who kept meticulous records of his “tick list,” logged 325 days of climbing. He became so comfortable on the rock that he began on-sight soloing valley test piece climbs, including Ahab, a notorious flaring squeeze chimney rated 5.10. No one had ever free soloed a 5.10 before, let alone on-sight. But these were mere warm-ups for what was to come. Before calling it a season, Barber walked up to what was at the time the longest free climb in the valley, a menacing gash splitting the 1,500-foot north face of Sentinel Rock. Two and a half hours later, he stood atop the tombstone-shaped wall, having ascended the Steck-Salathé route alone and without any equipment. It was the first time a major rock formation in Yosemite had been climbed without a rope. But what made this ascent truly mind-bending was that Barber had never done the route before. He found his way through acres of vertical terrain with no prior knowledge of what lay before him. Barber had invented a new sub-breed of climber, the on-sight free soloist, and he was now its sole practitioner.

  Years later, over coffee at his house in North Conway, New Hampshire, Barber told me that after he soloed the Steck-Salathé, the Yosemite locals, who were ruthlessly competitive, started giving him the “stink eye.” He’d show up at a campfire in Camp 4, and everyone would stop talking until he left.