The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  “It could have been a jealousy thing, or I could have been an asshole,” he said, alluding to the fact that he had a reputation for being abrasive back in those days. “I don’t know, but it just got worse over the years.”

  So Henry Barber moved on. While the Stonemasters did their thing, largely within the confines of a single granite-walled valley in Northern California, he traveled the world, pushing standards everywhere he went. In Dresden, Germany, he climbed in the local style, chalkless, barefoot, and with jammed knots for protection. In Australia, they still talk about “Hot” Henry’s visit in 1975, when, in a matter of days, he pushed free-climbing grades not one but two numbers higher.

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  IT WAS LEFT TO ANOTHER social maladroit, John Bachar, to drive ropeless climbing in Yosemite to the next level, which he promptly did the next year, in 1976, when he free soloed a multipitch 5.11 called New Dimensions. The route was only one grade below Fish Crack, which was considered the hardest climb in Yosemite at the time. A ropeless ascent of New Dimensions was as bold a statement as anything conceivable in the world of rock climbing, but not everyone was impressed or inspired. Some climbers saw Bachar as foolishly reckless. Shortly after the historic climb, a note appeared on the Camp 4 bulletin board: “Tell Webster’s to change the meaning of Insanity to ‘John Bachar free-soloed New Dimensions.’”

  “He was socially awkward,” says Long, “a borderline sociopath. He was his own guy and didn’t get along with a lot of people.”

  Upon hearing of a contingent of climbers who doubted his claimed exploits, Bachar posted a now infamous note on the climbers’ camp bulletin board that read, “$10,000 to anyone who can follow me for a day of free soloing. John Bachar.” There were no takers. But according to Long, it wasn’t all about bravado and showmanship. Long thinks Bachar’s solos were more about self-affirmation than proving himself to everyone else. “He did a lot of it quietly and invisibly, with no fanfare. No one knows how much he really did.”

  When Bachar soloed the Nabisco Wall, a 250-foot 5.11c that includes Butterballs as its second pitch, in the spring of 1979, only a few of his closest friends were present to witness the feat. There was no film crew. No photos. Word had already spread, though, by the time Bachar got back to Camp 4, and he found himself accosted by climbers saying things like, “You’re fucking nuts, man.” Nabisco Wall was considered the valley test piece, and anyone who climbed it with a rope could consider himself a “hard-man” or “hard-woman” (there was a small but vital female Stonemaster contingent, led by the likes of Lynn Hill and Mari Gingery). Bachar had cemented his place in the pantheon of the world’s all-time greatest rock climbers. But he wasn’t finished.

  He had upped the ante on the Nabisco Wall, but it wasn’t until 1980 that he found his limit as a free soloist. The route was called Moratorium, and Bachar decided to climb it on-sight. To keep things adventurous, he didn’t tell anyone what he had in mind, nor did he query other climbers who had done the route. If he had, they would have told him it was hard for the grade and that the crux was not the kind of climbing anyone would want to do without a rope. Three hundred feet above the ground, he found himself barely holding on in a slippery open book, the crease in the back too thin for his fingers to fit inside. Fully committed, unable to reverse the moves he had already made, Bachar punched through. Afterward, as he hiked down the back, he felt hollow. “I’d gotten away with something,” he later told a friend. “I hadn’t conquered anything. The mountain had just let me off.”

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  THOUGH HE SURVIVED Moratorium that day and added another notch in his belt, the rigid strictures he had drawn up over the years began to isolate Bachar from other climbers. In the early 1980s, the ethic he championed was to climb routes from the ground up. If he fell, he immediately lowered off, pulled his rope down, and started again from the bottom. Adhering to this style, which came to be called traditional climbing, the Stonemasters (and others who followed their lead) had hit a ceiling that was preventing them from pushing grades beyond 5.13. Most of the obvious cracks in the valley had been climbed, and the only way to keep pushing higher and harder into uncharted territory was to quest out onto the blank faces between the crack systems. Face climbs generally offer only nubs and indentations and don’t have fractures in which to place chocks or cams, or even pitons, so the only option if you want protection is to drill a hole in the rock and place a bolt.

  Bachar was okay with bolts as long as they were placed by the leader, while climbing from the ground up. For a number of years, Yosemite climbers had maintained a consensus that allowed for the use of small metal hooks from which they would hang so as to free their hands for drilling. Several notoriously difficult and dangerous routes were thus established, including Bachar’s own three-pitch tour de force in the Tuolumne high country, the Bachar-Yerian. The route is graded 5.11c X, with the “X” indicating that the bolts are so widely spaced it’s likely a climber would die were he to fall at certain junctures along the route.

  Bachar’s ethic was noble—no one disputed that—but only a handful of people in the world were good enough, let alone bold enough, to climb according to his rules. Most people wanted to experience the joy of being high on a rock face, the world stretched below like a sublime painting—without having to lay their lives on the line.

  In Europe, the birthplace of climbing, a new style was coming into vogue. Rather than go from the ground up, French, Spanish, and Italian climbers were rappelling from above and bolting routes with power drills. Where a hand-drilled bolt might take half an hour to place, a power drill could do the job in seconds. This new practice came to be known as “rap bolting.” Once the bolts were in situ, the first ascensionist would “work” the route by climbing from bolt to bolt, resting on the rope along the way. When they had the climb fully memorized and rehearsed, an attempt would be made to climb the whole thing in one go without falling. If successful, the climber would say he had “redpointed” the route. The term comes from the German word Rotpunkt, which means “point of red.” It was coined by Kurt Albert in the 1970s after he began painting a red dot at the base of routes in the Frankenjura that he had free climbed.

  This new style was called sport climbing, and it was much safer than traditional climbing. Sport climbing soon became the world standard, and by utilizing these modern tactics, grades broke the 5.14 mark for the first time in the late 1980s. But Bachar would have none of it. He called its practitioners “hang dogs” and famously stated around this time that climbing without risk isn’t really climbing.

  At first the other Stonemasters backed him up, but it was hard to sit on the sidelines and watch as others, who were willing to embrace the new ethic, got all the glory. Yosemite was becoming a backwater. Cutting-edge climbing—and climbers—moved to Europe. In the mid-1980s, Ron Kauk, the only Stonemaster who could match Bachar’s prowess on the rock, traveled to France to see what all the hubbub was about. Once he got his first taste of sport climbing, he immediately saw how it would open up huge potential in Yosemite. When he returned to the valley, he established some of the first sport routes. Higher grades soon followed. One of these routes, on Cottage Dome in Tuolumne, was a line that Bachar had been trying to climb ground up.

  “All I wanted was a little rock saved for me,” said Bachar, years later. “But they wouldn’t even give me that.” He retaliated by flattening the bolt hangers on one of Kauk’s routes. An infamous altercation in the Camp 4 parking lot ensued.

  “What gives you the right to take someone’s route out?” asked Kauk. Bachar replied that it was no different than what they had done to his project on Cottage Dome. With the speed at which they could install new routes on rappel, he explained, there would soon be no terrain left for him. Bachar says that Kauk threw a punch but pulled back inches from his head. Kauk says he didn’t and that he walked away disgusted with his old friend, who had once been like a br
other. Mark Chapman, Kauk’s climbing partner, stepped into the fray and told Bachar he would kick his ass if he ever chopped his bolts again. Bachar taunted him to just get it over with, and Chapman snapped. He punched Bachar hard enough in the neck that one of Bachar’s arms went numb and he ended up in the hospital. Bachar pressed charges, and Chapman, an old friend and fellow Stonemaster, was arrested for assault.

  Things quickly went downhill from there for Bachar. By 1990, he had few friends left in the climbing community. Many of the old Stonemasters felt that he had put climbing ethics before friendship. Bachar was bitter that the new generation of climbers seemed to have no interest in carrying forth the traditional hard-man style, which he had risked his life to enshrine. His shoulder was wrecked from years of high-level climbing, and his marriage was falling apart. While he was working through a divorce, his house in Yosemite burned down in a forest fire, and the park service tried to take his scorched land by eminent domain.

  Bachar disappeared, and so did the Stonemasters’ lightning.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Stone Monkey

  Charlie Honnold had named Alex and his sister as beneficiaries of his life insurance policy. Alex’s share of the interest on the bonds was about three hundred dollars a month, which was just enough to fund the itinerant climbing lifestyle that he envisioned as his escape from living with his mom. He borrowed her old Chevy minivan; loaded it with his climbing gear, a sleeping bag, and a few changes of clothes; and gave his mom a hug. In April of 2005 he headed off to find out what he was capable of.

  In Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, Alex wandered around the Mojave Desert among the bulbous, egg-shaped rocks, looking for things to climb. He wasn’t necessarily seeking to be a soloist, but he was alone and far too shy to seek out partners in the campground. “Soloing goes with being a total loser,” he later told his friend Chris Weidner. “You show up at a crag with no friends and you do your thing.” He had a guidebook, but he often sized up routes and boulder problems by studying them from the base. How featured was the rock? How steep? How grainy? How tall? If his intuition told him he could do it, he climbed it.

  Things sometimes got weird when he ran into other people. A part of him wanted to show off, but only if the climbing was well within his comfort zone. If the climbing was hard, near the limit of what he was capable of on-sight free soloing, which at the time was 5.10c or so, he couldn’t have spectators. One day he was climbing such a route, which featured a short roof that was high enough off the deck for a fall to be fatal. His hands were jammed into a crack above the overhang, and as he was screwing up his nerve to commit to the move, he looked down and saw two tourists staring up at him. Alex froze, then retreated to a comfortable stance. He would wait until they left. But the tourists lingered, and Alex found himself wondering whether they were judging him, if they thought he was a coward for his obvious trepidation. Finally they left, and Alex pulled the roof. Later, reflecting on the incident in an essay published in Rock and Ice magazine, he wrote: “After that, soloing became even more solitary for me because I feared doing something stupid when people were watching. Yet it was still a difficult balance, since there are always people at climbing areas, and I often just wanted to climb. And honestly, sometimes it was nice to impress people. But pride is dangerous since it leads to recklessness or overconfidence, which have no place in soloing.”

  As winter approached, Alex bummed a ride north to Bishop, on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. The minivan had died and he was now getting around on an old, green mountain bike he had inherited from his dad. He stationed himself in a campground called the Pit. In the morning, he’d ride to the Happy Boulders or to a sport-climbing area called the Owens River Gorge. At the latter, Alex spent his days soloing, mostly out of necessity. He still didn’t have any partners.

  Alex’s obsession at the time was to tick off as many routes as he could. His goal was twenty-five pitches a day, which he would compulsively record in his black book every night in his tent. He was on-sighting these routes, then downclimbing them, which, according to his rules, allowed him to count each route twice. He stuck with this program day in and day out in order to climb, as he later put it, “crappy little faces with no appeal besides the tick I could put in my guidebook.” One day he headed up a 5.9 arête—an outside corner as opposed to an inside corner or open book. By now a route of this difficulty felt routine and somewhat casual. About twelve feet above the ground he slipped, landing in the dirt with a thud. After he realized he wasn’t hurt, he looked around to see if anyone had seen him fall. There was no one in sight. He sat for a few moments contemplating what had just happened. It was his first unexpected fall while free soloing, and it could just as easily have happened higher up the route, high enough for him to be dead. He brushed himself off and climbed the route. A week later, it happened again from a similar height, this time while downclimbing a 5.10. Again, he walked away unhurt, and no one, besides himself, witnessed the fall.

  By November, he was back at his mom’s. He still didn’t have a car, so he bummed rides from Sacramento-based climbers to Jailhouse Rock, a blocky, overhanging basalt cliff rising above the Stanislaus River, near Jamestown, California. Alex was still learning to apply his indoor skills to real rock, but he was tearing through the grades—with a rope. By spring he had ticked several 5.13s.

  One day at Jailhouse, he met Mandi Finger. She was six years older and an experienced climber who was breaking into 5.13. When I spoke with Mandi twelve years later, in 2017, she told me Alex was too shy to talk to her, so she initiated a conversation. She discovered a young man who possessed a wealth of knowledge about almost any topic she might bring up. Within days of meeting, they decided to set off on a road trip in Mandi’s Volvo station wagon.

  For the next few months they traveled from one climbing area to the next across a vast swath of the western United States. In August, they celebrated Alex’s twenty-first birthday at a bar in Squamish, British Columbia. Some local guides bought Alex a drink called a muff diver—a shot of Kahlúa with a cherry floating in it, buried under whipped cream. Alex declined, telling the small crowd that had gathered around to watch that he didn’t drink. The Canadian guides wouldn’t hear of it. Of course he would dive the muff. How could you not? For Christ’s sakes, it’s your twenty-first birthday, they cajoled. They got borderline aggressive. It got awkward. But Alex stuck to his guns.

  Alex and Mandi ended up dating, off and on, for nearly four years, though Alex claims that the length of the relationship “depends on how you define dating.” Years later, Mandi kicks herself for staying with Alex as long as she did, claiming it was always “his way or the highway. He did not compromise.”

  What was Alex like back in those days, before he became famous? I asked her. “He was an asshole,” she says. “All he cared about was climbing. He was obsessed. You don’t do the stuff he does and come down and be normal. It’s a package deal.”

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  YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK LIES about 150 miles due east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada. It encompasses 1,200 square miles, about the size of Rhode Island, most of which is roadless wilderness where intrepid hikers can explore granite domes, snow-clad peaks, and pristine alpine lakes. But the vast majority of the park’s 4 million annual visitors skip the backcountry and beeline for Yosemite Valley, a seven-mile-long by one-mile-wide glacier-carved vale that lies on the park’s southwestern corner at 4,000 feet above sea level. Here, the tourists clog the loop road and throng to overpriced hotels and crowded campgrounds, where the hum of RV generators and the squeals of children fill the air.

  My first pilgrimage to the Ditch was in 1989. As I emerged from the Wawona Tunnel on Highway 41 and saw the valley for the first time, I nearly crashed my Honda CB650 swerving into the parking lot of the famous overlook called Tunnel View. A few seconds later I was standing on a stone wall, gobsmacked by the panorama that lay before me.
It was early May, and the alpine high country above Half Dome, still covered in snow, seemingly floated in the sky on the far end of the valley. Cascades poured down gullies on both sides of the valley, but these were mere trickles compared to the six-hundred-foot Bridalveil Fall, which plunged from a tiger-striped wall in the foreground. The floor of the valley was lush green and densely forested. Trees rose up the slope to the edge of the overlook, where two ponderosa pines, sticking up above the rest, framed the view.

  I remember taking my time soaking it all in before turning my attention to the titanic cliff that loomed over the north side of the valley directly across from the falls. I had not anticipated how intimidating it would feel to stand face-to-face with El Capitan. If I hadn’t spent years dreaming about climbing that wall, I could have simply trembled in awe of its immensity and pondered the retreating Ice Age glaciers that carved it from the earth’s bedrock more than 10,000 years earlier. But I had long ago decided that scaling El Capitan would be my rite of passage as a climber, and for that reason, the cliff seemed to mock me, as if laughing at my audacity. Ansel Adams took a famous black-and-white photo from Tunnel View back in 1934, and he put it on the cover of his classic book Yosemite and the Range of Light. I had studied that photo until I felt as though I knew the place, as though I had taken its measure, but I now realized that nothing could have prepared me for how small I would feel in this valley of giants. It was shocking and a bit embarrassing how quickly I abandoned the idea of trying to climb El Capitan. Sure enough, that first season in the valley I never got higher than a pitch off the ground.

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