The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

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  WHILE WE GENERALLY TOOK TURNS pushing the route up the wall, we also each vied and connived a bit for the better pitches of the route. Jared and I sought the beautiful cracks and corners up the sheer sections of cliff that offered exposed and exhilarating climbing but also enough protection points to keep the climbing at least relatively sane. Alex, on the other hand, sought out the nasty, scary pitches, the ones with the highest stakes, exactly like what he was now battling.

  Jared and I called him our “secret weapon,” but in the climbing community he was known as “the Mutant.” He picked up the nickname in 1995 on Denali, the highest peak in North America. Alex was hanging out at the 14,000-foot camp with two other elite climbers, Mark Twight and Scott Backes, when they got word that three Spaniards were freezing to death high on the West Rib. A few hours later, having been deputized by the park service, the trio was picked up by an army Chinook helicopter and skid landed at 19,500 feet, just below the summit. When they reached the Spaniards, one had already fallen, one was frozen and incoherent, and one was still able to move. Twight and Backes started working their way up with the guy who could function, leaving Alex behind to wait with the other. But Alex got impatient, as he was wont to do, so he tied the guy to his harness and started dragging him up the mountain back to the helicopter. When the snow got too deep, he threw the Spaniard on his back and kept climbing upward through steep terrain. The incapacitated climber, with all his frozen gear, weighed more than Alex.

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  ALEX LOWE WAS A MAN custom-built for such superhuman feats. His upper body was triangular, bulging arms hanging from broad shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist. His outsize, scar-covered hands often sported “gobies” and “flappers,” climber-speak for the cuts and flaps of skin you get from stuffing your paws into rough-sided cracks. His barrel chest housed a set of lungs that could have sped him through the Tour de France had he chosen to ride bikes instead of climb mountains. In 1993, he was invited by the Russian Mountaineering Federation to take part in a kamikaze-style climbing competition on a 23,000-foot peak in Central Asia called Khan Tengri. The field included many of the best mountaineers in Russia. Alex didn’t just win; he crushed the previous best time by more than four hours—a record that still stands today.

  In March of 1999, a few months before we left for Trango, the cover of Outside magazine featured Alex, with his craggy jaw and blue steel eyes twinkling beneath bushy brown eyebrows, standing astride a virgin spike of rock in Antarctica. The caption read: “The World’s Best Climber.” It was a moniker he scoffed at, famously saying around the same time, “The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun.” His enthusiasm and love for climbing could be contagious—if you could keep up with him. He more or less held his climbing partners to the same standards he set for himself, so if you weren’t getting up at four A.M., downing a pot of jet-black coffee, and then cranking off pyramids of four hundred pull-ups before breakfast, you might find climbing with him a bit intimidating.

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  ALEX WASN’T GOING TO BACK DOWN, so he pushed off with his right arm and leg, unhitching himself from the crucifix-like stem and falling toward the pinnacle on his left. His body swung through the thin air, and just as gravity began to exert its inexorable pull, his right hand slapped onto a crystalline knob. At the same moment, he threw his right leg around the backside of the pinnacle. His body sagged, but Alex dug in with his right heel, straightened up, and stayed stuck on.

  With no actual holds on which to stand or pull himself up this arête, he began a complex dance of intricate oppositional movement: one hand gripped the edge while the other slapped around the corner, fingertips groping blindly for the tiniest crease or edge. He smeared his toes against any slight depressions or nubs, countering the pulling forces of his arms. A well-placed heel hooked around the arête gained him enough purchase to reposition his hands a few feet higher. He scummed whatever square inch of his body he could—calf, hip, forearm—against the rock. Alex had simian intuition and this “body English,” as climbers call it, allowed him to grip a smidge less forcefully, thus saving precious kilojoules of energy. In any setting this would have ranked among one of the more impressive pieces of climbing I had ever seen. Here, at 20,000 feet, in cold, wintry conditions, after weeks of strenuous climbing, I was witnessing a masterpiece. He was now less than a body length away from easy ground, and I allowed myself to exhale. But then, on what would have been his last flurry of sublimely played notes, a string broke.

  A tiny trickle of water, dripping from a dollop of snow sitting atop the pinnacle, had soaked the last few feet of the arête. Alex kept reaching over his head, but his fingers couldn’t find a grip on the wet rock. He shot a quick glance between his legs, and all he could see was a bulging rock twenty feet below. It stuck out enough that he’d hit it, but it wasn’t big enough to stop him. He’d bounce and then fly off the back side of the ridge. “I’m downclimbing,” he yelled, his body quivering as he slid down the arête. In place of the precision he normally employed while dancing up his pitches was a desperate, uncontrolled, all-out grovel to keep himself from falling. The world’s best climber was coming unglued.

  Jared braced a leg against the block in front of him to catch the fall that now appeared imminent, as Alex, clutching a golf ball–size crystal of quartz with his left hand, looked backward over his right shoulder, gauging the distance to the other pinnacle. “Watch me,” he yelled, swinging his right leg backward like a martial artist winding up for a roundhouse kick. Gravity took over as his body hinged outward like a barn door. His leg found nothing but air. For a split second he was facing outward, away from the rock, looking right at us. Then he peeled off and went airborne.

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  SIX MONTHS EARLIER, I had been reminiscing with a buddy from college about our few triumphs and far more numerous mishaps as fledgling alpinists, in the front lobby of a warehouse turned corporate headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission District. John Climaco and I had met at Middlebury College in Vermont after my brightly colored climbing rope—conspicuously displayed in the doorway of my dorm room—caught his eye. Climaco, a far more experienced climber, took me under his wing and introduced me to ice climbing and mountaineering.

  Climaco had called me a few weeks earlier with the news that he had just scored his dream job producing websites for an Internet startup called Quokka that was hoping to be a Bloomberg-type terminal for sports. He was organizing his own Quokka-sponsored expedition to the unclimbed north face of Gasherbrum 1, an 8,000-meter peak in the Karakoram. Quokka, he said, had deep pockets and was seeking other trips to feature on its website. “Perhaps you have an expedition you’d like to pitch?” he had said.

  At the time I was newly married and expecting my first child. My wife and I lived on a private dirt road in the woods of northern New Hampshire. Broadband wasn’t yet available on my street, so I was still dialing up with a 56k modem to access the Internet. When I got off the phone with John I logged in with my AOL browser and a familiar male voice said: “You’ve got mail.” I typed “quokka.com” into the header. Nothing happened. Then my computer crashed. It took twenty minutes before I finally pulled up Quokka’s home page, which featured a full-screen pixelated image of a sailboat crashing through a stormy ocean. Graphics and various tabs covered the image. I clicked something and my computer crashed again. Quokka via dial-up was maddening, but I saw enough to understand that with a fast Internet connection this was a website in which one could get lost.

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  CLIMACO BROUGHT ME to a glass-walled conference room with exposed pipes crisscrossing the ceiling and introduced me to his boss, Brian Terkelsen. In 1993 Terkelsen had co-founded the Eco-Challenge with Survivor mastermind Mark Burnett. The two had spent years developing reality-TV formulas that centered on relationship dyn
amics. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Terkelsen was sizing me up as a potential character in what he deemed essentially another type of reality TV show. But that’s not what he told me at the time. Quokka, as Terkelsen explained, was aiming to use the Internet to cover sports in a whole new way. Instead of turning on the TV and digesting whatever the producers had decided to show you, Quokka would put viewers in the driver’s seat, allowing them to feel as though they were inside that NASCAR or aboard the sailboat voyaging nonstop around the world. Gail Bronson, an analyst with IPO Monitor in nearby Palo Alto, called Quokka “sports on steroids.”

  Terkelsen said they would send us to San Francisco State to get our VO2 max and body fat index measured. Up on Great Trango, we’d wear heart-rate and oxygen-saturation monitors. This data, along with anything else they could think of, would be a click away on the site. I nodded as he tossed out terms I’d never heard before, like “biometrics,” “digital-media assets,” and “real-time data.” As we worked our way up the wall, he said, we’d document the action with pictures and videos and “dispatches” we’d write on tiny laptops in the portaledge at night. All this “content” would be beamed down to technicians in base camp who would collate it and upload it via satellite to the World Wide Web. We would show, in the most visceral way, in “near real time” what it feels like to climb one of the biggest cliffs on earth. Most important, Quokka would foot most of the bill for the expedition and pay the climbing team a talent fee.

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  SAN FRANCISCO IN THE LATE nineties was a heady place, the center of the dot-com bubble. Climaco, who had passed up law school to get in on the action, was offered a stake in the company in the form of shares he could cash in at Quokka’s IPO. He was hoping to follow in the footsteps of a classmate from Middlebury who had gotten in on the ground floor at Yahoo. When Yahoo went public in April of 1996, James became a twenty-something-year-old instant multimillionaire. Many young bucks wanted to get the IPO done and cash out. There were plenty of dot-coms in that sense like Quokka, but Quokka was a signal of something else, too. This dot-com whirlwind would play a part in transforming the way climbers engaged, not only with one another but also with the pursuit itself.

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  IT WASN’T ONLY THE TECH sector booming in the midnineties. By 1996 the North Face had grown into the world’s largest outdoor clothing and equipment company. Doug and Susie Tompkins had launched the North Face brand thirty years before on October 26, 1966. (The Grateful Dead played at their grand opening, and the Hells Angels worked the door. Rumor has it that Electric Kool-Aid was served.)

  Within two years of founding the North Face, the Tompkinses sold their interest in the company for 50,000 dollars. It was then bought and sold a dozen times before it was acquired by an investment group in 1994 for 62 million dollars. It fell to the new CEO, Bill Simon, to prep the North Face to go public, and he had a radical idea. Typically, when a clothing company needed photos for an ad campaign, it hired models, went somewhere scenic, and did a photo shoot. Instead Simon used a substantial portion of the company’s marketing budget to fund a team of professional climbers and skiers. He recruited a dozen of the world’s leading rock climbers, alpinists, and extreme skiers, including Alex Lowe. Greg Child, an Australian expat who climbed the North Ridge of K2 in 1990, was offered a contract worth 75,000 dollars a year, plus benefits and stock options. “For the first time in my life, I had a real salary, and my job description was to climb my ass off and travel the world putting up first ascents,” says Greg.

  The North Face had just made professional climbing a plausible career—one that allowed this handful of “athletes” (a then novel term for people living on the fringes of respectability) to earn a decent living. Almost immediately after its inception, Simon sent the Dream Team—Lowe, Child, Californians Conrad Anker and Lynn Hill, plus a handful of others—accompanied by outdoor photographer Chris Noble, on expedition to an alpine version of Yosemite Valley in Kyrgyzstan called the Aksu.

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  WHILE THE DREAM TEAM MADE headlines, I was living the more traditional climber’s existence—squatting illegally in a cave in Yosemite National Park. I loosely associated with the ragtag community of Chongo Nation climbers who bridged the Stonemasters and Stone Monkeys eras. When we weren’t out climbing, we’d congregate to drink malt liquor and swap spray at a worn-out fiberglass picnic table outside the deli in Yosemite Village. In the late fall of 1995, a few of us huddled around a dog-eared copy of Climbing magazine. We took out our frustration of being nobodies on the “sellouts” who graced the magazine’s pages.

  “How the heck do you get in on this gravy train?” one friend asked, after turning the page to a story about the North Face Dream Team and their recent expedition to the Aksu.

  “No idea,” I replied. I had no job, and the twenty-four-ounce container of Old English in my hand had been purchased with the proceeds from collecting nickel refund soda cans that morning. My day had started with a half-eaten “lodge breakfast”—some scrambled eggs and crusts of toast—that some tourists had forgotten to bus from their table in the cafeteria.

  The North Face climbing team would probably have remained nothing more than a pipe dream for me were it not for the one guy sitting at the table that day who actually had the balls to step up and shout that he was worthy of being sponsored. Warren Hollinger was a disciple of the self-help guru Tony Robbins, and he was the most charismatic and unapologetic self-promoter I’d ever met. Standing six feet four inches tall, with a huge mop of curly brown hair and a ruddy, freckled face, Warren was a smooth talker and an inspired climber. He wasn’t gifted with uncommon finger strength, but he was making a name for himself by climbing some of the most dangerous routes on El Capitan.

  Warren’s purpose in life was to train himself until he could look around and say, like José Canseco famously quipped in the late 1980s, “Right here, right now, I’m the best in the world.” And as soon as he felt like he was the best, he planned to quit, sell his climbing gear, and set off on his next endeavor—to sail around the world. While I was sitting in my cave plotting where I could find my next twenty-four cans—a case was the maximum they’d take at the recycling center—Warren was on the phone selling Conrad Anker, one of the founders of the Dream Team, on the idea of the North Face supporting our upcoming expedition to Polar Sun Spire on Baffin Island.

  Anker was one of the few people in the world who had been to the east coast of Baffin Island. He had kayaked into the remote Sam Ford Fjord in 1992 with Jon Turk, and the pair had paddled right beneath the 5,000-foot north face of Polar Sun Spire en route to climbing their own first ascent on a nearby tower. So Conrad threw us a bone. They couldn’t give us any cash, but the North Face would supply us with state-of-the-art Gore-Tex jackets and bibs for our climb. Thanks to Warren, I now had my foot in the door with one of the biggest sponsors in the outdoor industry.

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  BAFFIN ISLAND IS LOCATED in northern Canada, north of Hudson Bay and west of Greenland. The island’s 500,000 square kilometers is covered with lake-studded plains, glaciers, fjords, U-shaped valleys, and towering granitic walls. Though climbers have been visiting and exploring Baffin Island since the 1930s, and in earnest since the early 1970s, the world was not properly introduced to the vast untapped climbing potential on the island’s fjord-riddled east coast until the explorer and adventure photographer Eugene Fisher reported in the 1995 American Alpine Journal that “on the east coast of the world’s fifth-largest island are a series of 26 fjords, some 18 to 70 miles in length, that contain some of the tallest vertical rock walls on earth, walls that exceed even the fabled faces of Mount Thor and Asgard. . . . Yosemite Valley would count as a minor side fjord if it were located along this vertiginous coast.”

  I first read these words in the Yosemite Lodge cafeteria in the company of Warren and a few other climbers.
The article boasted of five El Capitans and two Great Trangos in one fjord, and practically no one had climbed there. My grubby friends and I figured this had to be a wild exaggeration, but I called Fisher and he gave me a detailed explanation of the triangulation method he used to determine the heights of the walls.

  Jeff Chapman, my buddy from the Crazy Kids days who accompanied me up Cathedral Ledge with our Chuck Taylors and clothesline, eventually caught the climbing bug and ended up being one of my main partners in college. So Warren and I added him to the team. I had gotten lucky a few months before the trip when someone collided with my Subaru in an icy parking lot. The car still drove, so instead of getting it fixed, I used the insurance money to pay my share of the expedition expenses. In early May 1996, our Inuit outfitter, dragging us behind his snow machine on a large wooden sled called a komatik, dropped us on the frozen sea below the north face of Polar Sun Spire.

  We had planned for thirty days on the wall, but when two weeks had passed and we were still battling our way up a massive overhang on the bottom half of the wall, we knew we had to start rationing our food. Dinner, the highlight of each day, was a single Lipton noodle soup pack that we’d split three ways.