The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  As we climbed higher, the wind picked up and we entered a cloud forest, where everything was coated in electric-green moss that grew up the trunks of the trees and hung beard-like from the branches. Orchids grew from niches in dead logs and in the crotches of the trees. I kept sniffing for the park’s most famous plant—Rafflesia arnoldii, aka the “stinking corpse lily.” It’s the word’s largest flower, and its petals can grow to more than a meter in diameter. Its smell, as one might guess, is said to be nauseating. But I never smelled anything except myself and the pungent, peaty forest that enclosed us.

  In late afternoon, a monstrous, crescent-shaped building materialized out of the gloom—the Laban Rata rest house. We stopped in for a quick cup of soup in the cafeteria, which was packed with tourists, most of whom were Japanese. The standard itinerary for a Mount Kinabalu ascent is two days, with an overnight in this famously overpriced hut on the way up. Most of these people would leave at two A.M., hoping to summit in time to catch the view of the sun rising over the Celebes Sea.

  Not far above the hut, at around 11,000 feet above sea level, we finally broke above the tree line. The porters left the main trail and began angling up a dike in a steep slab of rock. The mist had now coalesced into a light drizzle. Bubbling rivulets coursed down the rock in little grooves, pouring over our hands and feet as we scrambled toward a col between bulbous summits. Soaked to the skin, with the temperature in the low forties, I longed for the sweltering heat we had left behind in KK. It was almost dark when I looked up and saw two porters on their way down, without their loads. Over the next ten minutes all twenty of our porters blew by us. “I bet they just dropped their loads on the col and called it good,” said Jimmy.

  When Jimmy and I finally crested the col at sunset, we found Conrad and Alex sitting on the apex of the ridge next to a giant pile of duffel bags. It was raining, the wind was gusting, and it would be dark in a few minutes. There was nothing even vaguely resembling flat ground anywhere.

  “Mind if I bivi with you?” asked Alex, looking mildly concerned.

  “Of course, check and see if you can find any good spots for the tent down the ridge. I’m going to check over here.” Half an hour later, neither of us had found anything, so we just pitched the tent next to the pile of bags. It was an awful spot, a jumbled pile of boulders, but it was no worse than anywhere else. After guying out the tent, we unzipped it and looked inside. I burst out laughing. Alex didn’t laugh, but he did smile when he saw the jagged spine of rock running down the middle of the tent floor. “We’ll find a better spot in the morning,” I said, crawling in. I went to work leveling my side by filling the nooks and crannies with rolled-up duffel bags, books, and anything else I could find. With the foundation laid, I inflated my Therm-a-Rest pad and laid it over the mess. Pumped nice and stiff, it covered the chaos underneath well enough. Next, I reached into the bottom of my duffel and pulled out the pillow from my bed at home, which was warm and dry inside a black Hefty trash bag. I propped the pillow against the back wall and reclined while emitting an exaggeratedly loud sigh of contentment. Alex, who was still sitting in the door of the tent, gave me a bemused look. “You brought your pillow,” he said.

  “Of course,” I replied, relishing the moment. “I always do. Didn’t you?” Alex didn’t answer. He crawled in and threw his pad down on his side without making any effort to improve it.

  “This is so cool,” he said sarcastically, looking up at me from the coffin-like trench, his pad folded around his shoulders like a taco shell. “I can’t believe how much cool stuff I’m learning from you guys.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MORNING, Conrad and I took on the mission of finding a way down into the gully, while the rest of the team stayed behind to work on our base camp. The biggest drawback to the camp wasn’t its precariousness; it was the lack of water. The only source I could find was a soupy puddle skimmed with a layer of black gumbo in which floated a giant white dead bug. Another unwelcome discovery was a robust population of giant jungle rats mounting a campaign to capture our food stash.

  According to my research there were two routes down into the gully: the path taken by the British Army back in 1994 via a place called Lone Tree and an alternate route established by a Spanish team back in 2000. As absurd as our plan was starting to seem, we weren’t the only ones to have the idea of rappelling into Low’s Gully only to climb back out. The Spaniards did it in 2000, followed by a British team in 2004. It was disappointing we wouldn’t be the first, but it was also encouraging (considering I was known for leading wild-goose chases like the Pitcairn expedition) to know that reputable climbers had deemed the canyon a worthy objective.

  After we’d crested a ridge directly above camp, the ground dropped away before us into what appeared to be a bottomless trench. From the stygian depths rose a towering spire, like something out of a Tolkien novel. The bottom section of the wall was invisible, hidden within the dark confines of Low’s Gully, but from where it emerged from the blackness it arced upward in a clean, unbroken shield, streaked with tiger stripes of white, green, and black. The first 2,000 feet of the wall appeared to be overhanging, and then the angle eased for the final five hundred feet, which culminated in a shark-toothed pinnacle piercing a cerulean sky. I felt a tingling of excitement: Now that I was seeing the wall firsthand, it appeared every bit the kind of challenge and adventure I had structured my life around. But before we could think much about the climbing, we needed to negotiate a long and treacherous rappel into the forbidding chasm.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, after rappelling about 2,000 feet, I stood in an algae-covered riverbed, feeding rope through my belay device. Above me, Alex aid climbed a bolt ladder, which had been drilled nine years earlier by the Spaniards. We had intended to pioneer our own route up this cliff, but eons of flash floods had polished the bottom few hundred feet of the wall porcelain smooth and it made no sense to drill bolts alongside the ones that were already in place. We decided to follow the Spanish past this toilet-bowl blankness until we found a good spot to branch off into uncharted territory.

  But Alex was doing it all wrong. Instead of walking up his étriers and hanging in his harness between moves, he was pulling himself upward using only his arms. By this point I had climbed at least fifty big walls, and I had never seen anyone do it this way.

  “Hey, there’s an easier way to do that,” I yelled up.

  “I know,” he called back. “I want to do it this way, so I can get more of a workout.” I laughed, my cackle echoing in the cavelike chamber. It was ridiculous what he was doing, but wasn’t that the whole point of climbing: to bend over backward and make life as difficult as possible?

  On the second pitch, I was thirty feet above Alex’s hanging belay when I came upon a detached flake blocking the path forward. I lightly tapped my knuckles on the block, like I was knocking on someone’s front door. It reverberated like a drum. All four sides were cracked, and I wondered what was holding it to the wall. “Just free climb around it,” called Alex, when he saw that I had stalled out. But the rock was covered in lichen and there were no good holds to pull on—other than the block itself. What I did next is the climbing equivalent of grabbing the handle on a skillet to see if it’s hot. I slid a small camming device into the crack on the bottom of the flake and gave it a tug. As the cam lobes flexed outward, whatever flimsy bond that was adhering the block to the wall came unglued. A horrible grinding noise filled the air. A chunk the size and shape of a cinderblock slammed into my chest, tearing through three layers of clothing and taking a bite out of my chest muscle before continuing its flight downward.

  “Rock!” I screamed, as I watched it spin through the air making a sound like a swooshing samurai sword. Alex leaned to the side nonchalantly as the rock sailed past about a body length away. A few seconds later, it cratered into the gully below, sending a shock wave up the wall and echoing acros
s the valley. My body shook with adrenaline. Blood oozed from the gash in my chest. I leaned the rim of my helmet against the wall and gazed between my legs at my helmetless partner. We shared a look, but nothing was said.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS LATER, Alex and I rappelled back into the gully. This time, we weren’t going back to base camp at the end of the day. Our task was to push the route forward while Conrad, Kevin, and Jimmy followed behind, hauling up the gear we’d need to spend the next week living on the cliff. It was exciting to think that somewhere up on the wall, I didn’t know where, we would bivouac in portaledges that night. We had reached the point where it was time to branch off the Spanish route, and my mind was filled with that feeling of giddy anticipation that comes with going off the map, outside the known world.

  Alex had shown up that day wearing a light blue helmet. He had quietly borrowed it from Renan, who was staying behind to shoot long shots of us working our way up the wall. This cliff was a filmmaker’s dream because it started in a pit, which meant Renan could shoot down and across at us from various vantages in Easy Valley.

  By late morning, I found myself in a precarious position, hanging from a camming device wedged between two plates of rock that moved when I shifted my weight. Sand and pebbles were sifting out from beneath the plates, which is never a good sign. My excitement at pioneering a route through terra incognita was replaced by dread as it sank in that the path I’d chosen was a minefield. I tapped the rocks to the side and above me with my hammer, like playing a xylophone. Each piece had its own unique tone, but nowhere could I find the sharp metallic ring given off by solid rock. I felt like I was playing a real-life game of Jenga. Were I to choose poorly, like I’d done on the second pitch, and accidentally dislodge the wrong piece of stone, it was possible I could unload a dump truck’s worth of loose rock onto myself, Alex, and everyone else down below.

  “Go for it,” yelled Alex impatiently, from his perch twenty feet below me. “It’s not dangerous if you tread lightly.” He was right. This type of climbing, what we call choss, had once been my specialty. In my day I had free climbed some notoriously sketchy routes, including Stratosfear in Colorado’s Black Canyon, the East Face of Mount Babel in the Canadian Rockies, and most of a new route on Mount Dickey in Alaska. But you need confidence, and a lot of it, to free climb on loose rock. And right then, perhaps because I was still spooked from pulling the rock off on the second pitch, or because I now had three children, or simply because I wasn’t as strong as I’d once been, I had none.

  When I called for the bolt kit, Alex didn’t hide his disgust. “Seriously?” he said. “You’re going to drill?” When I affirmed that indeed was my plan, he said I was being “super old-school,” a thinly veiled way of telling me he thought I was a wimp. Drilling a bolt is the one way in which climbers permanently alter the landscape. Once that four-inch-deep hole has been bored into the rock, it will be there forever. For this reason, many climbers, myself included, try to avoid using bolts, if at all possible. I had to weigh the question of whether I was “murdering the impossible” against the chance that I would fall, pull out all my protection, and break my legs when I hit the ledge where Alex was holding my rope. Picturing myself crumpled and broken was all the convincing I needed.

  An hour later, I pulled onto a sloping ledge three feet deep and fifteen feet long. I had climbed only about a third the length of a normal pitch, but this shelf offered a perfect location for our bivouac—and I was happy for an excuse to stop and build an anchor. The cracks I’d been following had petered out, and the next weakness was hundreds of feet away, across a long section of overhanging gray rock that appeared entirely devoid of weaknesses in which to place protection. If I were to continue, it would mean drilling a ladder of bolts up the wall. No one wanted to see that happen, least of all an impatient and pacing Alex Honnold, waiting to be let out of his cage.

  Time for the secret weapon, I said to myself as I reeled in the rope for Alex, who was in a sour mood when he joined me on the ledge. “What the hell have you done to my cams?” he demanded. I had undone some rubber bands on the slings of his camming devices because I needed the carabiners to build my anchor. My pitch had been short, but I’d been so scared that I managed to stick most of our rack into the mountain. I explained why I thought it didn’t make sense to have the biners banded onto each camming device for multiday big-wall climbs. “I think I know how to take care of my cams and biners,” he said.

  “Why don’t you clip in?” I asked. Alex was standing next to me on the ledge, and he wasn’t connected to anything. I thought this was a stupid and unnecessary risk, and I told him so. But I had lost all credibility in his eyes, and he was done being mentored by “Mr. Safety”—the nickname he had given me somewhere along the way. He stayed untethered.

  I assumed Alex had always been a nitpicker, but his friend Chris Weidner later told me that Alex’s attitude began to change in 2009. Weidner first met Alex in 2006, before he was famous, and he says that in those early days, Alex was soft-spoken, thoughtful, and generous to a fault. When they climbed a route called Golden Gate on El Capitan in 2007, Alex practically dragged Weidner up the wall. “He was a really, really supportive partner, even though, compared to him, I sucked.” But over the next few years, as Alex’s fame grew and he became a public figure, Weidner says he also became more self-centered. “I don’t know whether he was getting a little older and more comfortable in his skin, or what,” recounts Weidner, “but he definitely changed a bit, and I wasn’t too psyched about it.” According to Weidner, Alex couldn’t understand why his friend wasn’t as motivated or as strong as he was, or why he didn’t see things the same way he did. He was showing zero empathy and being selfish “in the way that a psychopath is selfish,” says Weidner.

  “It was insane how obsessive and nitpicky he was: ‘Why do you need to drink that cup of coffee, why are you drinking that wine, why do you put so much salt on your dinner?’” It got so bad that Weidner stopped using salt because it was easier than battling Alex about it.

  * * *

  —

  AS ALEX GRUMPILY put the rubber bands back onto his cams, Jimmy joined us on the ledge. He grabbed the carabiner of hooks and went through them with Alex like they were keys on a key ring. There was the talon, the sky hook, the fish hook, the pointed Leeper, and the flat Leeper. We even had a custom hook I had shaped on my grinding wheel at home. I called it the Hawk, for its beak-like point and because I came up with the idea for it while listening to a classic rock station of the same name on El Capitan. Jimmy placed the hooks on variously shaped edges on the wall in front of us, explaining why he chose one over the other, and showing Alex how to test if a placement was solid. He put the sky hook, which is shaped like a shepherd’s crook, onto a chip the size of a silver dollar. When he weighted it, the metal dug behind the tiny flake and popped it off like a dead toenail. “Choose wisely,” said Jimmy, chuckling as he gave me a knowing look.

  Just a few months before, Jimmy had led a pitch like this at 20,000 feet in the Indian Himalaya on Mount Meru. More than twenty different expeditions, which included some of the best alpinists in the world, had attempted the route previously, but no one had come close to success. Jimmy’s masterful lead, which Conrad later named the House of Cards due to the rock’s instability, proved the key to the route. But the team ran out of food and fuel and ended up turning back just one hundred meters shy of the summit.

  Alex set off, moving slowly upward, making long reaches between small holds I couldn’t see. He kicked some of the footholds to test their integrity before stepping on them. Good, I thought. He’s showing some caution. His route meandered right, then back left, then straight over a bulge to a small stance twenty-five feet above, where he was splayed out on the wall like a gecko. His rope whipsawed in the air, and I tried to calculate if the wall was steep enough that he would miss the ledge if he fell.

  “That�
�s far enough,” called Jimmy. “Try to find a good hook placement and get a bolt in.” Crimping an edge with his left hand, Alex reached down and pulled the hooks off the gear loop on the right side of his harness. He chose one and placed it on edge in front of his chest. He gave it a little downward tug, and, satisfied it was good, he clipped his harness to it with a short sling called a quick draw and slowly eased his weight onto it while still holding on with his fingers in case it popped off.

  “Is it normal for the hook to flex?” he called down nervously, as his life hung from a quarter inch of chrome-moly steel balanced on a chip of rock the width of a matchbox.

  “Perfectly normal,” I yelled back. Then Alex drilled his first bolt. Moving up toward what looked like a ledge, he stretched the rope to its end, placing four more bolts along the way. When he called down off belay about two hours after he had set off, Jimmy and I looked at each other.

  The guy had just on-sighted loose, overhanging 5.12 on a jungle wall in Borneo. And he made it look easy. I wasn’t confident I could follow his lead, even with the rope overhead, so I seconded the pitch by clamping mechanical ascenders to the rope and ratcheting my way upward. When I got to the anchor, I looked up at Alex. His brown eyes were wide-open, and the way he looked at me was entirely different than he ever had before. The grumpiness was gone, and in its place was a glow that came not just from his eyes and the huge shit-eating grin that covered his face—it seemingly radiated from his entire being. I felt as though I had just come in from the cold and was now standing next to a blazing fire. And I realized why Conrad had fallen under Alex’s spell when they climbed El Niño together on El Capitan. Being near Alex when he was luminescent felt really good. “That was sick,” said Alex. “I’m so stoked.” We went for a high five, but I turned my hand sideways and clasped his giant fingers. He looked at me and smiled, and I now knew that we could give each other as much shit as we wanted, and it would never damage our budding friendship.