The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  Jimmy led another pitch, and then the three of us rappelled down the ropes we had fixed to our camp. Two portaledges, cocooned inside white rainflys, hung one above the other, with four haul bags neatly hanging outside the doors. Conrad and Kevin were ensconced in the upper ledge, so the three of us moved into the lower one. The ledge was designed for two on the top bunk and one in a hammock strung underneath.

  Jimmy explained to Alex that, as was customary, the three of us would Rochambeau to see who got stuck with the hammock the first night. After that we’d rotate a different guy down below each night. “It’s okay,” said Alex. “I’m fine with the hammock.” He slipped over the aluminum bar and left us to lounge in the comparative luxury of the double-wide platform above. He seemed happy to trade a less comfortable bunk for some private space.

  We had decided not to bring a stove, to save weight, so we dined on salami, cheese, and crackers, which we passed between the two ledges in a gallon-size Ziploc bag. For dessert we shared a block of caramel-filled milk chocolate. Off in the distance, past a row of pink and purple clouds that appeared to be marching across the South China Sea, I could see the hazy outline of a distant island. I wondered if I was looking at the Philippines.

  “Hey, Alex, what are you going to call your pitch?” asked Conrad, who was drawing a map of our route, what climbers call a topo, in a small yellow notebook. On a big-wall first ascent, it’s a custom to give names to significant pitches or features.

  “I hadn’t even thought about it,” replied Alex, “but how about ‘the Emily pitch—beautiful and intimidating.’” “Emily” was Emily Harrington, a twenty-two-year-old whom Conrad had recently signed to the North Face team. She was around Alex’s age and one of the best female climbers in the world. She was also spunky and quite attractive. Alex had a huge crush on her. He knew that in the small world of the climbing community, word gets around, and she’d eventually hear about the “Emily pitch” (she did). I never would have had the gumption to do something like that when I was Alex’s age.

  I looked over at Jimmy, who had turned away from watching the sunset and was staring at the inside of the rainfly. I followed his gaze and for the first time noticed how beat-up the fly was. Little nicks and cuts riddled the fabric, and I recalled Conrad back in KK saying that we needed to seam seal it and repair the holes. But we had never gotten around to it.

  “This is the same ledge we used on Meru,” said Jimmy wistfully. “It was so cold up there that all three of us slept up on the top bunk.”

  “Are you ever going back to try and finish it?” I asked.

  “No fuckin’ way,” he said. “I’m done with that thing.”

  (Two years later, Jimmy would return to Meru and finish the route with Conrad and Renan.)

  Later, as the three of us settled in for the night, Alex grew quiet and I figured he had fallen asleep. I’d noticed in base camp that he usually went to bed right when it got dark. He was one of those guys who just had to close his eyes and he fell asleep and snoozed right through until morning.

  “You know, I’m kind of feeling like a pansy,” announced Alex, out of the blue.

  “How so?” I responded. “You just did the sickest lead I’ve ever seen.”

  “I know,” he replied, “but it scared me. I shouldn’t have gotten so scared.”

  * * *

  —

  CONRAD, KEVIN, AND JIMMY headed up the ropes the next morning, while Alex and I dropped down to see if he could free climb some of the bolt ladders we had aid climbed on our way up. I was hanging off some bolts, feeding the rope in and out for Alex, who was working a difficult section, when the sun disappeared behind a cloud. Every morning so far, we had awoken to clear skies that slowly filled with clouds over the course of the day as the sun burned off the moisture that had settled overnight onto the jungle surrounding Mount Kinabalu. By midafternoon these clouds would build into towering cumulonimbus that would eventually envelop the mountain in torrential thunderstorms complete with booming thunder and lightning. At first I thought these clouds were the standard fare, but then it got dark, so dark it felt like nightfall. A stiff wind began to blow, and giant raindrops splattered off our helmets.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I called down to Alex, as we raced back up our ropes to the portaledge.

  By the time we got back to our camp, horizontal sheets of rain were blowing in from the north, dousing us as if someone was splashing buckets of water against the wall. We crawled into the ledge, but it wasn’t much different from being outside. Waterfalls were now pouring down all around us, and I could hear a mighty roar emanating from the gully below, which had transformed into a raging torrent. Water poured through the holes in the fly, and the wind shook the ledge violently. We heard yelling and then the horrifying sound of giant things falling through the air. I peered through the opening at the top of the door and saw rocks the size of television sets whizzing through the gloom on all sides of the ledge. Somewhere up above, Conrad, Kevin, and Jimmy were still battling their way up the choss.

  Alex had slipped down into the hammock, and against my advice had gotten into his sleeping bag. I had put mine in a dry bag that morning and clipped it up in the apex of the rainfly, where it still hung dry. Water was pouring in through the holes in the fly, and my nylon bed was filling up like a bathtub. There were two brass grommets on either end of the bed designed to serve as drains. I looked down over the edge and saw Alex’s pale face in the opening of his bag. Water was pouring out of the grommets in a steady stream directly onto his sleeping bag. I knew the hammock didn’t have a similar drain system, and since it was coated nylon, it had to be filling up with water. Alex was obstinately lying in a pool of water, in his bag, because I told him not to. He hadn’t said it, but when I suggested he keep his bag dry until we got the water situation sorted, I imagined he thought, Fuck you, Mr. Safety. It was the perfect time to give the cocky little bastard some grief, but when I looked at his face enclosed in the sopping-wet fabric of his sleeping bag, his expression said, Yeah, I’m an idiot. But I’m a stubborn idiot and I’m not giving an inch! So I just smiled. Slowly, a mischievous smirk spread across Alex’s face. And then we both burst out laughing.

  I heard a noise outside and looked out the door to see Jimmy, soaked to the bone, dangling on a rope outside the portaledge.

  “Conrad is going for it,” he said.

  “Still?”

  “Yeah. He said he wanted to finish his pitch. Move over, I’m coming in.”

  Jimmy and I sat on our helmets and used our cups to bail water out of the nylon bed like sailors trying to keep their boat afloat. Jimmy pulled out the camera and pointed it in my direction. Mostly, I was thinking about my warm bed at home.

  “How’s it going down there?” I yelled, leaning over the side of the ledge and locking eyes with Alex. I was only three feet away from him, but the roar of the gully below was so loud we could barely hear each other.

  “Not good,” he replied. “I just tried to kill some time fantasizing about women, but I just didn’t have the heart.”

  “Wow, you must really be suffering,” said Jimmy, who had popped his shaggy head over the ledge’s aluminum frame, his head pressed against the soggy rainfly next to mine.

  “How is it up there?” asked Alex.

  “Wet,” I replied, “and I’m bored. I wish I had brought a book.” Climbers, always concerned about weight, don’t usually bring books up on the mountain. Back in 2002, on a ski mountaineering expedition with Warren Miller Entertainment, I had gotten trapped for three days in a blizzard high on Mount Waddington in the Coast Range of British Columbia. To keep ourselves from losing our minds, my partner “Sick Rick” Armstrong and I had devised a game: We took turns making up stories about the cute little bear with the red Santa’s cap on our Sleepytime tea bags. We played for hours at a time, each picking up where the other had left off and working hard to outdo the o
ther guy by having the bear do completely outrageous, illegal, and immoral acts, which will remain between Rick and me. Stuck in storms at various bivouacs over the years I’ve told endless stories—some of them completely made up. I’ve read the directions on hot chocolate packs like they were New Yorker articles. Once, in Pakistan, I built a maze on the floor of my tent for an old tired fly I coaxed along by prodding him with a piton.

  A few minutes later, Alex’s giant hand came over the bar of the ledge holding a torn-in-half book. “Here, take this,” he said. It was the first half of The Brothers Karamazov.

  “Thanks.”

  “No biggie,” he said.

  In the morning, the rain had stopped, but we were still socked in dense fog and everything was drenched. I rolled onto my side and put my hand down into the bottom of my bag. It was sopping wet. Jimmy and I had slept in a pool of water. At that moment, I just wanted the trip to be over. I said as much to Jimmy, who was sitting up next to me, his face wearing a grim expression. Sipping on cold instant coffee, I laid out the reasons why we should bail. Jimmy didn’t say much, but I knew he was on the same page. Alex, meanwhile, had extricated himself from his torture chamber and was standing outside the ledge urinating into the fog. He was silent, which I took as his tacit agreement that the climb was over.

  Conrad and Kevin were also quiet, but I could hear them rustling around in their ledge. Jimmy had just begun expressing his own doubts when Conrad finally chimed in. “Enough with the whining,” he said sternly. “It’s time to get back to work.” Jimmy and I looked at each other sheepishly, like two children who had just been chastised by their father. It was just another storm.

  * * *

  —

  THE SUMMIT, which we reached three days later, was beautiful but anticlimactic, as they always seem to be. We work so hard and take so many risks on these climbs that I suppose it’s inevitable that mountaintops hardly ever live up to the monumental billing we attach to them. The letdown is so common that some climbers have said that summits don’t matter. It’s a gallant idea, but if the summit doesn’t matter, where exactly are we heading when we set off from the base?

  Conrad had been right when he told me that I would learn a lot from climbing with “the kid.” Alex Honnold had reminded me of the old climbing proverb: “There are old climbers and there are bold climbers, but there are no old bold climbers.” He had helped me to see, perhaps for the first time, exactly how much I had reeled things in over the past few years. What I hadn’t realized until Borneo was that if I kept reeling things in at the rate I was going, it was only a matter of time before I wouldn’t have any desire to climb a first ascent like the one we had just done.

  My parents, people who had never climbed a pitch in their lives, had always seen this eventuality. “How long do you think you can climb for?” my dad had asked me one day. Later, when I started having children, he had asked, “So what are you going to do when you’re done climbing?”

  “There is no next thing,” I had replied. My dad understood something that I had failed to see or had been unwilling to admit—the sport to which I had dedicated my life was a young man’s game. Sure, there were a few outliers like Conrad Anker, “old, bold climbers” who were still pushing the cutting edge into their fifties, but climbing with him had only reinforced the idea that I’m not one of those guys.

  After my dad had told me that I was “worm food” when I died, I had been desperate to find something that could give meaning to my existence. But the harder I quested, the more elusive the answers became, and over time, I slowly became nihilistic. If life had an intrinsic meaning, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I found climbing and, perhaps more important, the climbing tribe. Climbing became my passion, and the strength of that passion gave my life the orientation and purpose it had previously lacked. Climbing taught me what the fox meant when he told the Little Prince, “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

  Somehow, I had failed to notice that I had crested my personal climbing arc and I was now sliding down the back. A decade earlier, I had been the young buck, and now there I was, at only thirty-nine years old, and the new guy was calling me a silverback and Mr. Safety.

  And so I asked myself a question that had never occurred to me before: What would life be like without climbing? It was a question I wasn’t prepared to answer, but now that I was no longer gazing upward, wondering, like Alex, where climbing might lead me, I saw, for the first time, the cracks that had formed in the foundation upon which I had built my life.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS ONE LAST LOOSE end to take care of before we packed up camp and headed home—exit interviews. Jimmy and Renan had shot hours of video, and Conrad, Kevin, and I had given them plenty of material with which to develop the theme of young and old. We all said basically the same thing: It had been motivating to climb with a young gun like Alex Honnold. Every jaw-dropping lunge, every inhuman pull—even every rookie mistake—had served as a potent reminder that the fire that we saw inside Alex still burned inside us, too.

  But for this theme to work, Alex had to acknowledge that he had actually learned something from the silverbacks.

  “So?” asked Jimmy, as the cameras rolled.

  Alex, sitting atop a boulder on the outskirts of camp, stared back at him blankly.

  “Alex, come on. Conrad is one of the most accomplished all-around climbers in the world. He’s been on more than forty expeditions. Can you honestly say you haven’t learned anything from him?”

  “But he’s not really a climber,” replied Alex. In his narrow view of the sport, which he was now revealing for the first time, if you couldn’t climb 5.14, what you did in the mountains was some weird type of adventure hiking. And he wouldn’t pretend to be impressed by it. He would later say that he’d felt like Jimmy had teed him up and then said, “Okay, now dance, monkey.”

  “Who the fuck does this guy think he is?” said Jimmy after Alex had left camp. “I was so incredibly respectful of my elders when I first came on the scene.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I replied. “I still am.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing,” said Jimmy as he packed away his camera. “I’m never working with him again.”

  Alex ended up hiking down alone. Jimmy and I hiked down together, talking about Alex most of the way down. The guy was a cocky, elitist son of a bitch, and his failure to acknowledge that he might have learned something from the silverbacks was downright offensive. But then why did we still like the guy? Alex’s smugness, his condescension, the way he would look at you while you were cutting him down to size and just smile—it was lovable. You knew he was thinking, Dude, don’t you realize what a fucking badass I am? Do you realize how foolish you sound, trying to tell me what’s what? In most people, this attitude would be insufferable, but in Alex it was somehow endearing, probably because he could actually back it up. Compared to the false modesty so common in climbing, his brashness was refreshing. He wore his ego right on his shirtsleeve like the logo of one of his sponsors.

  A few minutes from the trailhead we came upon Alex sitting by the side of the trail. He had left camp an hour before us and he’s a fast hiker, so he must have been waiting for a long time. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You guys want to do another quick interview?” I left Jimmy to do his thing, knowing that Alex wouldn’t want an audience while he was saying nice things about us.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nonprofit

  It was the name that initially drew him in. Dean imagined the sky was a deep blue sea that he would fall into if he slipped. When he saw the climb for the first time, a 1,000-foot gently overhanging pillar of gray and orange limestone on the northwest arête of the Eiger, he knew that it was the one. Even the grade, 5.12d, was just right—not too hard, definitely not too easy.

  It was June 2008, and Dean Potter had been �
�living like plankton,” in his words, at the base of the Eiger for more than a month. It had been raining most of that time. Afternoons especially were almost always foggy and wet. To pass the time, he and his cameraman, Jim Hurst, would take turns hiking down to the train station to buy beers from the vending machine. If they ever got a weather window, the plan was for Dean to freeBASE the looming pillar of rock that hung over their camp like a tombstone. Dean would free solo the climb wearing a BASE rig, Hurst would film it, and if everything went according to plan, they’d end up with a nice segment in Sender Films’ next Reel Rock Tour—a major annual showcase for adventure sports.

  Dean always maintained he didn’t climb for accolades or fame, but ever since the Delicate Arch fiasco his reputation was badly in need of redemption. People still ranted about it two years later on SuperTopo, where they referred to it simply as “DA.” Sometimes, when he was feeling low, he wondered if he’d ever live it down. It had even contributed to the end of his marriage with Steph. They weren’t officially divorced yet, but they would be soon. And now this Alex Honnold kid had stolen the show. He was the new face of extreme sport, the guy all the sponsors wanted to associate with. Dean’s career was in jeopardy of fading into obscurity. He needed some good publicity.

  Whenever the weather was decent, he would solo up the Eiger’s West Ridge, rappel down from the top, and rehearse different sections of the route. If conditions were favorable, he would BASE jump afterward from a spot called the Eiger Mushroom. He’d land down in the valley, grab some beers and maybe a baguette, then hike back up to their camp.

  Deep Blue Sea would be Dean’s first go at this brave new kind of extreme sport. FreeBASE wasn’t quite free soloing, because he would be wearing a BASE-jumping rig, which meant that a slip didn’t necessarily mean certain death. But it wasn’t BASE jumping either, because the exit—if it occurred—was not a controlled event. If he slipped or popped off unexpectedly, there would be no horizontal vector to his launch; plummeting only inches from a cold wall of rock, he’d somehow need to find a way to orient himself in the air in order to track away from the cliff.