The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  He superglued the cut closed, but he now had no choice but to tape the tip of his finger, which badly limited his ability to grip the rock. If the split kept getting bigger, it would start oozing blood right through the tape, which would act like lubricant and make it impossible to continue.

  All this drama was being shared on Instagram and caught on film by a camera team that was living alongside Tommy and Kevin, documenting the climb for a feature-length film being produced by Sender Films. People began to wonder: What if Kevin is stymied by pitch 15? Will Tommy leave him behind? Would Kevin want to support Tommy and belay him to the top, if he wasn’t able to share in the success? Would the climb still count if only one of them succeeded? While the Internet peanut gallery argued about arbitrary, hair-splitting semantics (including whether Tommy could legitimately claim a free ascent since he had seconded, not led, some of the easier lower pitches), Kevin continued to belay Tommy as he redpointed more pitches each day. Then at night, Tommy would belay Kevin as he attempted, day after day, to master pitch 15.

  Just as it was looking all but certain that Kevin was out, he made one last-ditch effort to keep his bid for the Dawn Wall alive. With the tape slipping off his superglued fingertip, Kevin roared as he lunged for the final jug, the only good hold on the pitch. And this time, he latched it.

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  THIS WASN’T THE FIRST TIME the world had waited on the edge of its seat to see if climbers would succeed on the Dawn Wall. A similar scene had played out forty-five years earlier. Back then they called it the Wall of Early Morning Light, and its first ascent in 1970 (accomplished with the conventional aid-climbing techniques of the time), by Warren Harding and Dean Caldwell (no relation to Tommy), marked the culmination of the greatest rivalry in the history of the sport.

  The 1950s, a period known as Yosemite’s golden age, saw the first ascents of the valley’s grandest formations. Rock climbs of this magnitude, what came to be called big walls, were so tall that a climber would have to sleep on the side of the cliff on the way up. And since no one had ever attempted to climb cliffs of this magnitude, those who would pit themselves against these monoliths had to invent the sport along the way. Of the handful of climbers who were most active during this period, there were two men—Royal Robbins and Warren Harding—who, by the nature of their diametrically opposed personalities, would come to represent the yin and yang of the golden age.

  Robbins was a serious man, a Berkeley intellectual who carried around leather-bound notebooks to record ideas stirred by the heady books he always seemed to be reading. He kept his hair in a military-style crew cut, was usually clean-shaven, and wore tortoise-shell eyeglasses. He was tall and powerful, with an athletic build and a commanding, almost imperious presence. A gifted free climber, he established the country’s first 5.9-rated route in 1952—Open Book—at a crag called Tahquitz in Southern California, when he was only seventeen.

  Robbins was a purist. For him it was not about getting to the top of the mountain; it was about the style in which he got there. He espoused a minimalist ethic: a climber should leave as small a footprint as possible. It was a standard to which he held not only himself and his partners but all climbers. At the time he came of age, cracks were being permanently scarred through the use of pitons, which chewed away holes in the rock as they were repeatedly hammered in and out. Climbing needed rules if the cliffs were to be preserved for future generations, and as the sport’s leading light, Robbins felt it was his obligation to make sure people knew what those rules were.

  Harding was, in every respect, the polar opposite, a wild man who oozed charisma and had a ribald sense of humor. He drove fast cars, boozed with abandon, and was often in the company of beautiful women. His eyes seemed to be eternally twinkling with the knowledge of some diabolical plan in the offing. Short and wiry, with a high-pitched voice, he wore his hair long and often slicked with Brylcreem. He rarely shaved. His friends called him Batso, a nickname he garnered because he seemed to spend most of his time hanging upside down.

  For Harding, climbing was anarchy. Anyone who didn’t like the way he did things could go to hell. He called Robbins and his followers the “Valley Christians.” And to counterbalance their virtuosity, he founded the Lower Sierra Eating, Drinking, and Farcing Society (LSED&FS), which was dedicated to gluttony and sloth. Their motto was “Semper Farcisimus.” I once attended one of their parties—a celebration of Batso’s seventieth birthday—which took place at a remote, obscure climbing area on the east side of the Sierra. I remember Warren, with stains of red wine all down his white T-shirt, staggering toward his tent shortly after dark. Later that night, after his cronies warned us several times to quiet down so they could sleep, they attacked us. One of my friends got beaten up by an old guy with a shovel.

  There was one thing Robbins and Harding held in common, and that was a deeply rooted competitiveness, especially with each other. In the battle for the first ascent of the valley’s walls, Royal Robbins initially took the upper hand when he scaled Half Dome over seven days in 1954. Harding had been preparing for the same climb when he heard that Robbins and his team had already pulled it off. They met on top, where Harding offered congratulations. But inside he was seething. “In a fit of egotistical pique, we grumbled around the Valley for a couple of days, trying to figure out what to do,” Harding later recounted. “Any climb less than Half Dome was beneath us; only a great climb would do.”

  So he decided it was time to attempt the valley’s crown jewel, El Capitan, the highest, sheerest cliff in all of North America save Baffin Island (which at the time was undiscovered by rock climbers). His assault on the leviathan wall began in July 1957. Harding and his two partners—Mark Powell and William “Dolt” Feuerer—soon found themselves stymied by soaring hand and fist cracks that were too wide for the pitons they carried. Back on the ground, they explained the problem to their friend Frank Tarver, who solved it by cutting the legs off some old wood stoves and sawing them into makeshift pitons that fit the wide cracks. Today, this section of the wall is known as the Stove Legs.

  It took Harding and a rotating team of climbers two seasons to complete their masterpiece up the center of El Capitan—a route that came to be called the Nose since it follows the cliff’s central buttress. In contrast to the alpine style that Robbins and his team employed on Half Dome, Harding and his crew fixed hundreds of feet of rope, similar to the way Mount Everest was climbed in 1953. With this nylon umbilical cord, the climbers were able to commute up and down the wall and haul food and equipment to their various camps, including vast quantities of cheap red wine and, once, a whole Thanksgiving turkey, baked lovingly by Harding’s mom.

  Harding, Wayne Merry, and George Whitmore (Powell and Feuerer had dropped out) summited on November 12, 1958, having spent a total of forty-five days working the route. “As I hammered in the last bolt and staggered over the rim, it was not at all clear to me who was conqueror and who was conquered,” wrote Harding of the experience in his book Downward Bound. “I do recall that El Cap seemed to be in much better condition than I was.”

  Robbins, for one, was unimpressed. The expedition style, the bolting, the fanfare that followed—it was almost too much to bear. His answer was to climb Harding’s route in alpine style two years later. He managed El Capitan’s second ascent, without the use of fixed ropes, in seven days. And thus began a game of one-upmanship that would consume Robbins and Harding for the next decade.

  By 1970, there was still one wall that no one had attempted to the right of the Nose on El Capitan’s southeast face, the tallest and most forbidding piece of rock in all of Yosemite, if not the world. It rose from a cavernous recess at the base of the cliff called the Alcove and soared skyward in a single uninterrupted 3,000-foot swath of continuously overhanging stone. Robbins had studied it with binoculars. While there were some cracks, too much of it was blank, at least to his mind. Whoever climbed it, if it was ever climbe
d, would have to drill ladders of bolts to connect the disparate crack systems. In Robbins’ estimation, an ascent of the Wall of Early Morning Light, as it had come to be called, would require too many bolts. So he declared it off-limits.

  Perhaps if Robbins had just kept his mouth shut, Harding would have turned his attention elsewhere, but when his nemesis declared the Wall of Early Morning Light out of bounds, the temptation proved irresistible.

  Harding, then forty-seven years old, set off in October 1970, with his friend Dean Caldwell, who was twenty years his junior. This time, he would not leave an umbilical cord to the ground but would instead climb the wall in a single push. As Robbins had predicted, Harding was forced to place many bolts, especially in the first few hundred feet. The tink-tink-tink of his drill biting into the rock was clearly audible at the base of the mountain, where Robbins observed, fuming at the audacity of his rival.

  At the beginning of their third week on the wall, a storm rolled into the valley. Harding and Caldwell were pinned in their “Bat tents,” special hammocks with built-in rainflys designed by Harding’s company, B.A.T. The initials—a clever play on his nickname—stood for Basically Absurd Technology. A crowd gathered in the meadow as the park service prepared to rescue the climbers, who they assumed were stranded. In fact, Harding and Caldwell were having a grand time camped on a ledge they named Wino Tower, where they sipped judiciously on a bottle of Christian Brothers brandy and rationed out sardines, bits of cheese, and canned fruit cocktail. Knowing that something was afoot below, Harding wrote a note, sealed it an empty tin can, and dropped it down the wall. A passerby picked it up and brought it to the rangers who were massing in the meadow. “A rescue is unwanted, unwarranted, and will not be accepted! We must be the most miserable, wet, cold stinking wretches imaginable. But we’re alive, really alive, like people seldom are.”

  But no one had ever spent this much time living on the side of El Capitan in one continuous push, and the rangers were convinced that they knew better. The next day, ropes were lowered from the rim. After much heated yelling back and forth, Harding and Caldwell made it clear that they were fine and adamantly refused the offer of rescue. Harding would later say that if it had come down to it, they were ready to fight off their rescuers with piton hammers. When the media heard the story of the tin can and the climbers’ refusal to be rescued, the story became front-page news, where it remained for the duration of the climb.

  When Harding and Caldwell summited at noon on November 19, 1970, twenty-seven days after leaving the ground, they stumbled into a media frenzy not seen since Edmund Hillary returned from the first ascent of Everest. After living in a Bat tent on the side of a cliff for nearly a month, Harding was so overwhelmed by the crowd waiting on the summit, which included journalists, friends, and his girlfriend, that he scuttled off behind a rock, where he hid crying for several minutes. But when he emerged, still wiping the tears from his eyes, he was ready to take on the role of America’s first climbing superstar.

  From Yosemite he went straight to New York City and then to LA, where he and Caldwell appeared on talk shows and were interviewed by Life magazine for a feature article about their climb, and then later by Howard Cosell for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. A lecture circuit followed, each show involving wild parties that usually lasted until the sun came up. Batso, of course, was always the last man standing. He was generous and as loose with his money as he was with women, and when the frenzy eventually died down, Harding discovered to his dismay that he had spent every cent he had made, and then some. A few weeks later, he was back working construction on a California road crew, just like he had been before the climb.

  Robbins was deeply offended by the Wall of Early Morning Light, almost as if the 330 bolts had been drilled into his own hide. The order of things had been upset, and in a fit of self-righteousness, he declared that he would make the second ascent, and in the process he would erase the route by chopping off all the bolts. But at their first bivouac four pitches up, as he and his partner Don Lauria rested in their hammocks, Robbins began to have second thoughts. Neither felt sure they were doing the right thing, especially in light of the fact that the climbing was some of the most inspired they had ever done. In the morning, Robbins turned to Lauria and said that he had decided to quit chopping the route. He would later write, “[It’s] good to have a man around who doesn’t give a damn what the establishment thinks. . . . Harding stands out as a magnificent maverick.”

  His rival may have been playing the game by different rules, but he was playing the game and playing it well. Robbins realized that underneath all their differences, he and Harding had a lot more in common than either of them had ever wanted to admit. And with that realization, climbing’s greatest rivalry—and Yosemite’s golden age—came to a graceful end.

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  JOHN BRANCH of the New York Times got the first interview with Tommy and Kevin when they topped out. Jorgeson gave him the best quote when he said, “I think everyone has their own secret Dawn Wall to complete one day, and maybe they can put this project in their own context.” He was echoing the same sentiment expressed by Maurice Herzog in the mountaineering classic Annapurna: “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.” Honnold stood nearby.

  The best climbers, the ones who truly stand out from the rest, the characters who have gone down in history, they’ve all had at least one superlative climb that defined them, a route that redrew the boundaries of human potential, setting a benchmark for the next generation. Even if Tommy and Kevin never climbed another significant route, they could coast on this one for the rest of their lives. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had the first ascent of Everest. Reinhold Messner was the first to climb to the top of the world without supplemental oxygen. Harding claimed both the Nose and the Wall of Early Morning Light. Lynn Hill free climbed the Nose in one day. But Alex didn’t yet have the one singular accomplishment that defined him, at least not to his own mind. Free soloing Robbins’ route on the Northwest Face of Half Dome couldn’t be the end, because there was one more obvious step to take. And Alex knew there was only one person who had any business even contemplating that next step.

  What no one knew, not even his closest friends, was that Alex was already well into the process of free soloing El Capitan. Years ago, around the same time that Tommy quietly rappelled off the summit to see if there were enough holds to free climb the Dawn Wall, Alex was making a list of routes he might solo as stepping-stones on his way to the Captain. Each of the routes, in their own way, simulated sections he would face on Freerider, the route up El Cap he felt offered the best chance of success. El Sendero Luminoso, a 5.12+ in Mexico, which he climbed in January 2014, featured steep, technical face climbing like he’d encounter on Freerider’s Boulder Problem. The University Wall, a 5.12– in Squamish, British Columbia, which he free soloed in August of the same year, had lots of burly wide cracks, like the one he’d face on the Monster Offwidth.

  Alex had worked on the University Wall for several days prepping it for the solo, but he couldn’t get it dialed to the point where he felt good about it. He would later tell me that he got it to about 95 percent. He had always felt that on a solo he should feel at least 99 percent certain of the outcome, and hopefully with a few .9s tacked on. So he set it aside and moved on to other things. Two and a half weeks later, still in Squamish, Alex was having one of those climbing days when everything feels easy. Small holds felt big. His feet felt as though they were glued to the rock. He had power to waste. So he walked up to University Wall and he started climbing. He had rehearsed an intricate sequence at the crux, which required pinching the bottom of a flake as he carefully ticktacked his feet along a series of barely perceptible nubs in the rock. These were the moves he was never able to feel quite right about. But when he got to the undercling, he locked off with his right hand and brought his feet up high. As he did, he realized he was feeling so strong that he didn’t have
to follow the tricky moves he had practiced. Instead, he simply reached high to a good hold above. He would later describe it to me as a moment of “transcendence.”

  From Squamish, Alex headed to the Needles, a climbing area in the foothills of the Sierras a few hours south of Yosemite. It was here that Alex had set his sights on another route on his list called the Romantic Warrior, a 5.12b. He had climbed it eight years earlier and had never forgotten a section called the Book of Deception, a tricky stemming corner at the top of the nine-hundred-foot route. It seemed like a good primer for Freerider’s Teflon Corner.

  A flamboyant and controversial climber from Southern California named Michael Reardon had already claimed a free solo of Romantic Warrior in 2005. Reardon was a former glam rocker turned actor turned movie director who was known for climbing naked and for leaving personal calling cards—panties and tubes of Vagisil—inside summit registers. What made Reardon’s climb downright mind-boggling was that he claimed to have done it on-sight. Climbing records and the sport’s accepted history have always relied on an honor system. When climbers claim to have done routes, they are taken at their word. But there have been a few notorious characters who famously dishonored the tradition. First there was Frederick Cook, who claimed the first ascent of Denali in 1906. The photo he supplied of his teammate planting a flag on the summit turned out to have been taken on an insignificant subpeak located many miles from the mountain. And there was Cesare Maestri, the Italian who still claims to have made the first ascent of Patagonia’s Cerro Torre in 1959, a climb so far ahead of its time that it wasn’t repeated until 2012. According to Maestri’s account, his partner Toni Egger died on the descent when he was swept off the mountain by icefall, taking the camera and photographic proof of the ascent with him. Maestri claimed that anyone who repeated the route would find his bolts high on the wall, but when the north face of Cerro Torre was finally scaled by an elite team of modern climbers, they found no bolts and the route didn’t match Maestri’s description.