The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  When Reardon claimed his free solo of Romantic Warrior—by far the boldest ropeless climb to date—doubts began to surface almost immediately. The gist of the controversy is captured in a post on SuperTopo that was written by someone with the handle Levy. He starts out by asking if anyone has actually seen Reardon solo anything. He wonders why, if Reardon is soloing so many hard routes, no one ever seems to witness the climbs. “He’s a nice guy & friendly,” writes Levy, “but in climbing perhaps more than any other ‘sport,’ personal credibility is everything. We have no judges or committees to say whether or not an ascent is legit or not so one must be taken at their word for their climbing feats. If somebody I know told me ‘Yeah I saw him solo it’ that would be enough for me. So far however, I have heard no credible reports of seeing the ascents M.R. claims.”

  One of Reardon’s most noteworthy doubters was Peter Croft, who knew him personally. Croft told me that he liked Reardon, but that he had heard too many stories from “high-profile climbers” about Reardon lying about things he had done. “It’s not like I’m 99 percent sure he didn’t do it,” says Croft. “I know that what Michael said did not occur.” Croft mentioned a number of different stories, including other debunked solos claimed by Reardon in Britain and in Joshua Tree, but he said that if I was interested in learning the truth about Michael Reardon, I should check with Peter Mortimer.

  In the summer of 2005, shortly after Reardon returned from a trip to the Needles, Mortimer visited him at his home in Southern California. Reardon told Mortimer, who was a close friend, that he had gone to the Needles by himself to check out some stuff and that it had been “a mellow trip.” He said nothing about having done what at the time would have been the greatest free solo in the history of the sport.

  A few months later, Mortimer heard that Reardon was claiming he had on-sight soloed the route. At first he was excited for his friend, but then he realized that Reardon was saying it had happened on the trip that he had told Mortimer was mellow and uneventful. So Mortimer confronted him. “Why didn’t you tell me about Romantic Warrior?”

  “It was so special, I needed to keep it to myself,” replied Reardon. This, according to Mortimer, was completely out of character for a guy who loved the spotlight and was unabashed about wanting his expressions as an artist of free-solo rock climbing to be appreciated by others. When Mortimer expressed incredulity, Reardon shot back that he had photographic proof of the ascent. “That’s bizarre,” replied Mortimer, “because you told me you were there by yourself.” The pictures do exist and are easily searchable on Google. They’re reminiscent of the iconic image of John Bachar on New Dimensions. Reardon, wearing a red shirt and blue shorts, his mane of blond hair flowing in the breeze, clings to a crack in a right-leaning open book, hundreds of feet above the ground. Like Bachar, he’s looking directly into the camera lens. But unlike Bachar, he’s giving us the finger.

  Mortimer contacted the photographer, Mark Niles, who admitted the pictures were from a re-creation. They had rappelled in from above and Reardon had posed, much like Honnold would later do for Mortimer on the Moonlight Buttress. “At that point I stopped believing him,” says Mortimer. Reardon would later change his tune about the photos, telling Rock and Ice magazine that they were indeed taken during a re-creation a few weeks after the climb.

  In 2007, Mortimer’s partner at Sender Films, Nick Rosen, was in the midst of writing an article about the controversy when Reardon was swept into the ocean by a rogue wave at the base of a sea cliff in Ireland. The water temperature was in the low fifties, and the current quickly pulled him away from shore. By the time the Irish Coast Guard arrived on the scene, Reardon, who was forty-two years old, was gone. His body was never recovered. Rosen and Mortimer decided to drop it.

  But there are still many credible people who believe that Reardon did everything he said he did. Duane Raleigh, editor of Rock and Ice, investigated Reardon’s claims. He checked the time stamps on his photos, cross-referenced weather forecasts, and interviewed eyewitnesses. “It all checks out,” says Raleigh. But that was before I shared Mortimer’s account with him. Raleigh wants to know why Mortimer’s information hadn’t come out back when Rock and Ice was reporting on the controversy. “There’s always been a little bit of doubt there,” he says. “And now, maybe a little bit more.”

  One person who believed Reardon unequivocally was John Bachar. They were friends, and the two used to solo together regularly. Bachar told Raleigh that Reardon would climb circles around him. When the rumors began circulating that the Romantic Warrior climb was a hoax, Bachar, with a tip of his hat to the 10,000-dollar bounty he offered up back in the early eighties, offered free Acopa rock shoes for life to anyone who could keep up with Reardon for a day. There were no takers.

  Alex, for his part, didn’t care one way or another. As far as he was concerned, if Reardon said he did it, he did it. We’re left with the question of whether any of this matters. Peter Croft, for one, thinks it does. “If history matters at all, we should give credit where credit is due,” says Croft. “And history does matter, so it [the truth about Reardon] should come out at some point.”

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  IN SEPTEMBER ALEX DROVE into the Needles and spent the night in his van in a dirt pullout. The next day he ran laps on the route’s crux pitches by rappelling in from above and self-belaying with a small aluminum pulley called a Micro Traxion. The device was designed for hauling bags through caves or up cliffs. It incorporates a ratchet that holds the load in place while you reset between pulls. In climber parlance this is known as “progress capture.” Climbers figured out that Micro Traxions also work well for self-belaying on a fixed strand of rope. We call it “mini-tracking,” in reference to the Micro’s predecessor, the Mini Traxion, which was bigger and heavier but works in the same way. Alex put a locking carabiner through the small donut hole on the device and clipped it to his harness. As he climbed up the wall, the Micro rolled along the rope at his waist. If he fell, the ratchet, which is lined with tiny angled teeth, would cam against the rope, holding him in place. The beauty of mini-tracking is that it allows a climber to rehearse a route without needing another person to serve as belayer. This way you’re not “wasting someone’s else life,” as Alex once put it to me.

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  WHEN ALEX got back to his van that evening, he realized he was out of propane. Which meant he had no way to cook the only thing he had for dinner—mac and cheese. He debated driving out to get fuel, but it was such a long way to where he could resupply that he might as well bail and head back to Yosemite. Should he just go for the Romantic Warrior route in the morning? It seemed like a bad idea. He had been planning another day or two of rehearsal, because the climbing had felt hard and insecure. He stayed the night, and in the morning, while eating an energy bar, he said to himself, Fuck it, I’m going for it.

  At the base of the route, he tried to empty his bowels, but nothing happened. This was a bad omen, but he headed up anyway. The first four hundred feet of the route are relatively easy, and Alex made quick time. But as he approached the first crux pitch, he felt his insides begin to grumble. He was in the middle of a steep pitch, and there were no ledges anywhere. And it would be extremely poor style to shit right down the climb itself. Alex looked out left, where a flake of rock offered a horizontal handrail. He grabbed it and traversed sideways until he was twenty feet off the side of the route, hanging from 5.10 handholds on an overhanging wall. He slipped his small pack off one arm at a time and shoved it into the crack; then, hanging by his one hand, he pulled down his pants. He brought his legs up into a crouch and “space dumped” into the void. After taking what might have been the most daring poop in history, he wiped, pulled up his pants, and finished the route in good style. Afterward, he told a couple of friends what he had done, but he didn’t report the climb to the magazines or post about it on his social media. And he never went back to pose for ph
otos. Alex was keeping this one for himself.

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  BY 2015, Dean Potter wasn’t climbing much any more. Instead, he spent his time making illegal wingsuit jumps from various formations in Yosemite Valley. He had jumped from every major cliff in the park. Many of his launch points were firsts, and he was constantly on the lookout for new ones. Half Dome was a perennial favorite. He would hike up to the slabby west side of the dome via a secret trail with his dog, Whisper. At the base of the wall, he would put the dog, a blue heeler, into a pack and then free solo a 2,000-foot 5.7 called Snake Dike with the dog—and his BASE rig—on his back. At the top, he’d strap motorcycle goggles over Whisper’s eyes and make sure she was securely fastened to his back, and then the two of them would jump off the Diving Board. On a good day, they would fly for more than a minute, swooping in near the cliff like a raven before banking out over the valley, pulling the chute, and floating to a soft landing in a small meadow alongside Mirror Lake.

  Since Deep Blue Sea on the Eiger, Dean had only freeBASEd one other route, the Alien on the Rostrum in Yosemite. FreeBASE had been a visionary idea, but the fact that he was the only person in the professional climbing world interested in pursuing it said a lot about how dangerous it was. The main problem was that there weren’t that many cliffs that were steep enough for it to be feasible.

  But in a roundabout way, freeBASE had led to his next obsession, which he was calling human flight. The idea was to jump from the top of a cliff, high on the side of a mountain, fly down its side, and then land on a snow slope—without deploying his chute. And he had found the perfect place to do it in the Coast Range of British Columbia.

  Dean had pitched the idea to National Geographic, and he brought me on as a writer, alongside Jimmy Chin, who would photograph the event. After signing a nondisclosure agreement, I was given the details. Dean, I learned, had been working with an aerospace engineer named Maxim de Jong to develop a custom wingsuit that featured body armor, similar to that worn by motocross riders and extreme skiers. The suit also included an “otter body” on its chest that would allow him to sled across the snow when he landed.

  The story never came through, so I wasn’t with Dean when he went to British Columbia and holed himself up in a small cabin with Jim Hurst, who was supposed to film the stunt for The Aerialist, the documentary about Dean’s life that was now nearly a decade in the making. The jump didn’t happen for reasons that remain obscure. I’ve always assumed it must have had something to do with the death of Dean’s friend Sean Leary, who died in a BASE-jumping accident in April of 2014 in Zion National Park. It was Dean who found Leary’s body on a ledge below the ridge he hit.

  But Dean was still working with de Jong on a custom wingsuit that incorporated a vertical stabilizer. The deeper he probed into the aeronautics, the clearer it became that wingsuit design was inherently flawed. With the flying-squirrel wings on the sides of the suit, BASE jumpers could achieve glide ratios up to 2.5:1. But glide wasn’t the problem. The issue was tracking. On most aircraft, directional stability and steering rely on the tail fin. Wingsuits don’t have a fin, and this makes them more akin to a falling leaf than a torpedo. If a wingsuit BASE jumper makes even a tiny miscalculation in body position, he can lose control and find himself tumbling through the air like a piece of plywood dropped from a skyscraper. Dean believed that this design flaw was probably responsible for Leary’s death, which gnawed on Dean’s conscience since he had personally introduced his friend to the sport.

  Another of Dean’s favorite jumps in Yosemite was Taft Point, just up the road from where he lived on thirty acres in Yosemite West, a small town within the park. And it was here that he found himself on the evening of May 16, 2015, almost exactly four months since Tommy and Kevin had climbed the Dawn Wall. Dean, who was now forty-three, stood alongside his friend and frequent BASE-jumping partner, Graham Hunt, a twenty-nine-year-old who was one of the best wingsuit jumpers in the world. It was a beautiful evening. Ravens, creatures that Dean had long ago identified as his animal totem, were soaring on warm air currents high overhead. The rising warm air was a good sign, as it would help them track away from the cliff when they stepped off the edge.

  But Dean wasn’t feeling well. He had left Hunt a message earlier in the day saying that he wasn’t up for flying. Later, he changed his mind. On a few occasions, they had flown through a notch in a ridge about 1,000 feet below the exit point. Since the conditions appeared to be perfect, they decided they would try for the notch. Jen Rapp, Dean’s girlfriend, situated herself nearby to take photos of the jump.

  “Are we ready?” asked Dean.

  “Yes,” replied Hunt, as he stowed his phone after a call with his girlfriend, who was on the valley floor trying to find the landing zone.

  Dean exited first, followed a second later by Hunt. The images captured by Rapp show Dean beelining for the notch, with Hunt much higher and slightly behind. They disappeared from view; then Rapp heard two very loud sounds in quick succession. Was that crack the sound of their parachutes snapping open? She hoped so, but it didn’t feel right. She texted both of them but got no response. Then she tried the radio. Hunt’s girlfriend, Rebecca Haynie, waited down by the river. But Dean and Graham never landed. By the time YOSAR arrived, it was dark and too late to do a thorough search of the scene.

  At first light, a California Highway Patrol helicopter located the bodies of the two men on a talus slope just below the notch.

  Jim Hurst was on his way to the Grand Canyon when he heard that his friend had just died. He immediately changed course and headed to Yosemite. The search and rescue team hadn’t been able to analyze the accident, and there were a lot of unanswered questions that were making it hard for their friends and families to understand how two of the world’s best BASE jumpers could perish on what should have been a routine jump. There was speculation that they might have collided in the air; or perhaps they flew too close to each other and the resulting turbulence caused them to lose control.

  Hurst and a BASE jumper named Corbin Usinger rappelled off Taft Point and explored the notch. They found a pine tree that was missing its top. By combining what they found on the scene with Rapp’s photos, and calculating the angles and trajectories, they were able to speculate what might have happened.

  The photos show that Dean was flying a lot lower than Hunt. This could have been due to the fact that his wingsuit was partially unzipped, something they discovered when his body was recovered. It looked like Hunt was making a turn to the left, which would have been consistent with him deciding not to fly the notch. But then he made a sharp turn back to the right. Why he did we’ll never know, but that turn cost him his life. Hurst determined that from the angle at which Hunt was approaching the ridge, the tree he hit would have been indistinguishable from the green forest backdrop. The top of the tree, which was broken into four pieces and lying in the talus below the notch, was approximately eight inches in diameter. Dean made it through the notch, but he didn’t have enough height to clear the lower-angled terrain in a gully on the backside. He ran headfirst into a rock wall going a hundred miles an hour.

  In the final analysis, Hurst thinks Dean was too low and needed to deploy his chute and take his chances with a rough, unplanned landing high in the terrain, which probably would have resulted in traumatic injury. Thermals were rising on Taft Point, but the far side of the notch was a cold north-facing wall. A local pilot later told Hurst that it was a place notorious for rotors and downdrafts, exactly the type of air currents that pilots try to avoid at all costs. The thermal updrafts Dean and Hunt had deemed auspicious may have actually strengthened any downdrafts on the north side of the notch as cold air was sucked down to replace the rising warm air.

  Hurst and Usinger climbed up to the notch and found the spot on the other side, about a hundred feet away, where Dean had hit. “If he’d had another four feet of elevation he would have made it,” says H
urst. “The realization that he was going to die would have been like a quarter second.” As they scrambled around the area, they found parts of their friend spread over a seventy-five-foot radius, like a Tibetan sky burial. According to Hurst, there were lizards sitting next to pieces of Dean’s brain, waiting for flies to land. “That’s something Dean would have loved,” he says. Dean Fidelman, a close friend of Dean’s, agrees. The scene was macabre, but it was a fitting end for a man “who had always wanted to become one with Yosemite.”

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  ALEX AND DEAN had a complicated relationship, but Dean’s death hit Alex hard. Years ago, when Alex was plotting his escape from his childhood bedroom, it was Dean he had watched in those Masters of Stone videos. They might have been rivals, like Harding and Robbins, with vastly different styles, but deep down they were uncompromising soul brothers who pushed themselves for the same simple reason: It gave them joy and offered an escape from the mundane drudgery of everyday life. In the years since Alex had scooped Dean on the West Face of El Cap, friends noticed that they were becoming closer, drawn by a mutual respect that seemed to grow stronger each year as they both became more comfortable in their own skins. A few days before Dean’s final flight, the two had dinner together in Yosemite.