The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  “Did you switch lenses?” asked Cheyne, who had also touched down.

  “I totally chickened out,” said Jimmy. “I didn’t even reposition the whole time Alex was climbing.” Jimmy saw me taking notes on my iPhone and added, “We are definitely way more gripped than Alex.” Alex, a bemused smile on his face, just looked at Jimmy and shrugged.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT ALEX invited me to go climbing the next day with him and Sanni. It rained overnight and the rock was still wet in the morning, so we made a plan to meet at two P.M. When I got to the van Alex was hanging from the Beastmaker by one arm and Sanni was sitting on the bed. Grunge metal played in the background. “What music is this?” I asked.

  “Apocalyptica; it’s cellos playing Metallica.”

  “Never heard of it. What else is on the playlist?”

  “Tool, Nine Inch Nails.” Alex grabbed a handful of M&M’S from a large bag on the counter and shoved them into his mouth.

  “You need to take it easy on the sugar,” Sanni said. Alex looked at her blankly. “He’s been bingeing on M&M’S,” Sanni said, catching my eyes.

  “You know they have linked excess sugar consumption to migraines,” I said to Alex. I’ve witnessed him suffer from debilitating headaches several times, including the one in Morocco that kept him in bed for most of a day.

  “I’ve heard that,” said Alex, “but I’m not sure it applies in my case. I’ve never noticed any kind of correlation.”

  It was three P.M. by the time we finally left the van. Alex and Sanni jumped on their bikes and said they’d meet me at the base of Lower Yosemite Falls. It took me a while to find a parking spot, and I figured they’d be waiting for me, but Alex and Sanni were just pulling up when I arrived. Sanni hopped off her bike shakily. She looked like she’d been in a fight since I’d last seen her ten minutes ago. Her black tights were ripped, her hair was askew, and she was limping.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “She swerved to get around a tourist and basically just ate it,” said Alex, answering for her. “I’m afraid she’s not a very good biker.”

  “I landed on my knee,” said Sanni, pulling up her tights. Her knee was red and swollen and sported a golf ball–size knob.

  “Wow, Sanni, if that was my leg I think I’d be going to the clinic,” I said.

  “I’m fine,” she replied as she limped into the woods and hid her bike behind a tree. “Let’s hike up to the base and I’ll see how it feels.”

  I looked at Alex. “Some serious grit.”

  He raised his shoulders and gave me a smirk. “I know,” he replied. “Her attitude is awesome. It’s probably the main reason we’re still together.”

  By the time we got to the base of the climb ten minutes later, Sanni was slipping on her harness. I flaked out the rope, and Alex started whistling, soon joined by Sanni. The tune was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Were they consciously trying to entertain me, or was this just how they rolled?

  “What song was that?” I asked, when they finished.

  “The theme song for Jurassic Park,” said Alex. “It’s one of my favorite movie soundtracks. You know how much I love movie soundtracks, right? I’ve told you about that, haven’t I? It’s something I picked up from Peter Croft. He got me into it.”

  Before he set off, Alex teed up another song—“The Red” by a band called Chevelle—and shoved his iPhone in his hip pocket. As he scampered up a bushy corner, the grunge metal reverberated off the three-hundred-foot cliff.

  “Place a piece, por favor,” called up Sanni, when he was a hundred feet up without having put in any protection. Alex, heeding Sanni’s request, threw a sling around a tree growing out of a crack and clipped his rope.

  “Merci beaucoup,” called Sanni.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN ALEX HAD CLIMBED TWO hundred feet above the ground, Sanni and I began simul-climbing behind him. I was tied into the end of the rope, and Sanni was clipped into a knot—called a cow’s tail—about twenty feet in front of me. The route was rated 5.10, a hike for Alex. As if to confirm this fact, Alex was wearing his approach shoes. For Sanni and me, this climb, called the Surprise, required careful execution. And since we were simul-climbing, we both had to match our movement to each other and to Alex. When he moved up, we moved up; when he stopped, we stopped. The difficulty with simul-climbing is that sometimes the leader will stop at an easy part to place a piece of protection, while the climber below is in the middle of a crux. Sometimes you have no choice but to keep moving, because you know you’ll fall if you try to hang out for too long in the middle of a hard move. Since you’re still moving, but the leader isn’t, the rope slackens, which means if you do fall, you’ll take a whipper, just like if you were leading. You can imagine what this would feel like for the person leading to whom your rope is tied. And if they happened to be a long way above their last piece, the resulting fall could be catastrophic. To prevent us from violently ripping him off the wall, Alex had fed his rope through a Mini Traxion that he attached to a solid piece just as we left the ground. It was the same tactic he had used in Morocco while climbing the Triple Crown with Tommy.

  By the time Sanni and I got to the crux near the top of the route, Alex was in the woods, belaying us off a tree. I looked up and spotted what appeared to be a loose block on the slope above us. If I fell, I’d pluck Sanni off, and we’d both go flying across the face. The rope would rake across the slope above us, and if it snagged the television-size boulder sticking out of the sandy dirt, it could pry it loose. I’d seen this kind of thing happen. Once, while rappelling from the east face of Mount Babel in the Canadian Rockies, I had gone down the wrong way, and when I tried to swing over onto the correct line, my rope dislodged a melon-size rock that landed on my thigh, nearly breaking my leg. I knew from hard experience, and from studying the circumstances surrounding the fatal accidents that seemed to befall members of the climbing tribe every month or two, that most climbing accidents happen in an instant. One second, life is grand—the next, you are dying. I pictured what would happen if the rock came loose. It was roundish so it would roll easily. The slope below it was steep. If we both fell, the load would be more than three hundred pounds, which would elongate the rope, making it skinnier and, therefore, easier to sever. I remembered a time I was guiding on Cannon Cliff in New Hampshire, and my client had found himself in a similar situation. “Hey,” I called down to him, “please be very careful, you’re in a no-fall zone.”

  “Please don’t say things like that to me,” said the man, who was clearly irritated. “I would rather not know.”

  “If you want to hide from the danger, and not have your eyes wide-open, this probably isn’t the right sport for you,” I shot back. I don’t know if he quit climbing, but I never heard from him again. I was pretty sure neither Alex nor Sanni saw this possibility for things to go badly wrong. This time I said nothing, but I climbed as if I was free soloing, hyperfocused, my fingers turning white as I overgripped the final set of tiny face holds leading up into the woods.

  * * *

  —

  “ALEX KNOCKED ON MY FRONT DOOR,” said Tommy. “It was shortly after you had all returned from Morocco. He walked in and he was kind of limping, which was a little strange. Then he started crying, which totally wigged me out because Alex just doesn’t cry. He said he had fallen free soloing in Morocco. He lifted up his pants and his leg was all messed up. Then he pulled up his sleeve and a bone fell out onto my sofa. I was like, ‘Dude, what are you doing here? You need to go to the hospital.’ And then I started looking at all you guys and I got really mad. I woke up and I was like, Wow, there’s really something going on here that I hadn’t let myself consciously digest. It was an incredibly vivid dream.”

  It was nine thirty in the morning, and the valley was soaked from a downpour the night before. Tommy
and I sat in camp chairs in one of the only dry spots we knew of beneath a fifteen-foot-tall egg-shaped rock called the MSG boulder. The overhanging face rising above the backs of our camp chairs proffered a difficult boulder problem that Tommy had climbed a few years ago. From where I sat I could finger the first hold, which was caked white with climber’s chalk.

  El Capitan, the granite monolith around which all our lives seemed to rotate, was visible through the widely spaced lodgepole pines that grew from the wet, loamy earth. The cliff was slicked with water, its sides gleaming. Mist rose from the meadow beneath it. Between El Cap and the Woodlot stood Ribbon Fall, which spills from an alcove on a 1,500-foot cliff just west of El Capitan. It was pumping from the recent rain, which filled the air with soothing white noise.

  Tommy and his family were leaving Yosemite that afternoon, and I had asked him if we could chat about Alex. I was curious how he was feeling about our mutual friend’s crazy plan now that he’d had more time to think about it.

  The day that he fell on the Freeblast (the lower ten pitches of Freerider), Alex called Tommy to tell him what happened. They were supposed to meet up a few days later, but it didn’t appear that Alex would be climbing with Tommy anytime soon. “When he called, the first thing I thought about was the dream,” said Tommy. “I said to Alex, ‘Whoa, I just had this crazy dream about you falling.’ And then it hit me—this [Freerider] is something he could very well die on.”

  “Did it make you feel like maybe you should be trying to talk him out of it?” I asked.

  “I don’t really feel like it’s my role to talk him out of it. Part of me wants him to do this thing that’s obviously very important to him. And if I was in his situation, I don’t know if I could not try it. On the other hand, I think that him falling is a real possibility. And I hadn’t let myself go there. I went and climbed the Freeblast the other day partly because I was just curious how it would feel to free solo it. Every time I have climbed that part of El Cap, I’ve kind of felt lucky to get through it. I’m like, ‘Wow, I didn’t slip.’”

  “What do you think is driving him to do this?”

  “I think he is driven by mastery. He listens to soundtracks of superhero movies and stuff like that,” said Tommy, chuckling. “He likes to envision himself as this larger-than-life superhero. Which he kind of is.”

  “What about the film? Do you think it’s putting pressure on him?”

  “I grew up in this world where filming and publicizing things was very much looked down upon,” replied Tommy. “It was supposed to be about the purity of the climber in the landscape, and you didn’t want to project outside of that. But I have also grown up taking part in competitions and I understand the appeal. And I think each younger generation veers more towards being motivated by that side of things. Alex would be trying to free solo El Cap regardless of whether it was being filmed or not, but I’m sure that being filmed is a motivator for him, and quite possibly, a really positive motivator. It gets him excited because I think a lot of the appeal is wanting to look like a superhero to the masses—and that’s not going to happen without a film. If you look at people like Peter Croft and the free soloists of the past, they did it under that old-school ethos. They didn’t tell anybody about it, and the people in that world admired them for that, while people outside of that world didn’t really care because they didn’t know it was happening. I think Alex wants everybody to care.”

  “How do you think this ends? If he pulls this off, do you think he can be content with it as his ultimate climb and then maybe start winding things down?”

  “It’s hard to say this”—Tommy paused and looked down at the ground, then looked me in the eyes, wearing a grave expression—“but I think Alex will probably just continue doing this until he dies. If I was younger I wouldn’t say it like that, but I’ve seen that happen a lot in climbing. Everybody that I know that pushes it that hard in a really risky endeavor dies. I can’t think of any exceptions to that, and he pushes it harder than anybody. I like to think that Alex is so good that it’s not that dangerous, but I know that it’s Russian roulette.”

  * * *

  —

  TOMMY MAY BE THE ONLY person who can keep up with Alex in the mountains, but there’s one thing he won’t do: climb without a rope. From an early age, his father drilled into him the family ethic of avoiding needlessly reckless pursuits. And by needlessly reckless he meant two specific types of climbing: Himalayan alpinism and free soloing.

  “I’d be curious to know if there’s any free soloist who has a family with a strong mountain background. It’s almost easier to have a family that is oblivious to the whole thing,” says Tommy.

  The wisdom of his dad’s edict has been borne out over the years. Tommy says he can think of at least ten times that he has fallen unexpectedly while climbing. Alex says he’s never fallen unexpectedly, but Tommy points to several instances when he has done precisely that, including the last climb they did in Morocco. Alex was following Tommy’s lead when he broke a hold on a 5.10 pitch and fell. When Tommy called him on it, Alex said, “If I was free soloing I would never have grabbed that hold.”

  “Maybe that’s true,” Tommy says, “but what if he didn’t recognize that it’s a loose hold? I once had a bad fall on El Capitan where the sole of my shoe just ripped off.”

  In 2014, while descending from a marathon linkup of seven peaks on Patagonia’s Fitzroy massif, Tommy and Alex were discussing a familiar topic among all climbers: Were the risks worth the reward? Tommy told Alex that his risk calculus had changed since he became a father—he’d become more conservative as a climber. Alex replied bluntly that Tommy’s family “would be fine without him.” Tommy wasn’t offended; Alex has no children, and he comes from a family that supposedly never used the “L word.” Tommy understood the remark as perhaps reflecting Alex’s own view of himself, that he wouldn’t be unduly missed if he died soloing. Later, Tommy and Alex were crossing a glacier when Alex disappeared into a crevasse. For a few seconds, Tommy thought Alex might be lost somewhere in the bowels of the glacier. Then Alex climbed out of the hole and started giggling. “I was like, ‘Hmmm,’” says Tommy. “Something’s not quite right about this guy.”

  * * *

  —

  THE GROUND WAS STILL WET in Foresta the next morning, so I figured Alex would take the day off from climbing. But by midmorning the sun was shining and the ground seemed to be dry. I was buzzing from multiple cups of coffee, and I got this strange feeling that I might be missing something important. I texted a couple of people, but no one responded. So I tried Jacob.

  “Where are you guys?”

  “Rostruming”

  “Is he doing it?”

  “Yes.”

  I frantically threw some climbing gear into my pack while Hampton got Tommy into his car seat. We arrived at the pull-off above the Rostrum on Highway 41 half an hour later. I climbed over the wall and wandered down a weathered slab, taking care to avoid the wet patches. The rock was pockmarked with nooks and crannies, most of which were filled with water. As the slab dropped away, the summit of the Rostrum came into view, where half a dozen people were tinkering with a giant camera crane perched at the lip of the cliff. Alex, wearing a bright red shirt, waved, as did a couple of the other guys. I worked my way toward the lip of a six-hundred-foot north-facing cliff that sits adjacent to the Rostrum, scoping for a place where I could watch the climb. From where I sat I could see most of the Excellent Adventure. Alex would climb all of the 5.11 North Face route (often just called the Regular Route or the Rostrum) as a warm-up leading to the 5.13 variation at the top. I couldn’t see any of the Regular Route because it was hidden around a corner, but I knew it would take Alex only forty-five minutes or so to dispatch the lower six pitches.

  Above the summit and a few miles to the northwest I could see the burned meadows of Foresta, and as I strained to spot our cabin, my eye was drawn to the thousands of oran
ge ponderosa pines that lay scattered across the surrounding hills. The national forest service estimates that 66 million trees died across the Sierra Nevada as a result of the severe drought that plagued California from 2010 to 2016. A third of those trees had died just in the last year. Lack of groundwater dried out and weakened these majestic trees and left them susceptible to an infestation of pine beetles. I had just seen a bulletin about the pine beetle on a message board down in the village. It said that if the drought continued, every ponderosa in the Sierra Nevada would eventually die.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, Alex appeared silhouetted on the edge of the buttress, fifty feet below the Excellent Adventure. Before scrambling down to this vantage point, I had briefly debated not watching him at all. The Great Escape had been a distressing experience I didn’t particularly want to repeat. But in the end I knew that as a reporter for National Geographic I needed to witness it. As soon as Alex came into view, it was obvious that today something was different. Perhaps it was my position, which offered a stunning bird’s-eye perspective of a man laying down all his chips for the chance to tread on the razor’s edge between life and death. It felt different to be watching from above rather than from below—where he’d land if anything went wrong. But there was something else, and as Alex stemmed up the overhanging corner below the roof, I realized what it was: The herky-jerky, gimpy-footed movement I had witnessed on the Great Escape was gone, replaced by a relaxed and proficient smoothness. Alex had found the flow, he was having fun, and the climbing appeared easy—despite the fact that it was anything but.