The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  With his legs split wide, bridged between the pages of the granite open book, he made a long reach with his right hand to a horizontal flake above him. Every other climber who had scaled this route since the moves were first deciphered by Croft and Shultz seventeen years earlier had placed a camming device in the crack created by the flake to establish a fail-safe anchor point. Alex, unencumbered by such contrivances, would trust his continued existence to the four fingers on his right hand.

  But if Alex was carrying the psychological weight of knowing that his life hung eight hundred feet in the air from a few bits of flesh and bone, he didn’t show it. Instead, he dangled one-armed from the plate of rock, taking his time. Green forest painted the gap formed between his horizontal red-shirted body and the gray slab of rock from which his slender human form was suspended.

  And then, in the middle of what may have been one of the boldest feats of athleticism ever, Alex did something that was surprising, casual, arrogant, and inspiring all at the same time. He reached down with his free hand to adjust his shirt where it had bunched up under the strap of his chalk bag. He hung there for far longer than was necessary, until finally, like a coiled spring, he surged over the ninety-degree lip of the roof to a fingertip edge that he latched with his left hand. With his arms stretched to his full ape index, he smoothly drew his legs over the lip like a cobra rising from a snake charmer’s basket. Now there was nothing left but forty feet of heroic jamming up the final crack that sliced the gray shield of rock guarding the summit.

  When he topped out, Alex stood at the cliff’s edge, his heels inches from the void. He didn’t yell or even speak, but his head bobbed up and down as if he was nodding affirmatively. I flashed back to a YouTube video of Dean Potter free soloing Heaven in 2006. When he pulled over the lip, Dean went ballistic. Fists balled, every muscle in his body flexed, he screamed at the top of his lungs like a Viking warrior filled with bloodlust. Alex, in contrast, just stood there silently. The only noticeable thing he did was hold his arms out in front of him, like a weight lifter admiring his muscles after a difficult set. It was something I’d seen him do many times, but I couldn’t tell if it was vanity or if he was examining the thickness of the blood-gorged veins in his forearms as a way to gauge how pumped he had gotten, which is to say how hard he had pushed himself.

  “You saw all that, right?” said Jimmy, slapping me a high five when I arrived on top a few minutes later.

  “Uh, yeah,” I replied, looking directly at Alex, who was sitting a few feet away. “It was only the sickest thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life.” I took a step toward Alex and clasped his hand. “Nice work, my man.”

  “Thanks, dude.” His brown eyes were wide open and twinkling. His mom has described them as “cow eyes,” and they are that big, but a cow would never look at you the way Alex was looking at me right then. He was a man wide-open, stripped of all the protective layers we wear to shield us from the world. The smile he wore was so big and so genuine that it gave him an aura, a glow I had seen on him only a few times since I’d known him. Once was after he led the Emily pitch in Borneo, the other when he climbed the Rainbow Arch in Chad. And I’d seen it a third time, in the five-minute film of him soloing El Sendero Luminoso in Mexico. He was high on the wall, hanging from a fingertip edge, when he looked back over his shoulder at a cameraman hanging in the air above him. The look on his face—it’s nothing more than the joy of knowing that life cannot be experienced more fully.

  Peter Croft once explained the feeling you get from free soloing as

  a heightened type of perception. A little edge that you need to stand on looks huge—everything comes into high relief. That’s just what happens to your body and your mind when you’re focused intensely on the feedback you’re getting from the environment and there are no other distractions. You become an instinctive animal rather than a person trying to do a hard climb, and that perception doesn’t immediately go away when you get to the top. It dulls over time, but for a while it feels like you almost have super senses. Everything is more intense—the sounds of the swifts flying around or the colors of the sun going down. A lot of times I don’t want to go down, I don’t want it to end.

  I had been reading a book I found in the Yosemite gift shop called The Things They Carried. In it, the author, Tim O’Brien, writes about his personal experience as a soldier in the Vietnam War.

  After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. . . . There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness.

  “You weren’t here when I topped out,” said Alex. “But I was really fired up. I think that’s the best solo I’ve ever done.”

  “Sort of the opposite of Morocco, huh?” I said.

  “Yeah, totally. I felt really good on this one.”

  Maybe that’s all any of us need to know. Maybe we’re all guilty of ruthlessly overanalyzing Alex’s motivations—like we do our own. Perhaps Alex is simply trying to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” as Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden. Sebastian Junger, in his book War, which chronicles the fifteen months he spent embedded with a platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, explained it like this:

  For a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else.

  Jimmy and I looked at each other, and I knew we were both thinking that if Alex could free solo the Excellent Adventure and feel this good, he could—and he would—free solo Freerider. Though no one said it, we sensed Alex would attempt his magnum opus—soon.

  A few minutes later, Alex was sitting back from the edge gathering up his things. He looked tired now. The glow had already begun to fade from his face, and I was sure his ankle must have been throbbing. I wondered if he was still buzzing inside or if the high from the best free solo of his life had already dissolved. “I’ll see you in a couple days,” he said, throwing his shoes and chalk bag into a small daypack. He was off to Sacramento for a fund-raising event for the Honnold Foundation.

  As the crew packed up the crane, I asked Dave Allfrey if I could do some mini-tracking on the six-hundred-foot rope that the camera guys had used to film Alex’s climb. “Of course,” he said, giving me an earnest look, “but be careful down there. And text me when you’re off the wall.” Alex had just free soloed a 5.13, and Dave was worried about me on a 5.11 toprope.

  Everyone was gone by the time I rappelled off. The North Face of the Rostrum overhangs from top to bottom and the rope dangled in the air beneath me. I couldn’t see if it had a knot in the end, but I assumed it didn’t—Dave would have taken it out so the rope wouldn’t get caught behind a flake when he pulled it up. As I slid downward, I plugged camming devices into the cracks as directionals to pin the rope in place over the sections I wanted to climb. My plan was to climb the Regular Route, the same line Alex had just scrambled, sans the finish on the Excellent Adventure. Four hundred feet down, I swung onto a small ledge, clipped myself to a bolt anchor, and rigged up my Mini Traxions.

  The first fifty feet went smoothly, but then the crack went from three inches wide to about eight. I knew that I needed to switch from a hand jam to an arm bar, so I slid my entire arm into the crack and pressed my palm against the cold stone. This created counterpressure against the back of my elbow, which in turn caused the inside of my biceps to grind against the outside edge of the crack. I held my entire weight with the arm bar and used my core muscles to lift my left leg as high as I could. I needed to slot
my knee into the crack to hold myself in place, but it wouldn’t quite fit. After five minutes of grinding my knee against the rock, I slipped out of the crack and slumped onto the Mini Traxions. As I hung there dangling on the rope hundreds of feet above the Merced River, I felt weak and impotent. The first time I had climbed this route, about ten years earlier, I had on-sighted it, no falls. My peak as a climber had come and gone. As I dangled on the rope contemplating the trajectory of my own climbing career—it all went way faster than I could have imagined—I remembered a conversation I’d recently had with Alex.

  “You can’t push the physical limits forever,” he told me. “I’ve already begun my decline, so I won’t be upping the ante forever. I’m training better and climbing better and smarter than I was five or six years ago, but physiologically I’ll never have the body I did when I was twenty-four. That’s just the biology of it.”

  I understood in that moment how brief Alex’s window of opportunity was. The man I had just watched perform that godly feat was thirty-one years old. In a couple of years more, he might slip far enough down the back side of the climbing arc that Freerider would be a physical impossibility. But he couldn’t have done it when he was twenty-four, twenty-five, or even twenty-eight, because he wasn’t ready yet. I could see quite clearly how not completing this almost preordained conclusion to his career—the ultimate climb of the world’s ultimate cliff, a free solo ascent of El Capitan—would dog him to the end of his days. Perhaps he needed this climb so he could quit the high-stakes free solo game. Maybe Tommy was wrong.

  * * *

  —

  ALEX AND PETER CROFT, the Yosemite icon who was still climbing hard and regularly in the valley, sat in Alex’s van on the edge of El Cap Meadow. Peter had arrived in the valley the day before to take a group of designers from the North Face product development team climbing for a few days. We’d all had dinner the night before, and the design team had showed us the new line of clothing they had been working on for fall 2017.

  I was perched on the wooden fence between the parking area and the meadow, trying to stay out of the way, when Jimmy waved me over to one of the production vehicles. “Here, you should listen in,” he said, handing me a headset. I slipped in the earpiece just in time to hear Alex say: “I would do the top pitches today if I had to.” I had dropped into the middle of the conversation, but it sounded as though Alex was imagining himself on the final ten pitches of Freerider, including the Enduro Corner and the traverse to Round Table Ledge. This section of the wall is continuously overhanging and follows a laser-cut crack that hangs half a mile in the air over Yosemite Valley. The climbing is continuous at the 5.11 and 5.12 grades, but the jams are secure, and it’s the type of climbing Alex excels at, especially without a rope. Cranking ropeless up this swath of immaculate stone was a huge part of why Alex wanted to free solo El Capitan. He knew exactly how good it was going to feel. “That part of the route is sick; it would be heroic,” he said to Peter. “The feeling of going over the top would be so cool.”

  They chatted about some random stuff for the next few minutes, including a story I had heard before, about how Peter had idolized Tarzan when he was a kid. Peter said he actually wanted to move to Africa until he realized there is a lot of disease in the jungle.

  I was trying to picture how scrappy Peter must have been as a feral kid running wild in the hills of British Columbia, when Alex said, “Do you think its douchey that I have a movie crew?”

  A long pause followed before Peter answered. “People asked me if I would solo Astroman again [for the camera], but I didn’t want to. It was so incredibly important to be doing it for the right reasons. It was just a matter of self-preservation, because I didn’t want to risk being distracted. I’ve just always looked at soloing as something incredibly selfish. I don’t mean it negatively, more just that it’s not for anyone else.”

  “I think I’m doing it for the right reasons,” said Alex. “But yeah, from the outside it looks bad.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, Alex headed up to the top of El Cap to camp out for a couple of nights. Over the past week he had made two day-trips to the top, working his way down the route, rehearsing different sections with his Micro Traxion. He spent most of his time on the Enduro Corner and the Boulder Problem. At the end of each of these training forays, he rappelled to the ground. The mileage was putting a lot of wear and tear on his ankle, and he’d told me that the days were so grueling he had to take rest days afterward. Alex hates rest days.

  “Come in quick,” he said, when I knocked on the door of the van. “You’re letting all the heat out.” Alex had just gotten down from his camping trip and had texted me a little while earlier to invite Chris Sylvia and me for dinner. Sylvia was in the valley to climb with me for the weekend. Sanni was frying tortillas, cheese, and refried beans on the stove top. Alex was cutting up an avocado and some green peppers. The van smelled like a Mexican restaurant. I sat sideways in the driver’s seat, which doesn’t turn around, and Chris took the backward-facing passenger seat. Chris and I cracked beers, and Sanni poured herself a glass of red wine. Alex sipped from his water bottle. I noticed something I hadn’t seen before, probably because I hadn’t been in the van with the door shut. The inside of the door was covered in a piece of wood paneling decorated with an etching of El Capitan. The cliff’s major features had been carved into the wood, including the Nose, the Heart, and a long continuous line denoting Freerider.

  Alex saw me looking at it. “Mason carved that; pretty awesome, huh?”

  “So how did it go up there?” I asked.

  “I mean, nothing is a deal breaker so far. So we’ll see.”

  “How does the Boulder Problem feel?”

  “I’ve done it eleven or twelve times now without falling on it. I feel pretty good about it, but it’s definitely something you have to get psyched up for. I mean, it’s kind of the only spot on the whole route where you have to pull hard and be really, really precise.”

  “Do you have it completely dialed?”

  “I used to do it differently, but I’ve sort of pioneered some new soloing beta that feels a little bit more secure.”

  * * *

  —

  ALEX WOULD LATER PANTOMIME EVERY move of the crux for me, which would have been comical if it wasn’t so deadly serious. “Left foot into the little thumb-sprag crack thing. Right foot into this little dimple that you can toe in on pretty aggressively so it’s opposing the left hand, then you can, like, zag over across to this flat, down-pointing crimp that’s small but you can bite it pretty aggressively. I palm the wall a little bit so I can pop my foot up and then reach up to this upside-down thumb-sprag crimp thing.”

  “How big is that hold?” I had asked.

  “It’s the worst hold on the route. It’s maybe this big.” Alex held up his thumb and forefinger about an eighth of an inch apart. “It’s really small. But you’re pushing into it and you have a pretty good foot, and so you get it with one thumb. You stand into it, flick your left foot out to this horrible sloping foothold thing that’s, like, really bad. Surprisingly, my foot’s never slipped off it, even though it looks like it’s going to every time.”

  “What if it did slip?”

  “For the first move it would kind of be okay because it’s all opposition between the thumb press and the right foot, so the left foot’s kind of a place holder at that point. Then you push into it. You unpeel one finger so you can leave room for your other thumb, and then you lean. Then the foot matters a little bit because you lean out to this hold out left. But even then, I don’t know. If the foot blew you might still be able to hold it just between tension, between the right foot, the thumb, and the other hand. Anyway, you reach out to the sloping thing. You reach back to the crimp that you initially used, and then you bring your right foot through to this slopy dish thing. Left foot way over so you’re lie-back
ing and then sag your hips over so you can match hands. You switch to this little undercling and you can get your palm over it. You put your right foot under this down-facing chip and then you karate kick into the corner.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know. It sounds fucked up. If you count hand moves, it’s, what, one, two, three, four . . .”

  “You’ve soloed stuff like that before, though, haven’t you?”

  “Kind of. I don’t know if I’ve done moves quite like that.”

  “Because it’s especially insecure?”

  “Yeah. It’s legitimately pretty hard.”

  Sanni handed plates of food to Chris and me and made a move toward the trash with the empty bag of shredded Mexican cheese.

  “What are you doing?” said Alex.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” replied Sanni. “I’m throwing this away.”

  “But there’s still some left in there,” he said. Sanni held up the bag, and indeed, there was a tiny pinch of yellow cheese lining the seam along the bottom—enough to make a nice meal for a small mouse. Sanni rolled her eyes and put the bag in the minifridge.

  “You guys sound like an old married couple,” I said.

  Sanni jumped up onto the bed and cuddled in next to Alex, who was propped up with a couple of pillows, his back against the side of the van.

  “Looks like there’s a storm coming in,” I said. The forecast for Wednesday was 100 percent rain.

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “It’s gonna wash all my tick marks off the route, and even if the route doesn’t get that wet, I’ll have to go up to the top to inspect it. Depending on how much precip we get, this could be the end of the season. So I’m thinking about maybe going for it on Tuesday. But we’ll see. We’ll see.”

  There was a burning question I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Do you feel trapped by who you have become? Maybe I could ask him when it was all said and done, but not right now. I didn’t want to mess with his psyche, and my gut told me that it was too late for anyone, especially Alex, to be questioning his motives.