The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  Moon-eyed Alex looked at me and said, “We’ll see,” one more time.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING AT FOUR A.M., Alex set off with Brad Gobright to climb the Freeblast. Gobright, who was twenty-eight at the time, is an up-and-coming climber who began free soloing a few years ago after watching videos of Alex. The year before, he had fallen on a hard, dangerous route. He was wearing a rope, but his gear ripped out of the rock, and he landed on the ground, breaking his back. Just prior to this fall he turned heads, including Alex’s, when he free soloed a route in Colorado called Hairstyles and Attitudes, a slippery 5.12c that had never been climbed before without a rope. Since his fall he has not soloed anything hard.

  The biggest problem Alex had run into so far while rehearsing the various sections of Freerider was the heat. Most days, by ten A.M. the rock was baking. Hot rock is not a climber’s friend. It feels greasy, and it shreds your skin. But nature trends toward a state of equilibrium, and in a narrow corridor like Yosemite, heat that builds on the valley floor has only one place to go—up. These updrafts are a daily occurrence on a hot day in Yosemite, and for a climber high on the face of El Capitan, the cooling breeze is always most welcome. Alex was hoping to time his ascent such that he would be high on the wall by the time it got hot. The plan made sense on paper, but so far every day he had worked on the route, it had still felt uncomfortably hot. The thermals weren’t enough to counteract the solar radiation being absorbed by El Cap’s west face. The heat was such a conundrum that Alex had been speculating about whether he might be able to time the climb to take place in the unsettled weather right before a storm, similar to the day when he had fallen on the Freeblast two months earlier.

  “But then I’m playing with the possibility that it could rain when I’m up there,” he had said to me after coming down from one of his baking-hot training sessions on the route. “But, hey, I’ve got a camera team, so I could just call them over to rescue me.” His almost sarcastic tone seemed to be his way of asking, What do you think, would that be totally douchey?

  His solution was to start at four A.M., but this meant climbing the Freeblast, and the crux sixth pitch, on which he had now fallen twice, in the dark. So there was one last piece to the puzzle: to head up there before sunrise to see how it felt to climb it by headlamp.

  We were all waiting in the meadow at nine A.M. when Alex and Brad sauntered up, followed by Clair Popkin and Jim Hurst. “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “It all felt good,” said Alex. “I even pioneered some new beta.” He detailed the new sequence for one of the slab sections.

  “How was it climbing by headlamp?”

  “It was fine. Not an issue.”

  The night before Jimmy had asked me if I could help hike a load of gear to the top. He planned to sleep up there with Cheyne, Mikey, and Jacob so they’d be in place to drop in on fixed ropes first thing in the morning. The plan was to position camera guys at key points along the route to film Alex as the historic climb unfolded.

  A few minutes later I was shoving my pack full of extra batteries and camera lenses at the parking lot adjacent to a five-hundred-foot cliff called the Manure Pile. It’s actually one of the most popular and classic climbing venues in the park, but because it sits adjacent and in the shadow of El Cap, it was long ago given this less than flattering name. The summit of El Cap looms 3,000 feet above the Manure Pile. While El Cap is by far the largest and most dramatic geologic feature in Yosemite, the summit is nondescript. Were it not for a large cairn marking the spot, you might wander on the indistinguishable slabs, littered with glacial erratics and wind-stunted juniper trees, trying to find the highest point of this mountain. I have climbed El Capitan twenty-three times, and not once have I even considered trying to find the actual summit. One thing is sure: There is no easy way to get to the top of this cliff.

  Hikers have a few different options. From Tamarack Flat Campground on the Tioga Road, it’s a fifteen-mile round-trip. Another option is the Yosemite Falls Trail, which has the advantage of starting right from the valley floor but the disadvantage of being so long that most people can’t make the round trip in a day.

  Climbers have access to what is probably the easiest way to get to the top, the East Ledges, El Cap’s standard descent route. This is the route Alex had been taking and was the route we would follow this morning, as we labored to gain 3,000 feet of elevation in less than a mile of hiking.

  As the heat began to rise, the five of us set off up a steep, dusty trail that dead-ended below a five-hundred-foot cliff—the East Ledges. Back when I used to climb El Capitan regularly, the East Ledges was used primarily as a descent route and there were no fixed ropes you could use to go up this way. If you wanted to use it as an ascent route, as we sometimes did, you had to climb it. That was before free climbing on El Capitan and practicing routes via mini-track had become de rigueur. Nowadays, most parties hoping to free climb Freerider will spend days, if not weeks and months, mini-tracking the moves on fixed ropes.

  We took turns ascending the fixed ropes. At each station, we’d wait for the call that the person ahead was off the rope; then we’d ratchet our way up the vertical wall with ascenders and foot stirrups, our heavy packs threatening to pull us over backward. From the top of the fixed lines the East Ledges route follows narrow goat paths that tunnel through thick manzanita bushes until breaking clear onto a gently angled slab of rock littered with boulders and widely spaced pine trees. As we shuffled up these slabs, our feet bent inward by the slope, we passed the top outs for some of the routes I had climbed over the years—Zodiac, Zenyatta Mondatta, Native Son, Tangerine Trip, Pacific Ocean Wall, and the king daddy of them all, the Dawn Wall. All of these routes, and many others, incise El Capitan’s southeast face, which stretched before us, a grand swath of vertical and overhanging granite bookended by the Nose, where the cliff turns a corner to the west. Along the way we passed numerous stone enclosures, bivouacs built by climbers camping on top after their ascents. I recognized many of them as places where I had slept over the years. We passed the Nose and the famous tree, the object both climbers on a team have to touch before stopping the clock on an attempt at the speed record. I climbed the Nose in a day twice. In 1994 it took me twenty-three and a half hours; then, with Greg Child in 2000, I did it in thirteen hours and forty-five minutes. (The current record, set by Alex and Tommy Caldwell on June 6, 2018, stands at a mind-boggling one hour, fifty-eight minutes, and seven seconds. Some have equated the sub-two-hour time to Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile in 1954.)

  Jimmy and Cheyne had gone ahead. Jacob and I were following Mikey, who stopped to point out a squat, ancient-looking tree with a trunk six feet in diameter. One side of the tree was melded to a car-size boulder. The tree must have been struck by lightning at some point, because its trunk was split open, with a hollow blackened chamber inside. Large dead limbs protruded from the trunk, but it still had green needles on a few of the branches. Jacob, who seemed to know a bit about trees, said it was a western juniper and probably eight hundred to a thousand years old.

  Someone had constructed a snug bivouac shelter by piling up stones on the underside of the boulder. We had passed half a dozen of these structures on the way up, but for some reason, this one incensed Mikey. He threw down his pack and began aggressively dismantling it. “This is exactly the kind of thing that’s going to lead to more climbing regulations,” he said, kicking down one of the walls.

  We found Jimmy and the other guys sitting on a sandy ledge about thirty feet above the top out for Freerider. Jimmy was eating gummy bears and had his shirt off and his pants unzipped. “Did you guys stop at the tree?” he asked. I nodded affirmatively as I plopped down a few feet in front of him. “Did you look inside?”

  “No.”

  “Dean’s urn is in there,” said Jimmy. “We scattered his ashes off the top of Freerider after his memorial.” Right then, a
s if on cue, a raven landed on a scraggly tree a few yards away. The raven was Dean’s totem.

  “Hey, Dean,” said Mikey.

  A few days later, Jimmy posted a picture to Instagram of a raven soaring above El Cap. The caption read: “Feathered friend that visited us everyday on top of El Cap #flyfree.” I figured that only a handful of his 1.5 million followers would pick up on the hidden message to the climbing tribe.

  * * *

  —

  PETER GWIN, the expeditions and adventure editor at National Geographic magazine, had arrived the day before to help me break the news of Alex’s historic climb. That night we were ensconced at my cabin, hard at work on the story, which we planned to break within minutes of Alex topping out on Freerider. Alex’s impending ascent had been one of the best-kept secrets in the history of the sport, but since National Geographic had the exclusive, and we’d all been working on this project for months, everyone was worried that someone might scoop us. I worried most about John Branch, a sports reporter for The New York Times, who won a Pulitzer in 2013 for his story about the deadly Tunnel Creek avalanche in Washington State. He also wrote a feature about the Dawn Wall, and he lives just a few hours from Yosemite in San Francisco. I knew he would be following Ondra’s Dawn Wall attempt, which was all over social media, and it seemed like only a matter of time before one of his contacts in Yosemite spilled the beans about what Alex was up to.

  By now, virtually all of the core Yosemite climbers knew that Alex was going to free solo Freerider. There were five different teams attempting to free climb the route, and it must have been obvious to them what was going on: Alex Honnold, being filmed by Jimmy Chin and Mikey Schaefer, rehearsing the crux pitches of Freerider, a route he had already done multiple times. Why else would he be doing that if not to prep for the free solo? It was well-known in the climbing community that Alex had been eyeing this prize for years.

  The climb was scheduled to begin in less than twelve hours, and Peter and I, along with a few editors back at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, DC, were making our final edits to the piece, much like we had when breaking other outdoor industry news. But this was different.

  I was sitting at the small kitchen table. Peter sat across from me on the couch, his computer in his lap. I knew it was coming.

  “Hey, I hate to bring this up, but we need to talk about what we write if Alex falls,” Gwin said.

  The editors at National Geographic had discussed this gut-wrenching scenario at length and had even debated whether or not to cover Alex’s attempt. Would it be seen in some quarters as promoting dangerous behavior? Could it be construed as ghoulish voyeurism? Ultimately, they concluded that—just as National Geographic had covered the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, which many at the time considered a suicidal endeavor, and many other dangerous climbing expeditions—if Alex was going to attempt to free solo El Capitan, National Geographic was going to cover it, whatever the outcome.

  However, Peter and I hadn’t really discussed exactly what we’d say if it turned out tragically. I had thought about it and had decided that trying to file a news story in the moments after watching a friend’s death would be something I couldn’t do. “I’m sorry, man, but I can’t go there.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I wrote something on the plane.” A minute later an invitation to a Google doc popped up in my e-mail. The first line read:

  YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK—Renowned climber Alex Honnold died Tuesday after he fell while attempting to become the first person ever to scale the iconic 3,000-foot granite wall known as El Capitan without using any ropes or other safety gear.

  I didn’t read any further.

  * * *

  —

  AT 2:57 A.M., I grabbed my phone off the bedside table and turned off the alarm three minutes before it was set to buzz me awake. Thoughts had been racing through my mind all night, and I had barely slept. Peter looked equally bleary-eyed and said he hadn’t slept either. We made coffee and were in the car half an hour later. At 3:55 A.M., we pulled into the meadow, where half a dozen people were milling about. We were parked across the street from Alex’s van. The light was on, and I could see him through the windshield in his orange jacket, doing something at the kitchen counter. There was no sign of Sanni, but I knew she was in there, probably still cuddled up in bed. Apart from the quick meeting in the meadow after he came down from the Freeblast, I hadn’t seen Alex the day before. He and Sanni had spent most of the day hanging out in the van. Sanni later told me, “That jerk was planning to not tell me.” He was being “really vague,” but it was obvious, by the way he was talking with the crew, that something big was going down. “Tell me, I get it. I’m not dumb,” she had said to Alex, who finally admitted that he was going for Freerider in the morning.

  “I remember really trying not to totally let go. I just didn’t even know what to feel. Yeah, I was freaked-out, but I also didn’t know he felt ready, and I was still processing the fact that he wasn’t going to tell me. If I did [cry], it was probably like a tear streaming down my face, while I’m just trying to hold a conversation. I know that I wouldn’t be really upset in front of Alex. . . . I was scared. It was a big deal, but it’s just not the time and place where you have a major breakdown . . . just a little baby breakdown.”

  Alex leaned over the bed and gave Sanni a kiss. She was sound asleep. She had tossed and turned all night and hadn’t fallen asleep until three thirty A.M., when Alex was moving the van from Mike’s driveway down to the El Cap Meadow. Alex had slept soundly, as usual. He exited the van, and a single camera guy emerged from the shadows. When I saw who it was—my friend Pablo Durana—I did a double take. He and I had been hanging out recently, and I had made a point not to tell him what I was working on in Yosemite. And Pablo had been discreet enough not to ask, but he knew a lot of these guys and had filmed Alex on a climbing expedition to Angola the year before. Apparently, the production needed another hand and had recruited him. Pablo trailed a few feet behind Alex, who strolled off wearing a small backpack and his orange puffy.

  We let them get a little ways ahead; then Peter and I fell in behind. The moon was almost full and so bright we didn’t need our headlamps. The ponderosa pines lining the trail cast moon shadows, which we ducked in and out of like forest sprites. We were so stealthy that we startled a family of deer, which ran off into the woods. I felt like I did as a kid when I used to wait until my parents fell asleep and then climb out of my window to terrorize the neighborhood with my Wiffle bat tommy gun.

  We found a log and sat down to wait about a hundred yards from the start of the route. Alex’s headlight flickered through a thick scrub oak that stood between us and the spot where he was getting ready, putting on his shoes, cinching on his chalk bag, and taking one last glug of water. The nature of his quest was such that he couldn’t carry anything but the clothes on his back, but he had stashed some water and energy bars in a few spots along the route. Every once in a while the bottom of the wall would light up when Alex panned it with his headlamp. Things got quiet. Time stood still. Had he started up? I couldn’t see his light, but the moon was so bright that perhaps he had decided to climb without his headlamp.

  Two climbers carrying a big wall rack and ropes walked past, within ten feet, but they didn’t see us on the log. Peter and I said nothing. I was starting to wonder what was taking so long when Pablo emerged from the shadows. He had his headlamp off and carried a large camera in one hand. “Pssst.” He looked up, surprised to find us sitting a few feet away.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “What took him so long to get going?” I asked.

  “He had to run off and take a nervous poo.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Casual. Just like normal. He was chatty, asking me how I was doing, stuff like that. Hey, I gotta run.” As soon as he moved off, Alex’s light appeared above the canopy, like a tiny ship setting
forth from shore into a vertical ocean of rock.

  * * *

  —

  ALEX DIPPED HIS RIGHT HAND into his chalk bag, gave it a shake to make sure it got a good coating of magnesium carbonate, then sank his thick fingers into the fissure with his thumb facing down. The rock felt like he thought it would, a little cold, but not frigid. The cold was never an issue for his fingers, but already he could tell that his toes felt squeezed. This was one of the problems that he couldn’t seem to find a way around. If he chose a bigger pair of shoes, his feet would be more comfortable right now, but by the time he got to the Boulder Problem, they would probably feel sloppy. So he had gone with the smaller 41s. But the footwork-intensive slab cruxes on the Freeblast would still be cold. It was essential he get high performance from his shoes on these moves. His right shoe felt especially constricting. No wonder. His ankle was still swollen and his Achilles tendon felt stiff, its flexibility restricted from being bound within the bruised muscles of his ankle for more than a month.

  The crack was slightly flared, but the size, which varied from half an inch to about an inch and a quarter, fit Alex’s fingers like a glove. The jams were so secure that Alex knew both his feet could slip at the same time, and he’d easily be able to check the fall. The flared crack made for secure foot jams too. With his toes twisted into the same pods he used for his finger jams, the chance for a foot slip, even if his toes were slightly numb, was nil. The only problem was that the climbing was so easy, he couldn’t yet tell how he was feeling. Was this a day like the one he had on University Wall, when he had power to waste? Or would today feel more like Rivières Pourpres, more like work? It was too soon to tell.