The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  It took less than a minute for Alex to enter the death zone. Once you’re one hundred feet above the ground, you might as well be a thousand—the fall will be equally fatal. There’s a rule of thumb climbers use to calculate the odds of dying in a ground fall. Land badly (i.e., on your head) from ten feet above the ground, and the chance of it being fatal is 10 percent. At twenty feet, 20 percent. From thirty feet up, you’ll hit the ground at thirty miles per hour. This would be like riding a bike at full speed into a brick wall. The equation is straightforward—the higher you get, the harder you hit that wall. That is, until you reach terminal velocity—about 122 miles per hour. Factoring in air resistance, it takes a falling body approximately twelve to fourteen seconds to reach this speed. This equates to a free fall of about 1,900 feet, or roughly the height of One World Trade Center, including the spire. But it’s not necessary to reach terminal velocity for a fall to be fatal.

  Göran Kropp—the Swedish adventurer who rode his bike to Everest in 1996, climbed the mountain without oxygen, and then rode home—died in 2002 after falling sixty feet and hitting a ledge at a small crag in Washington State. He slipped ten feet from the top of a 5.10a, and his highest piece of protection, a camming device, pulled out of the crack. The second-highest piece came unclipped from the rope. In 1989, Lynn Hill forgot to finish tying her knot at a crag called Buoux in France. At the top of the seventy-foot 5.11 warm-up, she called down for her partner to “take” and then sat back in her harness. Hill felt a slight tug as the rope pulled through and she went airborne. Witnesses say she windmilled her arms in the air to keep herself upright. She hit a branch of a large tree just above the ground and landed between two boulders. Miraculously, her only injuries were a broken ankle and a dislocated elbow. The snapping branch probably saved her life.

  Alex reached the top of the second pitch, a 5.8 hand crack, seven minutes after leaving the ground. The third pitch starts with a rightward traverse under a roof. The climbing is thin and delicate and culminates with a rock over with the right foot onto a small chip. Even though he was already two hundred feet up, the roof marked the real “game on” point. Alex threw his foot onto the tiny hold. Before committing, he double-checked with his headlamp to make sure it was placed precisely where he wanted it. Since he wasn’t warmed up, it was critically important that he execute the move precisely according to plan. He was less worried about moves higher on the wall because by then he’d be in the flow and would be able to trust himself to do the right thing instinctively. Alex bore down on a crimp with his left hand, crushing the hold as if he was climbing 5.14. The right foot held, and he reached through to an in-cut edge with his right hand. Stepping through to better holds, he exhaled and panned his light up the wall. Off to his right he heard voices. He had seen that a party was starting up the Nose at more or less the exact time he was beginning his quest up Freerider. The pair was yelling back and forth noisily, no doubt communicating about taking in and letting out rope. They sounded like Eastern Europeans. Alex’s light was shielded from them by a bulge in the cliff. They had no idea what was happening 150 feet away.

  The next two hundred feet involved straightforward finger jamming up discontinuous low-angle cracks. At the top of pitch 4, four hundred feet above the ground, Alex stopped to rest at a small stance. Above him rose the first of the back-to-back crux slab pitches. This wasn’t the one he had fallen on earlier in the season, but it was probably a little harder than pitch 6. Alex stood on the tiny shelf and looked down at his feet. He wiggled his toes. How do they feel? he asked himself. A little cold and numb. He could stop and take off his shoes, rub his toes, but that would be dicey, and it would totally kill the flow he was trying to get into.

  He looked down between his legs and saw two tiny lights at the base. Mark and Peter on their iPhones?

  Alex looked up. At the top of the wall a beacon of light appeared. It had to be Mikey, who had surely spent a long, sleepless night on top. Everyone on the film crew knew that the money shot would be the Boulder Problem. It was thin, hard, and unforgiving, and at 2,100 feet above the valley floor, it could be framed from above in a way that would reveal the true grandeur and impossibility of what Alex was doing. And since Jimmy trusted Mikey more than anyone, it had long ago been decided that this would be Mikey’s shot. It would be hours before Alex got to the Boulder Problem, but Mikey was leaving nothing to chance. When Alex arrived, Mikey would be ready. The rope would be rigged exactly where he wanted it, the anchors bombproof, his stance locked down, camera angles dialed, batteries charged, spare lenses at the ready.

  “It wasn’t an easy decision to take this job,” Mikey had told me in Morocco. “Ultimately, I said yes because Alex guilted me into it. He truly wants me up there. And I do think I’m safer than a lot of other people. There are times when I’m five feet away from him filming, and if I slipped, I would kill him.”

  But there have been times when Alex has asked Mikey to film him soloing something, and Mikey has said no. “Just go do it for yourself,” he would say.

  Alex shined his light on the crack splitting the wall in front of him and located a small pod. He tucked the tips of his index and middle fingers on his right hand into the slot and twisted them to the right, pulling his elbow down toward the side of his chest. He tucked his right toe into a flare in the crack and reached high with his left hand to another pod. Years ago, before anyone had climbed this route, the crack was barely an eighth of an inch wide at its fattest, too small to fit anyone’s fingers. To create a protection point, the first ascensionist had nailed the thinnest piton, called a knifeblade, into the crack. It bottomed out two inches in, half of its length sticking out. When his partner followed the pitch, he used his own hammer to knock the piton out, which meant banging it back and forth. In the process, the edges of the crack broke a little bit. After a few more ascents, the hole was big enough for the next-size piton, and then after a few more, the next size. This process continued until the early 1970s, when climbers realized that something had to be done about the scarring that was changing the face of Yosemite’s cliffs. Thus began the dawn of a new era, the “clean climbing” revolution. The clean ethic relied on a new mode of protection called the nut. The first nuts were exactly that: nuts from the hardware store or scrounged from alongside railroad tracks. Climbers slotted these rudimentary chocks, slung with webbing, into constrictions in the cracks with their fingers, not a hammer, and with them they could now climb a route a thousand times without ever leaving a trace of their passage.

  A good many of the free climbs in Yosemite, including this section of Freerider, are possible (at anywhere near their current rating) only because of the artificial piton scars left behind as permanent reminders of the golden age. We love to celebrate the purity of our sport—communing with nature, living life on its simplest terms—but the truth is that it’s all based on a haphazard short history full of human error and compromise.

  Alex stepped over a small roof, where the crack petered out into a blank face. From here the route moves up and right past several bolts to the belay anchor about twenty feet above. He balanced on the last decent foothold before the first slab crux. The next move was unlike anything he had ever climbed without a rope—the “walking up glass” moves, as Alex had described them. At that moment, he would have gladly increased the difficulty rating in exchange for some holds. In Morocco, on Rivières Pourpres, he could overpower the moves because he had something to grip, but here, on the glacier-polished Yosemite granite, it was all about finesse.

  “You have to make love to it,” Alex once said, when describing this section of the climb.

  The hardest moves ever climbed without a rope are three full number grades harder than this slab. In 2004, one of Germany’s top rock climbers, Alexander Huber, free soloed a route called Kommunist, rated 5.14a. The crux is approximately thirty-three feet above the ground, but Huber intentionally avoided using bouldering crash pads that could have softened a potenti
al fall. In an interview afterward he said, “I worked on the route until the moment I could perfectly control it under good conditions. I was convinced I wouldn’t fall, but like anything in life, you never know 100 percent. This sliver of potential danger is the essence of alpinism and climbing.” Of course, thirty feet off the deck there is also more than a sliver of hope that you won’t die if you fall. Alex, on the other hand, was now six hundred feet above the valley floor. It was 4:54 A.M. and still pitch-black. He felt his own sliver of doubt, but not about what would happen if he slipped.

  Alex shined his light down by his right knee onto the spot where he knew he had to put his right foot. The day before, when he came down from climbing this section by headlamp with Brad Gobright, he’d told a few people hanging outside his van, “Sometimes that kind of slab stuff is better in the dark because the shadows make the holds look bigger.” This might be true if there’s a bona fide imperfection in the rock, but the spot that now lay in the center of the yellowish halo cast by his headlamp had nothing to recommend it. There was no ripple, no depression in the rock; it was smooth, like a piece of gray construction paper. The reason it was the spot was not because there was something there to stand on. It was simply that it was in the right place, roughly in the zone where it would be possible to get over the right foot without having to hike his leg up too far. If he stepped too high, the weight transfer onto the smear would create too much downward pressure on his foot, which could cause it to slide out. What he needed right now was to use his body to push his foot in against the wall.

  Alex has climbed more at night than most climbers have during the day, but nevertheless, it is still more difficult. Regardless of how well you can or can’t see the holds among the shadows cast by your body and the myriad features of the rock, anyone who has climbed at night can attest that it feels different to climb in the dark, just like it feels different to hike in the dark. Perhaps it’s our primal fear of what we can’t see, of what might be lurking out there beyond the blinding glare of the campfire (or headlamp).

  As he scanned the wall, his light glinted off the bolt situated about a foot to the right of his knee. But rather than providing security, as it has on the thousands of ascents the Freeblast has seen over the years, it now lurked with a tinge of menace in its conspicuous attachment to nothing. Alex looked up. One hundred and fifty feet above and to his left, Matt Irving, a new recruit to Jimmy’s team, hung on a fixed rope, his camera pointed at Alex. Matt saw Alex staring at him. It was an awkward moment. Neither of them said anything—not yet. Alex was trying to get himself in the proper head space to make this move, but it was just like Peter Croft had said. The camera guys, the journalists at the base of the cliff, the distraught girlfriend back in the van—it was all a bit distracting.

  * * *

  —

  “ROCK!!” A LOUD CRACKING SOUND filled the air—boulders tumbling downhill. My heart fluttered, but I quickly realized it was coming from farther up the west face. I checked my phone. It was 4:54. Alex had been climbing for about thirty minutes and appeared to have stopped on a small ledge. I assumed it was the stance at the top of pitch 4. Peter, sitting beside me, was texting with editors back in Washington, DC, who were adding in the details he was supplying to the Google doc. Alex looked down, and his light illuminated our hideout on the log. But instead of panning past, his headlamp stayed on us. Since we could see him, I guessed he could see us. “Hey, put your phone down,” I said to Peter. “I think he’s looking at us.” God, I hope we’re not distracting him. He stayed in the same spot for a few minutes, which I thought was odd. He wouldn’t be tired yet, so why would he stop just when he was getting started?

  I wondered if he was contemplating his chances. In Morocco, after he soloed Rivières Pourpres, we had discussed the probabilities. He said he wanted, needed, his odds to be at least 99 percent. But he recognized that somewhere in the ninetieth percentile might be more realistic. Anything less than 99 percent was not what he called “repeatable,” but Alex had wondered aloud, as he had when hiking with Ueli Steck, if sometimes you just have to throw down all your chips and “take the chance.” I remember learning, in my high school statistics class, about the exponential nature of probability. If there’s a 99 percent chance that Alex won’t fall on a difficult free solo, and he exposes himself to these odds one hundred times, the probability that he will survive to share these tales with his grandkids is .99 multiplied by itself one hundred times, or 0.99100, which comes out to .366, or 36.6 percent. Flipped around, that’s a nearly two-thirds chance of a bad outcome. This is a gross oversimplification, especially because Alex is probably several .9s past 99 percent on most of his solos. But the math does reveal an indisputable truth about risk: Keep on taking the risk, and the risk becomes greater.

  He started moving again, but it was hard to see where he was exactly, relative to the two slab cruxes. Voices drifted down from above. I looked at Peter, but he was absorbed in his note taking. That’s odd, I thought, keeping the idea to myself. Why would Alex be talking to the cameraman?

  Alex’s headlight lit up the bottom edge of the Half Dollar, but this time I could tell by how bright it was that he was in the crack system leading up to the flake. “He’s done it,” I whispered to Peter, gleefully rubbing my hands together. I sighed deeply. The tension that had tied my stomach muscles into ever-tighter knots over the past few days untwisted a few turns. Alex had thousands of feet of rock ahead of him, including numerous pitches of 5.12 and one pitch of 5.13a, but at that moment I believed he had the climb in the bag. “He’s in cruiser territory for a while now,” I said. “The sun will be up soon, so let’s relocate to the meadow and get the spotting scope set up.” It was 5:37 A.M.

  As we packed up, Alex’s light disappeared. I assumed he was somewhere up on Mammoth Terrace, a massive ledge system that marks the spot, a third of the way up El Capitan, where the lower slabs rear back into a 2,000-foot vertical and overhanging headwall. I heard a noise and turned around to see Pablo, headlamp on, hustling up the trail.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” I called over as he scurried past, breathing hard. I had not expected to see him back up here.

  “Alex is bailing,” said Pablo. “He’s on his way down.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  —

  PETER AND I WERE PULLING out of the parking lot when Alex walked up. I wanted to check in with him, but the crew was filming, so I put the car in drive and did a U-turn. As we drove away, I saw Alex through the rearview mirror. He was looking in our direction, a frown on his face.

  Sanni, I would later learn, was still sound asleep at that moment. She awoke when Alex opened the door to the van, having slept through the whole thing.

  At 10:50 A.M., I was sipping coffee in the cafeteria with Gwin and Croft when a text came in from Alex. “Sorry about this morning. Let’s hang tonight.” It made me a little sad that Alex was apologizing for bailing. He was feeling beholden. That wasn’t right.

  I texted back:

  “I was proud when I heard you were coming down. U r the man. Yeah let’s hang tonight. Let me know what you guys end up doing.”

  I showed the text to the two Peters. Croft grimaced but didn’t say anything. He had gone home a couple of days earlier after climbing the Freeblast with Alex. I had called him the night before to tell him that Alex was going for it. Croft had left his home in Bishop on the east side of the Sierra at four A.M. to be here in time to witness Alex’s historic climb. Croft said he had just come from Mike Gauthier’s and that Alex had “freaked out.”

  “Suddenly he jumped on his bike and rode away. He said he needed to clear his head and that he was going to free solo Astroman.” Alex must have texted me somewhere along the way to Washington Column, the formation on the eastern end of the valley where Astroman is located.

  Gwin and I headed off to do some climbing of our own. When
we got back to the ground, there was a text inviting us to dinner at the production house in Foresta. “Bring some wine or beer if you can!”

  We arrived a bit late. A dozen or so people, including Alex and Sanni, were seated around a big dining room table. I grabbed a plate of food and found a seat next to Alex.

  “Hey, I tried to come over and talk to you guys this morning,” he said, “but you just drove away.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I thought you might want some space, so we just peaced out. How did it go up there?”

  “I didn’t feel that great. My shoes were too tight and my toes were a little numb. It felt scary. I got to the move where I have to rock over onto that sketchy foot, and I knew if it blew that I was going to die. If I had been on my own, I probably would have downclimbed to the nearest stance and tried to pull it together, but it just felt weird with the camera right there and all the people watching me.”

  “I’m so glad you made that call, dude,” I said to Alex. I realized that it came off a bit patronizing, but I wanted him to know that I thought it probably took more courage to back down than to push through.

  “Yeah, it just wasn’t my day, you know,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS REMINDED OF WHAT happened to Henry Barber in 1976 when a film crew talked him into on-sight soloing a 5.10 hand and finger crack on a sea cliff in Wales. Barber consented only on the condition that the cameramen were ready at the appointed time and that they didn’t speak to him or distract him in any way while he was climbing. They agreed, but when the time came, the director told Barber to wait because the light wasn’t right. Barber was tense and annoyed, and the cliff was blazing in the afternoon sun when they finally told him he could climb—four hours later. A few moves off the ground, a cameraman asked him to climb back down and start over.