The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  His plans for the spring sounded like they were up in the air. Yeah, he was planning to head back to the valley, but he didn’t sound 100 percent committed to the project. Then he mentioned, casually, that he might just go and solo Freerider on his own—without the camera crew. As I had predicted, he had been thinking a lot about his aborted attempt. “I don’t really mind having somebody around if I think the climbing’s all easy and I’m just charging,” he would later tell me. “But I never really want people around when it’s actually hard.” Freerider was actually hard, to say the least.

  “How’s Sanni?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “She’s great,” he replied. “But things are going so well with us that it kind of makes me a little worried. I have no angst.” Some of his biggest solos, like the Rainbow Wall in Red Rocks, just up the road from his new home, were completed after breakups with his last girlfriend, Stacey Pearson. Alex, by his own admission, has done a lot of angst soloing, but there’s one story he doesn’t talk about much. It was February 2013, and he and Stacey had broken up for the umpteenth time. They often stayed with Chris Weidner when they were in Las Vegas, and since neither of them had anywhere else to go, they were both still staying at his house—Alex in the driveway in his van, Stacey on the couch. One morning, Alex tried to get in to use the bathroom, but the door was locked. He went over to the window above the couch to see if Stacey would let him in, but when he looked down, she wasn’t there. He went back and knocked on the door. Weidner let him in.

  “Where’s Stacey?” demanded Alex.

  “Ummm,” replied Weidner. At that moment, she was upstairs in bed with one of Alex’s friends, who was also staying at the house. Weidner says Alex looked up the stairway leading to the second floor. He could see Alex’s heart sinking. Alex and Stacey were officially broken up, and she was now free to date whomever she wanted, but Alex still loved her, and apparently, he wasn’t quite ready to move on.

  “Seriously?” said Alex. “Wow, that was fast.” He walked out, got in his van, and drove straight to Zion, where he on-sight soloed Shune’s Buttress, an eight-hundred-foot 5.11+ that had never been climbed without a rope. The forecast called for snow in the afternoon, but Alex figured it was only an eight-pitch route and that he’d be long done by the time the weather moved in. The climbing was difficult, though, and it was snowing by the time he topped out on the buttress. What he hadn’t realized is that there’s another 1,500 feet of steep scrambling between the top of the climb and the summit of the mountain. Soon Alex found himself clawing his way up icy, snow-covered rock in a blizzard. At one point, he broke a hold and fell about eight feet through the branches of a small tree. He landed with a smack on a tiny pedestal of rock, inches away from having gone the distance to the ground.

  * * *

  —

  SANNI AND I SPOKE a few days after I got the house tour from Alex. She told me that after celebrating Thanksgiving in Southern California with her family, she and Alex had driven to Vegas, where they climbed by day and camped in random parking lots each night. They’d been living together in the box for months. Sanni was burned-out on climbing, and like Alex, she was still trying to process what had happened up on El Cap. Alex’s dream had not gone as planned, and morale was low.

  Sanni was accustomed to living in tight quarters. For the past five years she’d been living in Seattle in a small house with four roommates. But Alex wasn’t coping well with the constant engagement, and he didn’t know how to tell Sanni that he needed space. One day, while they were parked outside a strip mall, it boiled over. Sanni stormed off, telling Alex as she got out of the van, “You need to figure out what you want, because I can’t read your mind.” She found her way to a coffee shop, where she realized that she had left her wallet in the van. Starving and dying for a cup of coffee, but too mad to call Alex, Sanni killed the afternoon and evening wandering from one closing Starbucks to the next. Somewhere along the way, she decided she’d had enough. The next day she would jump on a plane and fly back to her old life in Seattle. Around eight P.M., she finally called Alex, who came and picked her up. “I need to backtrack,” he said, when she told him she was leaving. “I really want you to stay.”

  “You’re so good at physical self-care,” Sanni replied. “The second you get down from the wall, you take off your shoes, you drink water, and you start thinking about how to rest your body. But you’re so bad at emotional self-care. Tell me what you need. Tell me what you want, because I’m not going take it personally, and probably I need it too.” What he wanted, he said, was to be in a relationship with Sanni, but he needed some space. So they worked out a plan for how to give him an hour or two alone each day.

  After the fight, things were different. “It made us stronger,” she said. “Since then he has been a lot more open about his affection and a lot more willing to say how he’s feeling.”

  “Did he go so far as to use the L word?” I asked Sanni. Sanni had already told me that she loved Alex, and always had.

  “Of course he has, 100 percent,” said Sanni, now laughing. “And I genuinely think he felt it, too. It was not under duress.”

  According to Sanni, Alex was vacillating about whether he would try El Cap again in the spring. One day he would talk about other climbing goals he had in Yosemite and Sanni would think, with more than a tinge of relief, Okay, maybe he’s done with it. But then a few days later, he would say something like, “Yeah, I’m going to the valley, this is going to happen, it’s going to be great, and then I will move on with my life.”

  What is it like to love someone who has a guillotine hanging over his head? I didn’t have to ask the question.

  “Everybody thinks I’m thinking about it all the time, but I’m not,” she volunteered. “This morning was the first time in a really long time that I was actually like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ . . . It makes me want to cry to think about it. But I would never tell him that, because if somebody is about to go do something really hard, you don’t want to be the person that’s like, ‘This is a terrible idea’ . . . because that just doesn’t help. Him doing this has to be his decision and come from his heart. I just don’t want to be part of that decision.”

  But there was one thing she did tell Alex after the fight, knowing that he had often harnessed relationship turmoil to create the proper mind-set for free soloing: “You don’t have to be suffering to succeed,” she said. “You can have it all.”

  * * *

  —

  “I ERASED ALL MY SOCIAL MEDIA,” said Alex, gesturing toward his beat-up iPhone sitting on the van’s countertop. “I don’t want the distraction in these final days, and I’m a little worried about what all the scrolling on my phone might be doing to my brain. I’m kind of nostalgic for the old days before I had a smartphone. I used to do a lot of quality thinking in the box back then.”

  I had similar concerns. To limit how much Internet I consumed each day, I had been playing recently with an IQ app. Alex’s eyes opened wide when I told him about it. He sat up straight, grabbed his iPhone, and pulled up the App Store. “Which one did you download?” he asked, scrolling down the list and reading the names off to me. “What are the questions like?”

  “Scrambled words, detecting patterns, math problems, stuff like that. It’s a good way to use parts of your brain that might not see a lot of action, since you probably don’t spend much time thinking in those ways. I know you did a lot of math and science when you were a kid, so think about how much of your brain is sitting unused nowadays.”

  “It’s funny you mention that. I’ve actually been making a conscious effort to reassign all the neural pathways I used to use for math for memorizing beta.”

  The beta for Freerider could fill a book.

  “Is that what you think about when you shut yourself up in the box?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Does it ever get boring?”

  “No way
, I love it. I could sit in here for hours by myself and just get totally lost in my head.”

  We both sat quietly for a bit.

  “Hey, so I just finished reading this book that I think you’d really like,” said Alex. “It’s called Sapiens.” He explained that the central premise of the book is that humans became the most dominant species on earth because we have the ability to cooperate flexibly in large groups. What gives us this unique ability to cooperate and work together in societies is our belief in shared myths—stories that illustrate universal truths of the human condition. The part Alex thought I would be most interested in was the end, where the book turns from the past to the future and explores what the coming decades may hold for our species. The author, Yuval Noah Harari, speculates that the presently unfolding scientific revolution in technologies like artificial intelligence and bioengineering is leading to a brave new world in which humans may become “amortal.” The difference between an amortal and an immortal is that an amortal can still die—but only in an accident.

  “You know the singularity is supposed to occur in the 2040s, right?” I said.

  Alex, still looking for the best IQ app, rolled his eyes. He knew exactly what I was referring to, because I had talked his ear off over the years about the singularity, the name for the point in time at which computers become more intelligent than humans. One of the potential offshoots of a technological singularity is the possibility of curing illnesses like heart disease and cancer—and maybe even turning off aging altogether. This was an idea I had a hard time reconciling, because I had spent my whole life shaping a philosophy around the idea that my life-span was finite. As a young climber, I had decided that since I was going to die, even if I took it easy and didn’t take any risks, I might as well try to squeeze every last bit of juice out of life. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose,” said Steve Jobs, in a commencement address at Stanford in 2005. “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

  Bachar was thinking along the same lines when he told that guy at the Tuolumne gas station, “You’re soloing right now.”

  “I don’t disagree with the hypothesis, just the time line,” said Alex. “We’ve been talking about this tech revolution for decades, but it’s not happening nearly as fast as everyone thought it would. Besides, you’re too old anyway. You’re going to miss the singularity.” He said it in his typical deadpan fashion, but the way he dropped his eyelids ever so slightly, I knew he was poking me. Still, I decided not to ask the question that had been on my mind: If you knew that you could only die in an accident—and not from old age or disease—would you still want to “go big”?

  I didn’t want to do anything that might psyche Alex out, and for that reason, I didn’t offer my condolences for the loss of his friend Ueli Steck. Less than three weeks earlier, the Swiss Machine had fallen off a 25,800-foot mountain called Nuptse, which lies next to Everest. Steck was climbing solo and moving fast, as he always did. He was acclimatizing for an attempt on Everest’s seldom-climbed Hornbein Couloir, which he planned to solo and then link with a traverse to Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain. Had he succeeded, it would have been the greatest enchainment in the history of Himalayan climbing. No one knows what happened, but the 3,000-foot fall was witnessed by several Sherpas and Everest climbers in Camps 1 and 2. Presumably, Steck had simply slipped.

  I stood up and made a move toward the door of the van. It was eight P.M., Alex’s bedtime. And that’s when he locked me with his big brown eyes and said, “Sanni’s coming back in a few days. She’ll be here for about a week; then she leaves again on June second. I leave for Alaska on the twelfth, so that will give me about eight days to get it done.” I stared back at him, waiting for the qualifier, the “we’ll see, we’ll see,” which he always tacked on whenever we talked about Freerider. But he just looked at me earnestly and said nothing more. And it struck me that this was probably yet another step in the process he had laid out for himself years ago—the part where he tells someone, without being explicit, that he’s made a decision. He was going for it on or around June 3. And I knew that somewhere, maybe in the Cody Quackenbush notebook, he would have this written down—noted simply as “EC” (El Cap).

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I woke up in the second-floor apartment I was renting in Foresta. The wind was buffeting the house, and I could see a bank of gray clouds through the smoky sliding glass door on the other side of the room. My first thought was the same one I’d been having for weeks now. Thank god I’m not Alex. Thank god I’m not free soloing El Cap. I wasn’t the one doing the climb, but I still woke up every day with a dark cloud hovering over me. More than the doing of the deed itself, it was the years of anticipation and preparation leading up to it that seemed to me the most impressive thing about this whole endeavor. I imagined that I was Alex and that I had set myself a nearly impossible task—something I absolutely did not have to do. I could walk away. But I didn’t. Instead, I dug in—hard. I broke the inconceivable thing down into bite-size pieces, and every day, I worked on one of them, never worrying about the next, or how they would all eventually fit together.

  Colin Haley, one of America’s leading alpinists and a partner of Alex’s, once told me that he climbs because it satisfies a primal desire to have intensity in his life. He said he doesn’t overthink the risks he takes as a climber because the experiences he finds in the mountains are “worth everything.” Warren Harding, when asked by a reporter why he climbed, famously quipped, “We’re insane. Can’t be any other reason.” After Alex’s first attempt on Freerider, Peter Croft put it like this: “The great thing about a climbing hero is that they’re doing something for no good reason at all. To put that much on the line, to work so hard for something that doesn’t have any quantifiable value, it’s just this wonderful, crazy, uniquely human thing.”

  Jimmy had texted me the night before to tell me that Alex needed a partner. I was watching an episode of Prison Break and sipping on a glass of vodka. I texted him back: “Absolutely!” But now, in the harsh light of day, the vodka vapors still swirling in my head, I regretted it. Alex would want to climb simultaneously, which would necessitate my matching his pace up the wall. In the past six months, I had barely touched rock. Instead, I had been sitting behind my computer, writing, and changing Tommy’s diapers. What if I fell and pulled him off? What if I hurt him? What if I was responsible for stopping him from doing his dream climb?

  Jimmy said that if I was interested, I should let Alex know. But as I lay in bed feeling weak, I decided that I wouldn’t call or text him. I’d sit tight and hopefully in the interim he would find someone else. But if he did call, I would fake an injury. A few years earlier, I had offered to take a friend from Philadelphia up the Nose. On the first pitch, when Dan’s feet were a body length above the ground, he let go and slumped onto the rope. “Did you hear that?” he said. “Did you hear that pop? I think I might have dislocated my shoulder.” Dan had come down with an acute case of “Elcapitis.” And now I had it too. I had herniated a disk right after leaving Yosemite in the fall, so I decided that when, or if, Alex called, I would fake a back injury. I even said it aloud to myself, to see how it sounded.

  A few hours later, Alex called. “Hey, man, how’s it going? I just soloed Easy Rider.”

  “How was it?” Easy Rider is the U-shaped linkup Dean Potter pioneered in 2011 that climbs the top six pitches of Freerider.

  “It was soooo good,” said Alex. “Uhh, we’re breaking up, let me call you right back.”

  My phone rang a minute later. “Sorry about that. I jumped the gun. I know the phone doesn’t work until I get to the tree at the top of the Nose, but I thought I’d try it a little early. I should be good now.” I could hear scuffling and wind. He was on the move, hoofing down the summit slabs of El Cap. Always the multitasker,
Alex usually calls someone when hiking down from El Cap. And he always times himself. Despite talking to me, he would set his record that day, making it from the top of Freerider to Mike’s house in a little more than an hour, a factoid Alex would scribe into his notebook that evening.

  “Hey, so do you want to go up the Freeblast with me tomorrow?” he asked.

  I hesitated for a few seconds, realizing my back-injury story wasn’t going to roll off my tongue as easily as I’d hoped. Then I just blurted out the truth. “I do, but I’m really worried that I’m going to hold you back and that I could fall and pull you off.”

  “No way, don’t worry,” he said. “I have a plan. We’ll use Mini Traxions and you’ll be fine. And it will be fun to get up on the Captain together.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Totally.”

  At 5:45 the next morning I was standing at the base of El Cap with Alex. Jimmy and Cheyne, who were planning to do some filming, had already headed up some fixed ropes. Alex reached into his black vinyl-coated pack and pulled out a ratty orange-and-white-flecked rope. The sheath was covered in little nicks, and the end had unraveled, with strands of white core sticking out messily.

  “That’s our rope?”

  “Yeah, what’s wrong with it?”

  “It looks like it’s been through a war.”

  “Whatever,” said Alex, looking mildly annoyed. “This is actually the best rope I own. It’s fine.”

  Alex had cut the bottoms of the legs off the black nylon pants he always wore, turning them into capris. But instead of carefully marking where on the cuff he wanted to shorten them and using a pair of scissors to make a clean cut, it looked like he’d hacked them off with a sharp rock. The legs were different lengths, the new hemline festooned with tatty triangles of fabric. He looked like a Flintstones character or maybe Huck Finn.