by Mark Synnott
This is exactly what makes free-solo rock climbing so different from other extreme sports. If a big-wave surfer or an extreme skier falls, he could die. But he might not. When you fall free-solo rock climbing, there is no uncertainty. Though I can’t possibly know how it would feel to plummet helplessly through the air from some horrific height, it nevertheless has for me a terrifying, visceral reality. I’ve had the falling-to-my-death nightmare many times. Psychologists have reported that it’s one of the most common recurring dreams. Falling to one’s death has to be right up there on the list of primal fears, alongside getting eaten by a shark and being buried alive. So what the hell was I thinking? Why would I choose to do this without the rope? Well, I was thinking I could do it and not fall. And that I’d get some kind of psychological payback from confronting one of my primal fears.
So I sat on that rock at the top of Munginella, and I tried to calculate my odds. On a toprope, I figured I could climb it a thousand times in a row without falling. With the security of a rope overhead, on terrain that’s far below my maximum grade, it’s easy to climb well, to be in the zone, smooth yet precise and focused with my movement. If I could climb the route a thousand times on a rope and not fall, I’d estimate my odds of success would be better than 99.9 percent.
But without a rope? What if in the middle of the roof I panicked, even a little? Would I lose the .9? And if I did get scared, was it possible I could freeze up, or maybe even do something wantonly self-destructive?
In the summer of 1987, I was sitting on a guardrail by the side of the road outside Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, having just emerged from a Grateful Dead concert. A young woman pulled out of the parking lot, and as she drove by me, I got a close look at her. She leaned over the wheel blinking repeatedly, as if she was having trouble seeing. Her face was red and streaming with tears. Whatever substances she was on, she was definitely in no shape to be driving. She made a left turn. A police cruiser was coming the other way. I was watching her closely, curious to see how she’d react to the cop, when she yanked the wheel to the side and drove head-on into him. Neither car was going that fast, so she didn’t get badly hurt, but she was so hysterical afterward that they strapped her to a gurney and took her away in an ambulance. The reason I never forgot it was because I had seen her yank the wheel, as if she had done it on purpose.
It reminded me of the classic scene from the movie Annie Hall, in which Duane (played by Christopher Walken) says to Alvy Singer (played by Woody Allen):
Sometimes when I’m driving . . . on the road at night . . . I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The . . . flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.
Alvy responds, “Right. Well, I have to . . . I have to go now, Duane, because I, I’m due back on the planet Earth.”
Have you ever stood near the edge of a high place, like a rooftop, or a cliff-side overlook, and felt a strange compulsion to step off the edge, almost like the abyss was calling to you, beckoning you to take that leap into the void? If there was nothing between you and oblivion but one hand clinging to a rock, can you say with 100 percent certainty that you wouldn’t just let go? As I asked myself this question and tried to quantify things that are probably unquantifiable, I wondered if this fear of a kind of suicide, the fear that perhaps we’re not actually in control of our actions and thoughts, lies at the heart of why people react so viscerally to free soloing.
There was no way for me to know if some demon would make me let go of the hand jam in the roof without putting myself out there. And wasn’t that part of the Honnold magic? But I also knew that the real essence of the lesson to be learned from Alex was having the courage not just to face down one’s fears but also to follow the process with conscientiousness and premeditation. That’s why I was scoping Munginella instead of just going for it. And it’s why I was listening to the little voice inside my head, the one that tells me what’s okay and what’s not, the one that has kept me alive all these years. And that little voice was telling me that the overhanging hand jam was on the wrong side of the fence.
* * *
—
TOMMY CALDWELL SHOWED UP OVER Memorial Day weekend for a quick visit. Alex seized the opportunity and dragged him up Freerider in five and a half hours, a new speed record for the route. “Alex was on fire,” Tommy told me the next day, as we hiked up to the start of the Dawn Wall. He said that while he was up on Freerider he had tried to imagine free soloing the route himself. “Honestly, I really can’t fathom it.”
“Did you guys talk about it?”
“I’m really hesitant to say anything at this point. Before, I was expressing a lot of doubt, telling him how I felt about it all. Now, I’m a little bit more like, ‘He’s going to do it no matter what,’ so the best thing I can do is try and up his chances of success. And for me that means trying not to mentally rattle him. I don’t want him up there having doubts because other people are having doubts.”
We had found our way to a giant concavity in the southeast face called the Alcove. It marks the start for the Dawn Wall and several other famous routes, including the Reticent Wall, Mescalito, and South Seas; I had set off from here on all of them. Tommy and I found a flat place to sit down with our backs to the cliff. The Dawn Wall is so overhanging that we could see it rising in front of us. A portaledge covered in a red rainfly was hanging about 1,200 feet up.
“That’s the camp where I spent months of my life,” said Tommy. “The crux pitches are right above it.” We could see one guy on the wall above the portaledge. The other one was probably belaying him from inside the ledge. They were aid climbers and had already been on the wall for several days.
I asked Tommy how he was feeling about Alex’s odds. “Do you think it’s less than 1 percent that he will fall?”
“No way,” he replied. “I think it’s like 10 percent, if I had to put a number on it.”
“That high?”
“Well, I know you’ve done the math. If he’s done the Freeblast thirty times and fallen three, that’s 10 percent right there. And it’s not like that’s the only hard, insecure climbing on the route. If I were to go free solo it right now, I would be way less worried about the slabs than some of the stuff up high. I’ve actually never fallen on the Freeblast, and I’ve climbed it fifteen to twenty times. But I’ve always felt real lucky to get through the Boulder Problem, and yesterday I fell on it. Alex was right above me, coaching me through the moves, but I missed when I threw the karate kick.”
“Why do you think he’s fallen on it as much as he has? Is he not a slab master?”
“Maybe not. Then again, I feel like Alex has climbed twice as much rock as anybody in the world . . . ever. Seems like maybe it’s gotten in his head.” He didn’t say anything for a bit, then added, “I think I’m okay that I’m not going to be here. It’s not really the kind of thing I want to spectate.”
Tommy started to whistle. I wondered if he’d picked up the habit from Alex, or vice versa. They’re the only two guys I know who whistle.
* * *
—
IN THE BACK OF EL CAP MEADOW, there’s a certain oak tree that sits on the bank of the Merced River. The trunk is about four or five feet across, which would make it about two hundred years old. Its dense canopy throws shade over the lush green grass, but in a couple of spots, where people like to sit, the grass is thinner and matted down. With your back against its trunk, you can take in the entirety of El Capitan, from the west face on its left side, around the Nose, and all the way up the southeast face to Horsetail Fall and the East Buttress. From the San Francisco beatniks in the fifties to the hippies of the sixties, the Stonemasters, the Chongo Nation, and the Stone Monkeys, the tree has always been the place for people to sit and get high and admire the grandeur of a magnificent cliff
. It’s a special tree for climbers, and not just because some of Dean Potter’s ashes were scattered at its base.
The river, pumping with spring runoff, had partially flooded the meadow, but I found a dry spot under the tree, where I set up my spotting scope and then plopped down into my camp chair. Starting at the rim, I ran the scope down the wall until I found Alex and Cheyne Lempe hanging on the anchor above the Boulder Problem. When Alex left the valley in the fall, he had climbed the Boulder Problem, Freerider’s technical crux, about fifteen times in a row without falling a single time. I knew he’d done it a few more times this spring, including the two times he had climbed the route from top to bottom, and as far as I knew, he’d hadn’t fallen on it yet.
You can try a climb a hundred times and fail on the same move a hundred times. But succeed on that move once, and you may be able to do it every time from then on. Why is that? And what caused the mental block that prevented you from doing it in the first place, when clearly you were capable of sticking the move all along? On climbing moves that are at or near your limit, there’s a hard-to-define warrior spirit, a ferocity you must tap into when going for that next hold. Without that little extra bit of oomph, your fingers can hit the hold over and over but never latch. Sometimes, it can feel as though you’re coming up short intentionally. This is such a well-known phenomenon in climbing that we even have a term for it: “punting.”
But once you’ve proven to yourself that you can do a move or even an entire route, it’s like a tiny door opens inside your mind, and the belief that you can do it, that you will succeed, creates a powerful positive visualization. Golfers are famous for using this technique with their putting. Visualize the ball rolling into the cup and there is a far better chance it will actually go in. The actor Jim Carrey tells the story of using positive visualization to find career success. In 1987, before he was famous, he wrote himself a check for 10 million dollars and on the memo line wrote “for acting services rendered.” The story goes that he carried it around in his wallet until he finally found his breakout role in 1994.
In a way, it’s what Alex was doing on Freerider. All the time he spent rehearsing the route was partly to memorize sequences and learn the intricacies of movement that would give him the greatest margin for error when executing the moves without a rope. But every time he succeeded on a crux move, he was also adding a few rings of chain mail to the mental armor he would wear when he set off on his ultimate climb.
So I had to blink to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me when I saw Alex swing off the rock near the top of the Boulder Problem. I wasn’t watching closely enough to see which move he slipped on, but one second he was on and the next he was dangling on the rope. He hung in his harness for a few seconds, then pulled back on and climbed up to the anchor. A few minutes later, he and Cheyne continued simul-rappelling down the wall.
As he neared the bottom of the cliff, I packed up my stuff and hiked to the base to meet him. I was holding a tree branch I had grabbed from the woods to use as a walking stick on the hike up.
“You look like some kind of Boy Scout troop leader,” said Alex, chuckling. “And, hey, cool shirt, have you been to Mont Saint-Michel?”
“I haven’t. I got this from my son Will, who just did a French exchange program with his high school. He said it was his favorite spot in France. He brought me back this shirt and some special Mont Saint-Michel salt that apparently they have in these sheds free for the taking.”
“That’s so funny,” said Alex. “Because I can picture that. I was there as a kid and I remember my parents buying me this little toy crossbow.”
“How old were you?”
“Like, four.”
“And you remember it?”
“I do. Isn’t that weird?”
And it was, kind of, because Alex had told me on other occasions that he remembers almost nothing from his youth.
On the hike out, Alex stopped to look at his phone. I thought he was texting until he said, “Wow, Trump just pulled us out of the Paris accord. That is so depressing.” The news had just broken that minute. Alex looked dejected.
“You knew he was going to do it, didn’t you?”
“I know they were saying so, but I was still hoping.”
Alex doesn’t talk much about his environmentalism, but it’s one of his most deeply held convictions. Ted Hesser, the guy who shared his energy reports with Alex and now works for the Honnold Foundation, told me that Alex had recently written a 50,000-dollar check to help jump-start a grassroots solar-power initiative in Ethiopia. This was the first I’d heard about it. If I hadn’t gone climbing with Ted, I never would have known. There were no press releases, no posts on Alex’s social media.
“So how’d it go up there?”
“It went well,” said Alex. Either he had forgotten about falling on the Boulder Problem, or he was choosing to put it out of his mind. “The route’s in good shape. All my tick marks are still there, and it’s totally dry. Conditions are pretty much perfect, and I think that’s it. I don’t think I’m going back up.”
He sounded relieved to finally be done prepping the route, but the endless trips up and down El Cap over the past year had taken a toll on him physically. His eyes were glassy, and the crow’s-feet on their edges looked deeper than I remembered them. A few days earlier, while I sat in the passenger seat as he did yet another hangboard session, he admitted that he was profoundly tired. “Every time I hike to the top of El Cap my legs just feel dead.” He said he felt tired all winter and that there were many days when he wasn’t happy with how he was climbing. But he did have one week of “total transcendence.” All along, I had been wondering how he could time this so that he goes for it on a day when he’s feeling transcendent. For every athlete who has a personal best at the Olympics, there are a dozen more who don’t peak right when they need to. But for Alex, there was more on the line than the chance to win an Olympic medal. What he was endeavoring to do would be like going for the world record long jump between two skyscrapers spaced twenty-nine and a half feet apart.
As we strolled down the trail, El Cap at our back, it hit home for me, perhaps more poignantly than it ever had before, that the guy in front of me was more like the rest of us than we like to admit. He gets migraines and has a wicked sweet tooth. Sometimes he feels like he’s wearing lead shoes. Once in a while, though he’s loath to admit it, he falls unexpectedly.
“Is Sanni still here?” I asked.
“No, she left yesterday. Went back to our place in Vegas. I basically asked her to leave and she was totally cool about it.”
I had somehow missed Sanni entirely this round. A few days earlier, I was chatting with Jimmy in his van when I saw her walking up the road. I was about to jump out and say hello when she stepped into Alex’s van, which was parked a few feet away, and slid the door shut behind her. When the two of them are in the box, I don’t like to bother them.
“How did the slabs feel?” I asked Alex.
“Really insecure. I still always feel like my feet could slip. But at the same time, I’m like, well, it’s worked every time.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking. Actually, it hasn’t worked every time.
When we got to my car we could see Tom Evans and a few other people sitting under a tree on the east side of the meadow with a giant spotting scope trained on the wall. Undoubtedly, they had just watched Alex rappel Freerider. Tom, who’s in his seventies and has climbed El Capitan five times, runs a website called the ElCap Report, which chronicles the doings on El Cap with photos and daily blogs. He’s a friend of Alex’s and has been in the meadow observing and recording almost everything Alex has done on El Capitan since he first showed up in the valley more than a decade ago. Alex told me that Tom knew about the plan and had asked if Alex would give him a heads-up before he went for it so he could photograph the ascent.
“How does he know?” I asked.
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“Because he’s not stupid,” replied Alex.
I started climbing on El Cap before the Tom Evans days. When the Report started, I hated knowing that someone was watching me when I was up there, and writing about it on a website. I knew Tom enjoyed broad support, and I couldn’t figure out why other people didn’t feel like I did, that it was like letting a stranger into your bedroom. Something about knowing I was being watched killed part of the magic of being up on El Cap. I was so unsupportive of his mission that I never once checked out the website. It was only recently that I finally did, and I saw the disclaimer on the home page saying that if you didn’t want to be photographed, just let him know, and he’d leave you alone. The fact that I was now doing the exact same thing as Tom was not lost on me.
When we pulled into Mike’s, a small blue hatchback was parked next to Alex’s van. “Oh wow, my mom’s here,” said Alex, looking a bit taken aback.
We found her on the front porch eating lunch with two friends. Alex and I gave his mom a hug and then she introduced us to her companions, who were visiting from France. Dierdre Wolownick (she changed back to her maiden name after the divorce) is tall and thin, and, like her son, she has distinctive-looking fingers. But they’re not fat like Alex’s. They’re long and thin, with knobby knuckles. I remembered Alex once telling me that his mom is a lifelong piano player. I first met her in 2013 when she came to New Hampshire to do some rock climbing. Before the trip she sent out an e-mail to members of the American Alpine Club. It started out: “This is Alex Honnold’s mom. Also a climber. I’ll be climbing in the northeast this summer and I’m hoping to find some partners.”