The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  In November, a few days before Alex made his first attempt on Freerider, I went climbing with Dierdre. It was a bit surreal because she had no idea what her son was planning, and I didn’t mention it. The night before our climb, she told me the story about the first and only time she had watched her son free solo. She and Alex were road-tripping on the East Coast, on their way to a family reunion, when Alex, who was seventeen at the time, asked if they could stop in the Shawangunks, a popular climbing area in the Catskills outside New York City. They were hiking under a famous cliff called the Near Trapps when Alex disappeared. Dierdre looked up and down the trail, wondering where he could have gone. Then she finally looked up and saw him clinging to the side of a cliff overhead. “Get down here,” she yelled. “I’m fine, Mom,” replied Alex.

  “How did that feel to watch him being up off the ground without a rope?” I asked Dierdre.

  “Well, I had to force myself to trust his judgment, because I didn’t have any judgment in this type of situation. I’m thinking, ‘Well, he obviously knows what he’s doing, let him do it.’”

  In the years since that first solo, as Alex slowly developed into an unparalleled climber, he never once told his mom before he went big. Dierdre always heard about his climbs afterward, of course, and she meticulously collected clippings from newspapers, magazines, and the Internet about her son’s exploits. The scrapbooks, which Alex’s friends call his Hall of Fame, can still be found to this day on the coffee table in her living room in Carmichael. What goes through a parent’s mind, I wondered, when they hear that their child has just scaled a 2,000-foot sheer cliff without a rope?

  “A sigh of relief, you know, that kind of thing,” she said. “And, ‘Wow! My son did that?’ There’s that side of it too. He’s done these outstanding, outrageous things that nobody else can do. That’s an honor, you know. But also, I wish he wouldn’t.”

  * * *

  —

  I TOOK A GROUP PHOTO of the four of them. Alex and Dierdre were speaking in French. Mine is rusty, but it sounded like Dierdre was asking Alex if he would go on a hike with them. “Oui, oui,” he replied. Alex didn’t say anything about what he had up his sleeve, and his mom didn’t ask. But she did give me an inquisitive look as I bid them all adieu. A few days earlier, Jimmy had told me that Dierdre had finally figured it out. She knew.

  Poor woman, I thought as I jumped back in my rental car, leaving Alex to entertain his mom and her friends.

  * * *

  —

  THE PROPERTY where I was staying in Foresta was hosting a music festival, so I had to move out the next day because the band was staying in my apartment. I called the reservations number for the park to see if by some miracle there were any campsites, tent cabins, or hotel rooms open, but, of course, there was nothing. It was Friday, June 2, and the park was thronged with tourists. Reservations in Yosemite open six months in advance, and to get one, you have to speed-dial the number the minute registration goes live. I decided I had only one option, which was to move back into a cave where I’d often slept in my younger days.

  I was loading my pack with my sleeping bag and pillow when my phone dinged.

  “Looks like it is on. I’m headed up in an hour or so,” read the text from Jimmy. Alex had gone bouldering that morning, and then hiking in the afternoon with his mom and her friends. He had told me he was going to take two full rest days before he went for the climb. And his mom was still in the valley. I had assumed he wouldn’t go for it until she left because, like Sanni’s, his mom’s presence carried a psychological weight—a weight that I didn’t think he’d want on his shoulders when he set off. Maybe he’s just sick of waiting, I thought.

  One thing was sure: Now I really didn’t want to sleep under a rock. With my luck, I’d get caught and kicked out of the park. On a whim, I called a hotel in El Portal, just outside the park boundary. They’d had a cancellation. It was 210 dollars for one night. The old Mark—the one who once lived an entire season in Yosemite off 107 dollars—cringed when I said, “I’ll take it.”

  Half an hour later, I was parked at a pullout on the west side of El Cap Meadow, near the spot where I planned to watch the climb in the morning. I stood outside the driver’s side with the door open and cracked a can of beer. “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago played on the car’s radio as I watched the last rays of sun slowly creep up the west face of El Capitan. I traced the line of Freerider from where it appeared just above the trees and spotted a party of climbers on Mammoth Terrace setting up their portaledge for the night. On dozens of nights in portaledges on the side of El Cap, a can of malt liquor in my chalk-stained hand, back against the wall, I’ve felt the heat from the stone radiating like a fireplace hearth. We used to drag along a boom box, which we padded with duct tape and foam from an old blown-out sleeping pad. All day long we’d listen to 104.1 the Hawk—the same station I was listening to now. I wondered if people still did that, if maybe the folks up on Mammoth—the ones who were going to wake up to the equivalent of an alien sighting in the morning—were listening to Chicago right now.

  I tried to picture Alex up on the wall, but my mind didn’t want to go there. Instead, it kept conjuring up a different image. Alex trots out of the woods near the base of the Manure Pile. His face is glowing. He comes over to where I’m waiting and gives me a hug. I looked around; there was no one nearby. I leaned on my forearms. Tears dripped off my cheeks and puddled on the roof of the rental car.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS PITCH-BLACK IN THE BOX when Alex awoke on the morning of June 3, 2017. Okay, let’s do this. But when he picked up his phone, he saw to his disappointment that it was still only two thirty A.M. He rolled over and fell right back asleep. Two hours later his alarm jolted him awake. He swung his legs off the edge of the bed and hopped down onto his feet. Once standing upright, he realized that he didn’t feel so great. He had gone to bed with a headache, and it lingered. Might have been from watching The Hobbit the afternoon before. For some reason watching movies during the day often gave him headaches. Or it could have been the multiple hours of speaking French on the hikes with his mom and her friends the past two days.

  He flipped on the galley light and his breakfast was sitting on the countertop, premade the night before—a bowl of muesli topped with chia seeds, flax, and blueberries. He grabbed a carton of hemp milk from the minifridge and poured it over the top, then sat in the passenger seat holding the bowl in his lap. The muesli was a stash that he had been saving for this morning. The past few days he had been eating a different variety sold in the Yosemite grocery store, and he didn’t like it as much. So he was surprised when he lost his appetite halfway through the bowl—he usually devoured his breakfast.

  Alex slipped behind the wheel of the ProMaster and backed out slowly onto Lost Arrow Road. He took a right turn down Oak Lane, slowing as he crossed the two speed bumps outside the Yosemite preschool. A minute later he was rolling down the loop road toward El Capitan.

  At the trailhead, it was still dark, so he threw on a headlamp. He carried a small black backpack with his shoes, a chalk bag, a water bottle, and a chocolate chip Clif Zbar. He wore a pair of tattered approach shoes, his Huck Finn pants, a red T-shirt, and a thin fleece hoodie. Near the base of the cliff, he heard a commotion and looked up to see a bear thrashing through the bushes toward the fixed lines coming down from the Nose. Alex looked up at the 3,000-foot vertical wall above him. That’s a big cliff, he said to himself. Then he sat down and slipped on his climbing shoes. A few minutes later, he fastened his chalk bag around his waist, teed up his favorite playlist of “gnarly hate rock” on his iPhone, found his first toehold, and began inching his way upward.

  He was barely off the ground when he heard jangling in the woods. Three climbers emerged from under the trees and looked up the wall. There was a guy on the first pitch of the Freeblast wearing scrappy cutoff black pants and a red T-shirt. And he wasn’
t attached to a rope.

  “Oh my god,” said one of them. “It’s happening.”

  * * *

  —

  AT 5:35 A.M., a tiny dot appeared just above the forest. I plopped into my camp chair, feeling thankful for my puffy coat, hat, and gloves. According to the thermometer in the rental car, it was fifty-eight degrees, but it felt colder sitting in the mist that had settled over the meadow. The tall grass was covered in dew, and my legs were soaked from the knees down. It was too early for any tourists to be out, and the road was quiet. The only sound was a faint rustle of wind high overhead, up in the ether into which Alex was climbing. I pulled up my hood and tried to ignore the buzzing swarm of mosquitoes around my head as I looked for Alex through the eyepiece of my spotting scope. When I found him in the viewfinder, he was already 150 feet off the ground—well into the death zone. He was moving steadily upward, and I had to constantly adjust the angle of the spotting scope to keep him in the frame, which covered about a hundred feet of cliff.

  There was a small red bundle on the back of his left hip—his hoodie, which he had rolled up and tied around his waist. I thought it was odd that he wouldn’t either wear it or leave it behind. The sky had been gray on the drive up from El Portal, like it always is at dawn, but it had stayed gray. A high scud blocked the sun.

  Twelve minutes later, Alex hauled himself up onto a small pedestal at the top of pitch 4. He reached down, unlaced his left shoe, and slipped the heel off the back of his foot, then did the same with his right. Above him rose the first of the crux slab pitches. The move that had caused him to abort in the fall was about fifty feet above him. Alex looked down and stared directly into the lens of the spotting scope. I doubted he could see me, but I was gazing right into his eyes. As usual, they were wide open. I texted this detail to Peter Gwin, who was back at National Geographic’s headquarters in DC updating that same Google doc. As I returned to my scope to find Alex, Trango came back to me. All these years later and I was still trying to share what makes climbing such a singular experience—only now I was on the other side of the lens. We say that we climb for our souls, but the truth is that most of us need to share the experience with others to make it meaningful.

  Mikey was standing next to me, wearing a blue cotton hoodie and filming with a large camera set on a tripod. He had blown his knee out skiing a few weeks earlier and was walking with a limp, which meant he couldn't work with the crew on the wall.

  After Alex’s experience in the fall, and a lot of soul searching, he had decided not to have any camera guys on the crux pitches. Jimmy and Alex had been discussing these details over the past few weeks, and they had recently agreed that Jimmy and Cheyne would film only the top of the route—the section that Alex had never fallen on. Of course, close-up footage of Alex on the slabs and the Boulder Problem was critical for the film, so they agreed on a compromise. Jimmy would capture these shots with remotely operated cameras that he would strap to the wall. For most of the climb, including all of the most difficult sections, the camera team would be invisible to Alex. Still, I wondered whether he could block out the virtual presence that was hovering in the air all around him. Could he find the Zen that would allow him to enter that all-important flow state? He would have preferred that we weren’t down here, or anywhere near El Cap, at all; he had mentioned this to me a few different times: after his first attempt, over the winter, and then a week earlier when we were hanging out in his van. Even in the abstract, knowing we were watching his every move was a distraction.

  Alex was caught in a classic catch-22. Filming this climb had been his idea, after all. And he still wanted the greatest achievement of his life to be captured for posterity. It was also a little late in the game to walk away and leave Jimmy hanging.

  It felt as though he stood on that ledge for half an hour, but when he pulled his shoes back on, I looked at my phone and only two minutes had elapsed. It was going to be a long morning. Alex set off, pulled over a small roof, and smeared his way up into the crux.

  “I can’t watch this,” said Mikey, stepping away from his camera.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS OKAY. He always felt this way at the beginning of a big solo. It took time to find the flow state, that old friend that allowed him to surrender, to trust that he was going to climb to the best of his ability. If he slipped? That was just the cost of doing business. On every other big solo, he had compensated for the tightness by overgripping. His fingers were so strong that he sometimes had to be careful he didn’t rip the holds right off the mountain. And therein lay the problem he now faced: There were no handholds. He had no choice but to trust his feet.

  But there was a tiny crust in the rock, which he had discovered in the fall. A crease no bigger than a perforation in a piece of notebook paper. It was a non-hold, almost like a tick mark—a thing that showed you where to put your hand. He had been glad when he found it, because even if he couldn’t actually hold on to it, it was comforting to know there was something underneath his fingers. And there it was, right in front of him. But he didn’t put his hand there. Instead, he reached up and pinched his fingers through the shiny steel hanger, his forefinger touching the tip of his thumb as if he was making the okay sign. He was careful not to let his fingers touch the metal. As long as he didn’t grab the hanger, he reasoned, it wasn’t cheating. Alex had decided to make this compromise a few days earlier, after we had climbed the slabs together and he had lowered back down to do the moves again. He didn’t mention it to me until we were hiking out. “I tried this new thing on the first slab crux on pitch 5,” he had said. “I pinched my finger through the hanger on that one sketchy foot move, the one I backed off on in the fall. I can do it without touching the hanger.”

  “Cool. Sort of like what you did on Half Dome with the carabiner, huh?”

  “Yeah, exactly. I mean, if I fell I’m sure I’d break my finger.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Yeah, it’s a lot better than dying.”

  * * *

  —

  ALEX LOOKED UP AND FELT thankful there was no cameraman dangling above him. This time he was alone.

  He rocked up onto the horrible foothold, his fingers hovering inside the hanger like he was playing the game Operation, trying to remove the patient’s funny bone. He brought his left foot up, and for one or two seconds his body was splayed out, like a ski jumper doing a spread eagle. He shifted his weight onto his right foot, brought his left foot over to the same hold, and did a quick foot match. A second later he was through and onto good holds. The entire slab sequence had taken a total of twenty seconds. And for that brief moment in time, the equivalent of taking two deep breaths, there wasn’t a person on the planet whose physical hold on the world was more tenuous. Had he so much as sneezed, it could have been the last move he ever made.

  He quickly moved up through a swatch of vibrant lime green lichen and entered a serpentine band of calcite that stretched across the wall like a giant white snake. At the big step down on pitch 6, he grabbed the good hold with his left hand, then switched it to his right. Leaning out to the left, he slowly lowered himself downward, his left foot tapping against the rock, all herky-jerky, as he dropped into a crouch and his right knee bent like a blade closing on a jackknife.

  “That can’t be fun,” I said quietly. Mikey stood a few feet away, still with his back to the wall. Even from half a mile away, it was obvious Alex was feeling tight. But he had made it through. In three minutes, he had put both the slab cruxes behind him, moves that had haunted him for years. He scrambled onto the ledge above, sat down, and spent the next two minutes loosening the lacing on his shoes. He didn’t notice it, but just above his head was where someone had pecked the word “slave” into the rock.

  * * *

  —

  FOREST ALTHERR WAS HAVING ONE of those dreams in which you think you’ve awoken, but you’re still dreaming. He peered out
of his sleeping bag and locked eyes with a climber sneaking past, his ropes pinning Forest and his partner Jeff to the wall. Just as the dream deepened, Forest woke up and saw a figure moving toward the ledge. Oh shit, here it comes, he thought.

  Then he saw the red shirt and the black pants, and he knew exactly who it was. Holy shit, it’s Honnold. Everyone had been talking about the upcoming free solo in Camp 4, but nothing could have prepared him for this moment.

  “You guys look pooped,” said Alex.

  “No way, man,” replied Forest defensively. “We didn’t poop on the ledge. We have a poop tube.”

  It might have been that Forest was still half-asleep. It could have been the bad dream; or perhaps he just had poop on the brain. As an infectious disease epidemiologist, he’d been studying feces for years. His boss used to tag his progress reports with a pooping unicorn when his work was outstanding. It was an inside joke having to do with a viral Internet advertisement for a product called the Squatty Potty. The ad features a unicorn that poops rainbow-swirl ice cream. At the end, a bunch of smiling kids line up to get their poop cones. So when Forest came across a unicorn onesie on Amazon, he bought it. Ever since, he had been ticking off the FUA (First Unicorn Ascent) of classic routes around the country. He wore the onesie now, but Alex, focused as he was, didn’t notice.

  “No, sorry, I just meant that you guys look tired,” said Alex.

  The entire exchange lasted only a minute or two. Jeff would later recall that Alex didn’t have a huge presence, that there was something casual about the way he carried himself, how he slumped his shoulders. “Had it been portrayed in a movie, they would have asked him to stand a little straighter and look more superheroish,” he said.