The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  As Alex moved past, Jeff wasn’t sure what to say. Have a nice day? Good luck? Take it easy? None of these seemed appropriate, so he kept his mouth shut.

  * * *

  —

  THE NORMAL METHOD FOR GETTING into the Hollow Flake is to have your partner lower you while you smear sideways across a slab. It’s called a tension traverse, and it’s similar to a pendulum, except that you don’t swing back and forth. Both techniques are common on big walls and used for moving across blank sections between crack systems. Mark Hudon and Max Jones, the first climbers to try free climbing this section of El Capitan (they managed to free climb all but three hundred feet of the route in 1979, an inspired effort), found a way to avoid the tension traverse with a difficult climb down a thin crack. Alex had always found the pitch especially difficult because his fingers don’t fit in the crack, especially near the bottom. Once, when climbing this pitch with Mason Earle, he had unexpectedly popped off.

  Though free climbers don’t like to admit it, it’s easy to benefit from rope drag when traversing or downclimbing. If your partner is a little slow feeding the rope out, even a tiny bit of tension can prevent a slip.

  It had famously happened to John Bachar in 1979 on a route called Clever Lever in Colorado’s Eldorado Canyon. Bachar had just climbed the route, which features a 5.12 lunge to a jug hold at the lip of a roof twenty feet above the ground. He felt so solid on it that when he got back to the ground, he decided to free solo it. At the crux, he threw for the jug and easily latched it. Unfortunately, he had failed to notice when doing it the first time that the weight of the rope running through the protection had checked his outward swing. Now, without a rope, his legs swung out so far from the wall that his body went horizontal and his hand slipped off the jug. He hit the ground feet first, on the only flat spot in a garden of jagged boulders, and then tumbled another ninety feet down a slab. When he came to a rest, he popped up to a sitting position and thought, Holy shit, I’m okay, a second before a boulder he had dislodged on his way down the hill slammed into his back, knocking him out cold.

  * * *

  —

  ON PAPER, THE MONSTER OFFWIDTH appears to be one of the easier pitches on Freerider. The topo shows a straight black line, and the grade is listed at 5.11a. But climbers familiar with this route know that the Monster got its name because it’s been known to eat people alive. An off-width is the name for any crack that is too wide for standard jamming technique. A slotted hand or a sideways clenched fist will usually jam well in a crack up to four inches wide. Any wider, and you have to get creative with moves like hand stacks, arm bars, and chicken wings. The big difference between off-widths and regular cracks is that you often can’t hang off one arm while moving the other up, which means you have to lock yourself into the crack between moves with your legs. Off-width climbing is like trying to run up a steep hill wearing a heavy pack. The beta for the Monster on Mountain Project, an online guidebook, recommends carrying enough protection so you can build a mini anchor in the crack to hang off when you vomit from overexertion.

  Alex is lucky in that his size 12½ foot, crammed into a size 8½ shoe, fits perfectly when T-boned in the Monster. Climbers call this a “heel-toe jam.” Over and over, he pulled his right foot as high as he could, stuck it sideways in the crack, and then stood up on it while pulling himself up with a left-hand arm bar. His left hip, without a harness to get in the way, slid smoothly up the fissure. Like a snake, he methodically slithered his way up until his butt found a tiny shelf in the left wall the size of a toilet seat. Alex took in the view and thought about the Boulder Problem, which was now just a few hundred feet above him.

  At 7:53 A.M., he scrambled into the alcove below El Cap Spire, a flat-topped 150-foot-tall tower that juts like an upturned thumb from the side of the wall. He’d made it just in time because nature was calling. Behind the spire, he found an out-of-the-way spot and shat into a crack. He felt awful about it and hoped it would rain—hard—before the next party came up it. But it had to happen, because he couldn’t risk shitting his pants on the crux.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE LAST GOOD LEDGE below the Boulder Problem, Alex took off his shoes and shirt. For the second time of the day, he looked down directly into the lens of the spotting scope. Then he pulled down his pants, gave us what Mikey called “the full frontal,” and took a leak. Afterward, he went and sat down and had a drink of water from a bottle he had previously stashed on the ledge. Seven minutes after he got there, he slipped his shoes and shirt back on, stood up, and shook his hands like a sprinter at the starting line of a hundred-meter dash. He slathered chalk onto the backs of his hands and looked poised to set off when he sat back down and took his shoes off again.

  “I don’t want to watch this,” said Mikey for the second time.

  Minutes later, Alex was standing on the last good footholds below Freerider’s crux. Unlike every other difficult patch on the route, these moves are so tenuous that there’s only one way to do them. Other sections of the route, like the slabs, for example, have multiple possibilities. Alex could screw up a sequence and still feel confident that he could get through the moves. On the Enduro Corner, there was a sequence for the jams—left hand thumb up, right hand thumb down—and he had ticked the holds accordingly. But he had also practiced the pitch “off-handed,” as he called it, meaning he intentionally grabbed with the wrong hand. He had told me that it didn’t even feel that much harder. There are thousands of individual moves on Freerider and, despite memorizing many of them, Alex trusted himself to figure a lot of them out on the fly. When he was in the flow state, his body sometimes knew what to do better than his mind did. This intuitive kinesthetic awareness was how he found a lot of the refinements to his sequences. But the Boulder Problem isn’t like that. As Alex had explained to me in exquisite detail that day in Foresta, there is one way, and only one way, to do it. And he knew that if he screwed it up, if he pushed his thumb against the pencil-eraser hold in the wrong way, it would probably cause his feet to skate off the tiny nubs that were holding him up. And the handholds were so bad that if his foot slipped, there was no way he could check the fall.

  After three hours of squinting with my left eye while I gazed through the scope with my right, I had developed a mild headache. I reached up to put my left hand over my eye, so I wouldn’t have to scrunch it shut, and it felt wet on my face. My palms were sweating. The scope gave the illusion that I was watching Alex on a screen, like this was a YouTube video. But my pounding heart knew it was all too real. I must have looked away, because now I don’t remember seeing him do the karate kick. What I do remember is next seeing Alex’s left leg stuck out horizontally like a dancer’s. He had nailed the Boulder Problem—the 5.13a crux, 2,100 feet in the air—that had spit him off two days earlier. A few seconds later, at 8:23 A.M., he pulled onto the ledge above the Boulder Problem, turned around, and held his hands over his head. It was a gesture somewhat out of character for Alex, but he was connecting with those of us who were witnessing the climb. He was sharing the joy.

  * * *

  —

  THE FINAL PITCHES WERE LIKE a victory lap. By now Alex had spent so much time on Freerider that a lot of the holds felt like old friends. I love this move, he thought, over and over, as he karate-chopped his way up the perfect hand and finger cracks. As he joyfully reeled himself upward, the valley floor, half a mile down, was spread below like the tableau of a model train set. Old-growth black oak trees speckled El Cap Meadow like pieces of broccoli, the vehicles inching along the loop road like Matchbox cars. The sun-stippled Merced River sparkled as it lazily flowed downvalley alongside the meadow, which appeared to undulate as its tall golden grass swayed in the breeze. This was the section of the climb that had been playing on the highlight reel in Alex’s mind for the past nine years. He felt like the hero in an action movie of his own making, which, in a way, he was. A few feet away, Jimmy dangled o
n the end of a rope, camera trained on Alex.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS NO CHEERING CROWD when Alex pulled over the final block, no spraying of champagne, no gushing reporters asking him what it felt like to have just completed the greatest rock climb of all time. Alex walked a few feet back from the edge and took off his shirt and shoes. He was covered in chalk from the tips of his fingers all the way up his Popeye-like forearms. He stood on the rim, squinting into the bright morning sun, arms by his sides. It was 9:28 A.M. The first free solo ascent of El Capitan had taken three hours and fifty-six minutes.

  Alex would later post a photo to Instagram of him and Jimmy hugging a few feet from the edge of the cliff. The caption reads, in part: “I was elated, @jimmychin was probably just relieved that his movie has a happy ending.” Jimmy’s got both arms around Alex. His eyes are shut, and his mouth is wide-open, like he’s yelling. Alex, standing erect and almost a head taller than Jimmy, wears an enigmatic, toothy smile.

  * * *

  —

  MY STORY BREAKING THE NEWS of Alex’s historic ascent posted on National Geographic’s website at ten A.M. It immediately went viral.

  Tommy Caldwell had given me a quote. He called the climb “the moon-landing of free soloing.”

  Peter Croft had said, “After this, I really don’t see what’s next. This is the big classic jump.”

  Later, The New York Times would write that Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan should be celebrated “as one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.”

  But there were haters, too. The link to the story on National Geographic’s Facebook page racked up more than 2,000 comments, and I was shocked at how many of them were negative.

  Idiots like this fucker are why gym rats are climbing outside without helmets. I don’t want to ruin my next climbing day carrying your brain dead asshat self off the cliff when you bash your skull in on a 20 foot whipper that you should walk away from.

  Had he fallen, who would have paid for his bodies recovery? His parents? Always irritates me to think of how much stupidity I pay for as a responsible tax payer.

  . . . I am getting rather tired of hearing athletes talk like anything they do benefits mankind in any way. While the feat itself is extremely impressive, it is ultimately meaningless and the world is no different today because of it. . . . Why don’t you devote all that time and energy into doing something for someone else for a change?

  There were also hundreds of comments from Alex’s fans and supporters.

  Gotta love all the Debbie Downers here, pissing on this guy’s Wheaties just because they envy someone willing to take risks while they sit at home judging other people from the bottom of a bag of chips.

  Alex never read any of them.

  At 11:29 A.M. I heard a familiar whistle. A few seconds later, Alex emerged from the forest and trotted across the small meadow where I was waiting for him. The Huck Finn pants were covered in chalk, as was his shirt. On his head he wore a black baseball cap, his ears sticking out from underneath. It felt a little odd as he jogged across the meadow and I stood there waiting. But the awkward moment lasted only a few seconds before Alex locked me in the warmest embrace I’ve ever had from him. I slapped him on the shoulder and then stepped back to take in his expression. He was glowing. I was too. I might have cried, like I had at the end of The Karate Kid, when Daniel-san wins the tournament (I had watched it with my eleven-year-old daughter, who was getting into karate, right before I left for this trip), if I hadn’t gotten it out of my system the night before. This scene was playing out exactly how I had pictured it in my mind beforehand. Weird.

  Alex sat down on a rock, and I dropped into the dirt next to him. It was hot. Mosquitoes buzzed around us. I noticed a thin dark line on his upper lip, the faintest hint of a mustache. He’s not a hairy dude, which made me wonder how long it had been since he had shaved. I looked down at his shoes. The laces, de-sheathed and broken, had been jury-rigged back together. Alex pulled an apple out of his pack and asked if I had any water. I gave him what was left in my bottle.

  “So, did it go perfectly?” I asked.

  “It went pretty much perfectly. I had to take a dump down behind the spire. I feel pretty bad about it. But it’s just one of those things. I hope nobody’s climbing Excalibur for a while. The idea of soloing the crux sort of loosened things up.”

  We sat a hundred yards off the trail to the Manure Pile Buttress. Climbers, carrying ropes and gear, were walking back and forth, looking in our direction. By now, news outlets all over the world were reporting Alex’s feat, and climbers were reading about it on their phones. “Hey, Alex, glad you didn’t die,” yelled someone walking by on the trail.

  In the background, a mob was swarming up the cliff’s most popular offering—After Six. It’s one of Yosemite’s easiest multipitch routes, and it was on my list of solos. So far, I had ticked off exactly none of them.

  I asked Alex if he had thought about anything other than the moves on his way up the climb. He said that on the easier sections, he was already thinking about his next goal, which was to climb the grade 9a (9a is a French grade, equivalent to 5.14d/5.15a on the Yosemite Decimal System), two ticks below the world standard of 9c. It struck me as slightly preposterous that, having just made the greatest climb of all time, Alex would be looking forward to becoming like the fiftieth best sport climber in the world. But 9a happens to be one notch harder than what Alex has climbed to date. It’s something that he will have to accomplish with the use of a rope, of course. But greater climbing prowess would open the door to more free-solo projects as well. “Imagine what I could do if I was as strong as Adam Ondra,” Alex said one day between burns on the Beastmaker.

  “So it’s still just game on?” I asked.

  “It’s kind of been a strategy the whole time I’ve worked on this—to look past it, to think what’s beyond, what other stuff I’m excited about. So this just feels like a seminormal day. I want to eat some lunch, I want to get in the shade, and then I’m probably going to hangboard in a bit.”

  “A normal person would probably take the afternoon off after they free soloed El Cap,” I replied.

  “But I’ve been hangboarding every other day, and it’s the other day.”

  * * *

  —

  AN HOUR LATER, I was sitting on an upside-down canoe outside the door of Alex’s van, which was now parked back in Mike’s driveway. Birds chirped and flitted among the branches of the oak trees overhead. Yosemite Falls roared in the background, so ever present it hardly registered. On Lost Arrow Road, there were no news trucks, no groupies, no rangers offering congratulations. It was just Alex and me. Sanni was on her way to the airport. She and Alex had spoken on the phone shortly after he topped out. Sanni cried. “The only reason I’m sad not to be there is because I wanted to see your smile, that big goofy grin that doesn’t come out that often,” she said. “But I can hear it through the phone.”

  So I sat there. And I watched Alex. Barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of bright red shorts, he hung two-handed from the Beastmaker. Because he had been hangboarding every other day. And today was the other day.

  Jeff Chapman ascending a fixed line on the north face of Polar Sun Spire, Baffin Island, Canada.

  © Mark Synnott

  The mirror image of the shot above, taken by Jeff Chapman. The team spent thirty-six nights living in this portaledge while establishing their route called the Great and Secret Show.

  © Mark Synnott collection

  Crazy Kids of America, circa 1982. Top row, left to right: Paul Getchell, Muffy Arndt, Jeff Chapman, Scott Fitzgerald, the author, Bruce Barry, Ben Barr, unknown. Bottom row, left to right: Jesse McAleer, Amy Synnott, Robert Frost, Tyler Hamilton, Tyler Vadenboncoeur.

  © courtesy of the Frost family collection

  Warren
Harding on the Nose in 1957, during the first ascent of El Capitan. It was Thanksgiving, and the team hauled up a whole turkey and a bottle of Chablis to celebrate the holiday. It would take forty-five days, split over two seasons, before the route was completed in November 1958.

  © Allen Steck

  A young Royal Robbins at Stoney Point, a bouldering area outside Los Angeles, where many iconic climbers of Yosemite’s golden age cut their teeth in the 1950s and ’60s.

  © Frank Hoover, courtesy of Dean Fidelman collection

  Lynn Hill. In 1993, she free climbed the Nose of El Capitan, a feat that many had deemed impossible. Afterward, she famously quipped, “It goes, boys.”

  © Dean Fidelman

  John Bachar free soloing New Dimensions in 1982. His ropeless ascent of this 300-foot, 5.11-rated route in 1976 redefined the limits of what was thought possible. At the time, the hardest roped climbing in Yosemite was only one grade harder.

  © Phil Bard

  The Stone Monkeys were known for their antics both on and off the rock. Here, Alex Huber, who made the first free ascent of Freerider in 1998, executes a difficult boulder jump outside Yosemite’s Camp 4. Note the crash pads below in case he missed.

  © Dean Fidelman

  Ivo Ninov (front), Dean Potter, and Charles “Chongo” Tucker (standing) relaxing in “Chongo’s office” in Yosemite Valley. Sticks are used to protect the tree’s bark from the slackline that is tied around it.