Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure

by Alex Honnold

  As soon as I reached the van, my first thought was to check my phone to see if Stacey had called. I think we’d made some vague agreement to chat later. I hoped she had left a message. But I knew that she hadn’t. Unsurprisingly, no call, which I took to mean that Stacey just wasn’t very psyched about “us.”

  The sandwiches I made helped ease my disappointment. I planned on soloing another route in the afternoon, just so I could finish all my business at Red Rocks in one day and keep on driving toward my real goal—Tucson.

  • • • •

  I was pleased with myself for soloing the Rainbow Wall. Maybe I should have called it a day, but I’d already decided I wanted to do more. My plan was to solo up Prince of Darkness, a seven-pitch 5.10 route that soars through a blank-looking face on Black Velvet Wall. Then I’d downclimb another 5.10 route, Dream of Wild Turkeys, which joins Prince of Darkness about 650 feet off the ground.

  I chatted with some other climbers in the parking lot, joking about the terrible weather in Yosemite, then drove over to the trail-head for Black Velvet Canyon. But now the euphoria was long gone, replaced by lethargy and the deep fatigue of my worn-out mind. I’d always thought that Prince of Darkness would be a good challenge for me in dealing with the exposure of tiny holds on a smooth vertical wall. I never considered calling it quits, but on the way to the base I found that I didn’t really care. I was sick of the unrelenting wind and my feet hurt from hiking and edging. The wall didn’t excite me.

  Since I was already warmed up and in a soloing mindset, I expected the climbing to be smooth and effortless. But instead I felt jerky and slow. I wasted energy by overgripping the sandstone crimps and worrying about breaking footholds. I didn’t want to be there. Instead of relishing the process, the whole experience of being on the wall, I just wanted to have it finished. I wanted to be back in my van, out of the wind.

  I kept trudging upward, though I never got comfortable. My feet hurt more and more, but I never passed a good-enough stance to adjust my shoes. By the time I reached the top of the route—the large ledge where Prince of Darkness joins Dream of Wild Turkeys—I hated climbing, hated the wind, and wanted to go home. On the ledge, I took off my shoes for a while, trying to allow some blood to flow back into my toes. I didn’t look around the canyon, I didn’t admire the shadows lengthening across the desert, I just looked at my feet and waited to start the descent.

  I downclimbed Dream of Wild Turkeys, which turned out to be a pretty fun route. Or at least it would have been fun in a different time and place. As I descended, I would occasionally find myself having a good time. And then suddenly the wind would pick up and I would realize that I had only been enjoying a brief reprieve. But I suppose that the wind and my fatigue combined to blunt all my other emotions. I just didn’t care as much. Everything to do with “real” life, including Stacey, seemed a little less critical. What really mattered was sitting down in a sheltered place and eating. And maybe sleeping.

  • • • •

  That evening, I met some friends for dinner in Las Vegas. In the bathroom of the restaurant, I washed my hands for the first time and discovered I had a blood blister on my left index finger, where I’d jammed it into the iron-oxide divot, stacked a finger and a thumb on top of it, and made that pioneering move up to grab the jug. I came back to the table and showed the blistered fingertip to my friends. It felt like a badge of courage.

  That marathon day of veering emotions at Red Rocks was like a whole life in a nutshell. As it turned out, though, I didn’t wait for the rendezvous in Tucson. The next day I flew to Dallas, ostensibly to help Stacey pack for her move to L.A. But I really wanted to win her back. I basically re-wooed her. And it worked . . . for a while.

  Two months later, we broke up—for the first time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WORLD TRAVELER

  ALEX HAD PULLED OFF his three-route tour de force at Red Rocks in the same purist, private style that he had wielded on Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome. No one had witnessed his climbing on Rainbow Wall, Prince of Darkness, or Dream of Wild Turkeys, and only the folks with whom he had chatted at the trail-head around midday had any idea that he was up to anything special. But the word got out quickly. On Supertopo.com, veteran Yosemite climber Peter Haan—who in the early 1970s had dazzled his peers with first free ascents and roped solos of classic routes (using a complicated self-belaying system)—reported Alex’s Red Rocks feat on May 12, 2010, only fourteen days after Alex had battled his demons in gale-force winds on those sandstone walls.

  The response was another medley of disbelief, astonishment, congratulations, and cautionary screeds begging Alex not to risk his life so cavalierly. “You messing with us, Peter?” wrote another Valley veteran, invoking the kind of incredulity that had led some to dismiss Moonlight Buttress as an April Fools’ Day hoax. But a believer posted, “This fella should try walking on water.” Another veteran weighed in: “Having done all 3 routes, this just makes me sick.”

  Many of the responders expressed simple admiration. “Long live Alex Honnold,” cheered one. “Another amazing send by a super nice dude!” John Long, the Stonemaster who would bear on-screen witness to Alex’s genius in Alone on the Wall, posted simply, “Alexander the Great.”

  The cautionary comments, however, verged on the avuncular. “I hope Alex is being careful, he’s such a great kid,” one observer ventured. “It seems that Alex has taken it to a new level only by cutting the safety margin drastically. I’d feel more comfortable if his solos were cracks [as opposed to small holds on otherwise blank walls]. One thing is for sure, he has courage beyond belief.”

  So far in his career, the climbs that have won Alex the greatest acclaim have come in even-numbered years. Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome in 2008, Rainbow Wall in 2010, then other incredible breakthroughs in 2012 and 2014. Alex is aware of this pattern, referring to the odd-numbered years as periods of “consolidation.” But in some sense, this schema belies the nonstop virtuosity of Alex’s approach to climbing in all its forms.

  In April 2009, for instance, Alex joined a team headed for Mount Kinabalu, at 13,435 feet the highest peak in Borneo. By its easiest route, Kinabalu is a tourist-thronged walk-up, but the mountain is actually a gigantic monolith of granite soaring out of dense rain forest. Some of its earliest explorers got lost in the jungle just trying to find their way to the mountain, and even today, Kinabalu still has untouched walls that challenge the best mountaineers.

  The trip was the brainchild of Mark Synnott. Thirty-nine years old at the time, Synnott was a veteran mountaineer with a record of bold first ascents all over the globe. By 2009, he had perfected the art of getting magazine assignments combined with corporate sponsorship (usually by The North Face) to launch exotic adventures in the far corners of the world, his teams comprising some of the top American climbing stars. For Men’s Journal and Borneo, he recruited Conrad Anker (who found George Mallory’s body on Everest in 1999), photographer Jimmy Chin, filmmaker Renan Ozturk, and Kevin Thaw—all four veterans of other landmark expeditions. Anker, who had become the team captain for The North Face, had recently anointed the wunderkind of Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome with TNF sponsorship.

  Now Anker tried to convince Synnott to add the twenty-three-year-old Honnold to the Borneo team. Says Synnott now, “I was pretty apprehensive. I’d never met Alex. In general, I don’t like going off with guys I don’t already know. There’s a big potential for personality conflicts. And Alex had never been on an expedition.”

  The team’s objective was an unclimbed, nearly vertical wall on the north side of the mountain, rising out of a forbidding abyss called Low’s Gully. The place had an evil reputation, cemented by a catastrophe in 1994 when a ten-man British army team out on what was supposed to be a six-day training mission got entangled in a thirty-one-day survival ordeal. That disaster was vividly recounted in the book Descent into Chaos, by journalist Richard Connaughton.

  Synnott had another source for his misgivings. Aware
of Alex’s deeds as a free soloist, Synnott worried “what kind of insane stuff” the young hotshot “might pressure me into doing.” As it turned out, the two got along well in Borneo. “We hit it off right off the bat,” Synnott remembers. “Alex has a wide-open personality. He deals with people well. There’s no pretense. No bullshit.”

  Still, there were “quirky little things” that caused minor disputes between the leader and the rookie. “On his rack,” Synnott claims, “he set up all his cams the way he would in Indian Creek”—the crag in southern Utah famed for short, steep crack climbs. This meant that Alex couldn’t free up carabiners to use in all the different ways mountaineering requires. “So I had to take his rack apart,” Synnott adds.

  “‘What are you doing?’ Alex asked me.

  “‘Dude, this doesn’t work here.’”

  According to Synnott, Alex “wouldn’t use shoulder slings”—long nylon loops that minimize drag by redirecting the climbing rope as it zigzags from one piece of protection to the next.

  “What do you do about rope drag?” Synnott asked him.

  “I just skip pieces,” Alex answered. (In other words, he runs out his lead much farther than normal between points of pro, risking much longer leader falls.)

  “Alex didn’t like to use little stoppers” (the smaller styles of nuts for protection). “He said, ‘I don’t need this shit.’ Then he’d get to a place where there were only tiny cracks, and he’d say, ‘Wow, nothing else fits.’

  “Alex had been living in this Yosemite bubble, where you don’t need to learn all the tricks of mountaineering.”

  Despite those quirks, on Kinabalu, Synnott admits admiringly, “Alex did some pretty sick stuff”—long, highly technical leads with a minimum of protection.

  The deft, amusing piece that Synnott wrote for the March 2010 issue of Men’s Journal opens with a scene at the base of the wall in which a priceless bit of repartee evokes the “Yosemite bubble.”

  “Where’s your helmet?”

  “Uh, I don’t have one,” Alex replies, looking me square in the eyes and without apology.

  “What do you mean? You forgot it back in camp?”

  Before I finish my question, I know the answer.

  “Uh, no. I mean I didn’t bring one on the trip.”

  “Intentionally?”

  “Sort of.”

  But when Alex leads the terrifying, almost unprotected crux pitch of the long climb, before the two men settle in to bivouac on a suspended platform called a portaledge, Synnott hails the prodigy’s accomplishment.

  Two hours later he reached the shelter of a small roof, 150 feet above me. It was, hands down, one of the best leads I’d ever witnessed. . . .

  [Conrad] Anker was right. I was learning things from Honnold. . . . He brought something to the expedition none of us anticipated. Every jaw-dropping lunge, every inhuman pull, even every rookie mistake—it all rekindled the fire that we had back when we were his age. And it showed me, at least, that the fire was still there. Later, as we settled into our sleeping bags in the portaledge, Honnold needed to get something off his chest. “You know, I’m kind of feeling like a pansy,” he confessed. “How so?” I replied. “You just did the sickest lead I’ve ever seen.” “I know,” he replied, “but it scared me. I shouldn’t have gotten so scared.”

  Conrad Anker was one of my first mentors. I’d always admired the guy, not only for his great climbs such as the Shark’s Fin on Meru Peak in the Garhwal Himalaya and his first ascents with Alex Lowe of wild-looking towers in Queen Maud Land in Antarctica, but also because of the way he lives his life. Conrad calls himself a Buddhist, and he constantly preaches and practices kindness to others and doing good for the planet. The school in the Khumbu Valley he started years ago to train Sherpas in technical climbing is a prime example of Conrad’s altruistic service to others.

  And it was Conrad who convinced The North Face to sponsor me, which really improved my climbing opportunities. So even though I knew almost nothing about Borneo, I was psyched to be invited by Mark Synnott to go along on the Kinabalu expedition.

  All six of us got along well during that trip, and it’s true that Mark and I hit it off from the start. But it was a really long expedition—a full month from April 2 to May 1, 2009. I was used to getting things done a lot faster—one-day ascents of big walls in the Valley, for instance. There were times during the trip when our sluggish progress nearly drove me crazy. After five days in Low’s Gully, we’d gotten nowhere on the wall. I kept saying to myself, Why is this taking so long?

  The “quirky little things” that got between Mark and me had as much to do with our difference in age as with our climbing styles. Like when Mark tried to take apart my rack—that just sent me off the deep end. I liked to think I knew how to handle my own cams and biners.

  As for skipping pieces rather than building up rope drag, I do that all the time. It just depends on whether the terrain is dangerous or not. And Mark’s I-told-you-so about the stoppers isn’t the way I remember it. On the whole route, I doubt that I placed a single nut, because the wall was one pitch after another of overhanging granite. He was just too old-school for my taste.

  For instance, Mark led one pitch of pure choss—crumbly rock, loose holds everywhere. It was about 5.7, but Mark aided it. He even drilled a bolt. He took forever to lead the pitch. I said to him, “Dude, it’s just five-seven. Why don’t you just climb it? It’s not really dangerous if you tread lightly.” But he was going, “Oh, man, this is really sketchy!” Once he got his anchor in, I toproped the pitch in about three and a half minutes.

  Mark later took me to task for an awkward moment when he wanted Jimmy Chin to shoot some film in which I would talk about what it was like to have Conrad as a mentor. I balked. Mark thought this meant that I wasn’t open to being taught by my teammates. But back then, it was a lot harder for me to perform in front of the camera, especially with all the guys standing around, including Conrad. It felt like, “Okay, Alex, talk about this. Dance, monkey!” So I’d have to start dancing.

  There was a slightly weird dynamic going on among us as a team. I knew going into the trip that none of the other guys was as good a rock climber as I was. But they were all badass mountaineers, and I figured I’d be learning a bunch of stuff from them. Halfway through, though, I just felt, This isn’t the way we should be doing this climb.

  The big problem on Kinabalu is rain. We’d been climbing low on the wall for about a week before we committed to the full thrust, leaving our base camp behind. On only the second day on that push, a huge squall came over the mountain from the north. Mark and I settled in to the portaledge, while Conrad tried to push the route above. In his Men’s Journal article, Mark played this up as do-or-die drama—which is what the magazines want:

  Massive waterfalls were now pouring off the cliff, and the gully below started to roar as it transformed into a raging rapid. Even if we had wanted to bail, there was no way out but up. Above, I could hear muffled yelling, followed by an alarming amount of rockfall. Anker was somewhere above us doing battle in the chaos.

  The truth of the matter, though, was that the Kinabalu climb just wasn’t that rad. I felt that we could always have rapped off the route if we had to, and by 2009, Low’s Gully didn’t figure anymore as the hellish abyss that had trapped the British army guys fifteen years earlier. Still, we spent twenty-four hours on the portaledge getting soaked. Since Jimmy Chin and Mark took up all the space on the portaledge, as the rookie I got the shitty seat. I had to sling a hammock beneath the portaledge, suspended from its corners, which made for a very awkward body position. The water dripped through the floor of the portaledge onto my hammock and sleeping bag. I sort of sat in a puddle for a whole day and night. It was all right as long as I didn’t move and stir up the water. I was reading The Brothers Karamazov, which fit the dreary mood. I tore the paperback in half and gave Mark the first part to read. Pretty grim, but I guess it builds character.

  The weather cleared of
f enough so that we could finish the climb the next day. The last pitches were actually easy. After a brief celebration on the summit, we rapped the whole wall with our bags and hauled them back out the other side of Low’s Gully. It was an ordeal. I think the reason we did this is because we didn’t want to haul everything to the top of the wall. We just left it all in the middle and then lowered it to the ground in one huge lower.

  In the Men’s Journal article, Mark wrote some really nice things about me, even if they were still tinged with paternalism.

  Sharing a rope with Honnold had made me think a lot about what I was like when I was his age, and I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to myself. I was never close to as talented as he is, nor was I as bold, but I did have a youthful hunger and my tolerance for risk was more than a little excessive. Honnold reminded me that climbing without risk isn’t really climbing at all.

  And he ended the piece with this summit vignette:

  Looking over at Honnold, I couldn’t help but wonder if he understood the arc that we all seem to follow as climbers any better after hanging out with a bunch of old-timers, if he understood that he would have to ultimately accept the fact that if you’re going to climb as hard as he does now his whole life, and live to tell the tales, he was going to need a little bit of luck. These days I’ve got kids waiting for me to return from expeditions like these, and there’s a line I just don’t cross anymore. The problem is figuring out where that line is at any given moment. Honnold is one of the brightest and most talented climbers I’ve ever met. If nothing else, I think he knows that climbing is the kind of sport that will sort you out, one way or another.