by Alex Honnold
Still, I couldn’t help but understand their point of view.
Alex cited another statement in the Clif Bar broadside: “This isn’t about drawing a line for the sport or limiting athletes from pursuing their passions. We’re drawing the line for ourselves.” Then he explained: “In essence, that’s the same way I feel when free soloing. I draw the lines for myself; sponsors don’t have any bearing on my choices or my analysis of risk.”
Alex ended the op-ed with a resounding affirmation of the risk-taking that lies at the heart of all adventure:
Everyone needs to find his or her own limits for risk, and if Clif Bar wants to back away from the cutting edge, that’s certainly a fair decision. But we will all continue climbing in the ways that we find most inspiring, with a rope, a parachute or nothing at all. Whether or not we’re sponsored, the mountains are calling, and we must go.
The overwhelming majority of commenters on Clif Bar’s action, even among nonclimbers, concluded that the company had simply blown it, in the process making fools of themselves. Many suggested a boycott. “I’m firing Clif Bar for stupidity,” wrote a typical blogger. Yet the response to Alex’s essay was more measured. He was widely praised for his restraint and magnanimity. Out of the debacle, he emerged unscathed.
• • • •
Toward the end of 2012, Alex and Peter Mortimer started tossing around the idea of filming an ascent of a building. As Mortimer later told Outside magazine, “We thought, wouldn’t that be a rad next thing to do?” Alex agreed.
Soloing a skyscraper was not an original idea. For more than a decade, the French climber Alain Robert had made a career out of free soloing tall and iconic buildings, including the Eiffel Tower, the Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago, and the National Bank of Abu Dhabi. Since most countries outlaw skyscraper ascents, Robert ran the constant threat of getting arrested in midclimb—which happened more than once. As famous as his daring feats made him in France, however, Robert remains little known in the United States.
An American, “Spiderman” Dan Goodwin, had also made a name for himself in the 1980s, soloing such skyscrapers as the Sears Tower, but by 2012, his deeds were largely forgotten.
What Mortimer proposed, in order to make the project a novel one, was to film Alex’s climb live. The extra frisson of watching an athlete in real time who might just possibly fall to his death was the kicker that got National Geographic Television on board. Next came the search for the right skyscraper. Self-evidently, the ascent would require not only the permission but the full cooperation of the authorities, so most of the buildings in the United States and Europe were out of the running. Also, according to Alex, “It was surprisingly hard to find something inspiring enough. A building that dominates the skyline and is actually worth climbing.”
Alex and Pete first checked out the world’s tallest skyscraper—Dubai’s 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa. “Just the scout is a life-list experience,” Alex told Outside. But he decided against the attempt, claiming, “The Burj was just too hardcore for me. It’s the El Capitan of buildings.”
Elaborating on his scout, he adds, “There’s this little crack formed by the corners of the building that I couldn’t get my fingers into at all. Instead, I had to pinch these opposing window frames that are maybe six feet apart and really slopey, so it made for very insecure climbing. Everything about it was just too much, the scale, the difficulty. The windows are plated glass, so it’s like looking into a mirror as you climb, which is kind of scary since you see the skyline of the city laid out way below you. I heard that Dubai has something like sixty of the hundred tallest buildings in the world. Seeing them all down below you looking like toys is kind of unnerving, plus you see your own face, all sweaty and strained, looking right back at you from a few inches away.
“It’s a hard building. Maybe someday. . . .”
From Dubai, Alex and Pete traveled to Taiwan to check out Taipei 101, at 1,667 feet then the world’s second-tallest skyscraper. (Since 2012, two taller buildings have gone up, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel in Saudi Arabia and One World Trade Center in New York City; two others, both in China, are under construction.) Taipei 101 seemed to fit the bill. But the planned live TV broadcast—kept secret by Mortimer and National Geographic—was delayed for a year by logistics and bureaucratic red tape.
Meanwhile, in June 2013, Nik Wallenda tightrope-walked across the gorge of the Little Colorado River in Arizona. The event was broadcast live on the Discovery Channel, with a ten-second delay in case something went drastically wrong. The event was a huge media success, with thirteen million spectators tuning in, setting a thirteen-year record for the channel. Alex’s skyscraper climb promised to be every bit as gripping and spectacular. Plans proceeded apace, and National Geographic Television went public with the news.
In December 2013, Outside ran a feature about the upcoming event. Grayson Shaffer’s reporting was judicious, but the title and subtitle—“Alex Honnold Isn’t Afraid of Skyscrapers” and “Climbing’s biggest name makes his bid for international stardom by risking death on live TV”—smacked of tabloid journalism. For the lead photo, Alex dressed up as a Depression-era steelworker, complete with baker-boy cap, overalls, and suspenders atop his bare upper torso, lunch-bucket at his side, as he sat atop a girder seemingly hundreds of feet above the street. The photo was an homage to the famous black-and-white picture called “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” (often attributed to Lewis Hine but actually shot by Charles C. Ebbetts), which depicted eleven nonchalant workers sitting side by side eating lunch on a girder during the construction of Rockefeller Center in 1932. Depending upon one’s taste, the Honnold parody came across as either clever or cheesy. Alex himself found the photo cheesy, but he adds, “I thought it was fun getting all dressed up and pretending to be an actor.”
Shaffer asked Alex how much he was being offered by National Geographic to perform the stunt. He reported, “Honnold won’t discuss specific figures, but he acknowledges that he’ll be paid ‘vastly more than anything I’ve encountered in the climbing world’ for the project.”
Response to the Outside article was mixed. Along with the usual cheers from the sidelines (“Big time goal, Alex. Bravo”), there were murmurs of disappointment. For perhaps the first time in his career, the pithy phrase selling out was associated with Alex Honnold. Wrote one Outside commenter, “What sucks is the greatest climber who ever lived now has to resort to climbing a building for cash? . . . It might be fun to watch on the news, but to climbers I feel like it’s treason.” And another: “It’s fine if you want to climb a building for money, but don’t try to convince me that you are doing [it] because you are inspired.”
The same New York Times editor who would later assign to Alex the op-ed piece about the Clif Bar imbroglio asked this writer [David Roberts] in early 2014 to structure an op-ed piece around the very question of whether the skyscraper project was evidence that Honnold was selling out. I declined. When I e-mailed Alex to tell him about this development, he responded, “I wouldn’t actually mind if you wrote something like that. I think it’s fair enough to take criticism for those kinds of projects. I think you would be wrong, but it never hurts to have a spirited argument.” In the same way that he would later rise above the Clif Bar controversy, Alex welcomed a debate about whether Taipei 101 was corrupting his values as well as those of the climbing community.
In the end, the whole controversy became moot. National Geographic started to freak out about the cost of the production, and when the institution undertook a periodic cleansing of its house in the spring of 2014, new personnel less enthusiastic about the skyscraper climb pulled the plug on the society’s support. Even before that, though, Alex had balked at some of the conditions. “They wanted me to wear a parachute, which is ridiculous,” he says. “I tried to tell them that a chute wouldn’t do a bit of good if I fell off, because I’d hit one of the projecting balconies long before I could deploy it, but they just didn’t get it. They were all hung up on risk. They
didn’t want me dying on live TV.”
But Peter Mortimer isn’t giving up. He envisions filming Alex’s solo of Taipei 101 sometime in 2015 or 2016—not for live TV but for a film like Alone on the Wall. And Alex is still enthusiastic about the challenge. “I don’t think the climb would be super-hard,” he says. “Climbing on a building is a lot like training in a climbing gym—repetitive moves that emphasize pure fitness more than anything else. But it’s still cool to get on top of such a big building. And in some ways the view is even better than in the mountains, just because the urban environment has so much going on.”
• • • •
In the first two months of 2014, Alex had accomplished two of the greatest challenges of his climbing life—the free solo of El Sendero Luminoso and the Fitz Traverse. He didn’t have anything else quite that big on his agenda for the rest of the year, but he wanted to climb as much as he could. The hunger was still there.
In March, Alex and Cedar Wright met up near Grand Junction, Colorado, to attempt what they called Sufferfest 2. Sufferfest 1 had been shot in June 2013 in California, as Alex and Cedar climbed all fifteen of the state’s 14,000-foot peaks—from Mount Shasta in the north to Mount Langley in the south—biking between peaks rather than using any motorized transport. Adding to the challenge was the fact that both men were basically novice cyclists. In the hands of a more solemn filmmaker, the ordeal could have been staged as a heroic marathon, but Cedar’s vision was to portray the trip as an exercise in absurdity, with “suffering” as a comic end in its own right.
The pair pulled off the challenge, biking some 700 miles, hiking about 100, and climbing a total of 100,000 vertical feet in twenty-two days. All the climbing on the 14-ers—most of it by nonstandard routes—was free soloing, up to grades as stiff as 5.10c. Alex and Cedar pretty much wrecked their bodies in the process. On White Mountain, the guys had to bike ninety miles round trip and gain and lose 11,000 vertical feet. As Cedar told Climbing magazine, “It was brutal. Even Honnold had a moment of wanting to give up.”
The film played the two warriors as innocents abroad, trying to figure out how to make their bikes work but cavorting gleefully on sometimes chossy arêtes and ridges in the Sierra Nevada. The tone was manic and playful. Yet there was no ignoring the severity of the punishing ordeal. As Cedar reflected for Climbing,
I consider this to be one of the greatest achievements of my climbing life, and it was awesome to share it with Honnold, who is a great friend and motivating force in my life. Mostly we toiled and suffered, but occasionally I would have a moment of genuine bliss, taking in the beauty of the incredible Sierra Nevada. It was a full-on sufferfest, but I think in a couple of weeks I’ll look back on this as fun.
For Sufferfest 2, Cedar would craft a film around another zany, self-imposed endurance challenge: The idea was to try to climb forty-five desert towers in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona in three weeks, bicycling between objectives as he and Alex covered more than 800 miles on paved highways, marginal back roads, and single-track trails.
To make the film, Cedar hired a small crew of riggers and cameramen, including Hayden Kennedy, one of the best alpinists and rock climbers of Alex’s generation. But none of the filming would be rehearsed or reenacted—the crew had the task of capturing the action as it unfolded.
Nine months after their romp in the Sierra Nevada, Cedar and Alex concocted a similar orgy of self-mutilation via nonstop biking and climbing among the desert towers of the Southwest. But this time, the journey—and the film—would culminate with a project born of Alex’s philanthropic concerns, as embodied by the Honnold Foundation. At the end of their sufferfest, Cedar and Alex would join with a company called Eagle Energy to install solar-energy panels in a number of hogans and houses on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, bringing power and light to traditional Native Americans, some of whom had lived their whole lives without electricity or running water.
The tone of the film, as of the adventure, is stamped on its title screen: “Thirty Four Pieces of Choss & Five Horrendous Life Experiences.” The online teaser summarizing the video goes on in the same vein: “Any terrible idea is worth repeating . . . especially if like Alex Honnold and Cedar Wright you have a terrible memory and seem to remember your last ‘sufferfest’ as not too bad.” And it salutes the “goofy duo” as they embrace “60mph winds, loose rock and even looser ideas of what is safe.” Alex appears on screen, predicting, “I think it’s going to be fun. . . . No, it’s definitely going to be bad.” Followed by Cedar’s take: “Oh my God, we learned nothing from the last trip?”
Cedar and Alex start Sufferfest 2 with an ascent of what they hail as the first desert tower ever climbed—Independence Monument, a 450-foot sandstone spire near Grand Junction, Colorado. Therein lies a bizarre story. Way back in 1911, a madman named John Otto carved and pounded holds in the soft rock as he tamed the tower by creating an artificial staircase up it. On July 4, he flew the Stars and Stripes from the summit. The tradition persists more than a century later, as climbers tackle the spire on Independence Day and fly their own American flags from the top. Otto went on to become the first caretaker of Colorado National Monument, earning the princely salary of one dollar per month well into the 1920s.
Alex and Cedar scamper up “Otto’s Route” on Independence Monument, rating it solid 5.9, as they marvel over the holes and steps carved in the rock so long ago. As Alex later reported, “I thought it was an amazing route—historic and fun.”
Riding their hybrids (crosses between road and mountain bikes) into Utah, they get lost on the way to the Fisher Towers. Much of the comedy of the film spins off the still somewhat rudimentary skills of the “goofy duo” as cyclists.
The Fisher Towers are the epitome of choss. Alex and Cedar set their sights on the Titan, the tallest of the several pinnacles—in fact, it’s the tallest freestanding tower in the United States. The route they choose, called Finger of Fate, was put up more than half a century ago by the legendary Layton Kor, who rated it 5.8 A2. It’s one of the great classic lines in the Southwest, but it’s seldom climbed free, because it goes only at 5.12d.
On film, gazing up at the Titan, Alex intones, “Choss is like the inclusive term for all things bad about rock climbing.” Cedar chimes in: “It’s like crazy melted wax. Petrified candles.” Alex: “It’s really beautiful to look at, but really frightening to climb.” On the route, as they come across antiquated bolts the likes of which they’ve never seen before, they chalk it up to a “history lesson.”
And then the wind—the predictable bane of hiking and climbing in the Southwest in the spring—starts lashing the spire. The partners have to scream to communicate. The rope trailing behind them sails out horizontally across the face. On the summit, Alex stares into the camera and pronounces, “It’s kind of apocalyptic. The world could be ending around us. And we are”—he searches for the word—“shell-shocked.”
The canny skill of Cedar’s filmmaking comes to the fore in scenes such as these. What could easily be played as epic melodrama comes across—suffering and all—as antic fun. Everything is part of the game. In their scariest and tiredest moments, the guys still keep tongues firmly in cheeks.
Looking back on the journey half a year later, however, Alex remembers a more serious mood that haunted the road trip as he and Cedar pedaled onward through the night. Three days into Sufferfest 2, they got the news about Sean “Stanley” Leary’s death while BASE jumping in Zion. Stanley had been Alex’s frequent partner and good friend, but he had been even closer to Cedar—had in fact been the mentor who taught Cedar how to climb.
As Alex explains, “We found out about his death after we rapped off the Finger of Fate. The film crew had hung around to tell us the news, so as soon as we got down off the Titan and were about to pull our rappel ropes, Hayden Kennedy came up and told us what had happened in Zion. Cedar was super-choked. He threw some things around and cursed a lot. I was a lot more subdued, but I was pretty choked myself.
/> “We all hiked out together and talked a lot about life and loss. We decided that we would carry on to the next destination and keep on going with the Sufferfest, rather than bail to Zion to participate in the grieving and the body recovery. So we ate some dinner in camp, talking more about all these things, then Cedar and I got on our bikes and rode the fifteen miles west to Castleton Tower. It was cold and dark and it was just the two of us riding under the stars. Dark and stark in the desert. We’d spent all day getting worked with the cold wind and scary climbing, so we were feeling fragile anyway. So it felt like a really powerful thing to be questing through the night together, ruminating on what Stanley should have done differently and what it all meant.
“The desert is sort of a reflective place anyway—that’s why Jesus went there to do his heavy thinking. The loneliness, the darkness, the bleakness. It’s a poignant place to think about mortality and the meaning of life. Not that we came up with anything profound, other than the fact that Stanley would have kept climbing, and so would we. And that we wished he hadn’t been a BASE jumper.”
• • • •
Cedar and Alex climb Castleton Tower and then push onward to Monument Basin, where they get sandbagged on a weird leaning tower called the Shark’s Fin. A friend named Rob Pizem had recommended the route. As Cedar complains in the film, “What he said was, ‘You should do it, it’s a super-fun, easy route.’ What he should have said was, ‘It’s a lot of hard, overhanging climbing, and you could die.’” Alex: “Next time I see him, I’m going to punch him in the nose.” Alex and Cedar were able to climb most of the spires in around one hour each. The Shark’s Fin took about six.
For days on end, the wind never lets up. Some of the best footage captures the guys biking through dust storms, or collapsed on the ground, trying to rub the sand out of their eyes. “Who needs Patagonia,” asks Cedar rhetorically, “when you can come to the desert in the spring?” By now the adventure has become an homage to extreme fatigue, as Alex and Cedar beg each other for a rest day. Forty-five towers in three weeks, of course, is an arbitrary goal, but so was the Triple Crown in under twenty-four hours. So the pair stick with the program.