Matt Hart

“The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life” by Mark Synnott

Paperback, 416 pages
Published in 20 by Dutton
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982128518 | ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982128517
Date Finished: Aug 15, 2020
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon

Great book, go read it.

My Notes:

Prologue:

He couldn’t help thinking about the fact that it had spit him off before. It’s only 5.11, which, while still expert-level climbing, is three grades below Alex’s maximum of 5.14. But unlike the overhanging limestone routes in Morocco that Alex could bully into submission by cracking his knuckles on the positively shaped holds, the crux here required trusting everything to a type of foothold called a smear.

He had obsessed about free soloing El Capitan for nine years, nearly a third of his life. By now he had analyzed every possible angle. “Some things are so cool, they’re worth risking it all,” he had told me in Morocco. This was the last big free solo on his list, and if he could pull it off, perhaps he might start winding things down, maybe get married, start a family, spend more time working on his foundation.

Ch 1: The Hon Is Going to Solo El Cap

As the reality of what I had just been told sank in, the core of my body quivered. El Capitan. Without a rope. Whoa. 

    I had climbed Freerider. Or, I should say, I had attempted it. I got to the top after several days of brutal effort, but not before the climb spit me off numerous times along the way, ropes and protective equipment arresting each fall. On a few of the hardest parts, the cruxes, I simply couldn’t hang on to the fingertip James and the flaring cracks where my hands wouldn’t stick. So I had been forced to use “aid,” meaning I hung on mechanical devices I slotted into cracks in the rock. I cheated. Freerider is so named because it’s a “free” climb, which means it can be ascended with nothing more than your hands and feet, the rope acting only as a safety net, in case you slip off.

off. The very best climbers can scale Freerider without aid, but I couldn’t think of a single person who hadn’t fallen at least once on the way up. 

I often played his foil, especially when it came to the subject of risk. It’s not that I’m against the idea of free soloing—I do it myself on occasion. I just wanted Alex to think about how close he was treading to the edge.

What it all came down to was that for Alex Honnold, a life lived less than fully is a fate worse than dying young.

“Well, he’s going to do it with or without you, and if he wants it filmed, you’re the people to do it.” 
“So? Should I do it?” asked Jimmy. 
“I’ll watch it,” said Krakauer.

Ch 2: Crazy Kids of America

Years later, when my dad would ask me what I planned to do with myself after graduating from college with a philosophy degree, I’d tell him in all seriousness, “I’ve decided not to have a career.”

The club included some noteworthy characters, including Tyler Hamilton, a compact ball of energy who always had a sly sparkle in his eyes, and who’d go on to become Lance Armstrong’s right-hand man in the Tour de France, and Rob Frost, who was small for his age but scrappier than a junkyard dog, and who is now a high-angle cameraman and filmmaker. Even Chris Davenport, today a legendary extreme skier, joined us occasionally for Crazy Kid missions, his catlike athletic ability and rambunctious daredevil spirit making him a perfect fit for our crew.

Ch 3: A bison of the stonmasterus’ lightning

Indeed, it was the first time in nineteen years since Alex’s birth that Dierdre, a professor who taught French, Spanish, and English as a second language, had spoken to her son in English. She wanted to raise her children in a bilingual household. Alex mostly replied in English, his way of letting his mom know he thought the whole thing was kind of stupid.

He was a top student in the school’s International Baccalaureate program, despite having no real passion for academics. He did the bare minimum to get by.

At UC Berkley, Alex was surrounded by more shiny people than he’d ever seen in his life, but he was so shy and socially timid that he sometimes went months without communicating face-to-face with anyone.

His classmates, who had little to no awareness of his existence, had no way of knowing that the quiet genius who was flying under everyone’s radar was slowly transforming himself into a climber the likes of which the world had never seen.

… Alex’s father, who had served as his one-man support crew over the past eight years, driving him to competitions all over California and holding his rope for countless hours, died from a heart attack while hustling to catch a flight at the Phoenix airport. He was fifty-five years old. 

    At the world championships in September, Alex couldn’t muster any motivation or enthusiasm for the event. He placed thirty-ninth. 
    The thought of another year at UC Berkley filled Alex with dread, so he asked his mom if he could drop out.  

He describes himself during this time as a “gangly-looking” dude with a bad complexion who was “just not cool at all, with, like, no real prospects, no real future.” Smalley visited Alex that winter and grew concerned about the way his friend was handling the death of his father, which was to act as though nothing had happened.

In the aftermath of his father’s passing, Alex became, in his words, “a born-again atheist.”

Climbing was the one thing in his life that lit his fire. Nothing else inspired him, no other interests, not friends or girls, certainly not school.

The five before the decimal point of a rock-climbing technical difficulty grade simply denotes that it is fifth-class, that is, roped climbing.

Climbing grades are inherently subjective. A tall person might be able too reach past a featureless section to a beefy handhold, where a shorter climber might have to make creative use of faint ripples in the rock while stabbing desperately for the same hold.

By the 1970s, the pioneers of Yosemite’s golden age had come and gone. Royal Robbins and Warren Harding had left their marks with first ascents of the valley’s largest, most spectacular cliffs, Half Dome and El Capitan, in 1954 and 1958, respectively.

For Bachar and the Stonemasters, the new game was to climb free, that is, without pulling on gear, resting on the rope, or standing in stirrups. Ropes and hardware were still used for protecting the climber against a fall, as a safety net, but never for upward progress. Every move had to be accomplished with the hands and feet alone.

Warren Harding, who first climbed El Capitan over a span of two seasons, during which time he left his ropes “fixed” on the wall, had more in common with a skyscraper construction worker riveting I beams together than with this new breed of gymnast, who saw climbing as pure athleticism.

Making a difficult climb look like no big deal, smooth and cool, just like jazz, became Bachar’s trademark. 

    To Bachar and the other Stonemasters, smooth and cool meant moving fast, carrying a small rack of protection, and placing pieces far apart—“running it out,” as climbers like to say. 

Preuss authored more than three hundred first ascents—half of which he did solo. He disdained the use of equipment like pitons and even ropes because to his mind, they tainted the essence of alpinism, which was to climb mountains without the use of mechanical aids.

There is no record of anyone besting Preuss’ free-solo feats until 1973, when a nineteen-year-old named Henry Barber, from Wellesley, Massachusetts—the same Boston suburb where I grew up—rolled into Yosemite after driving across the country in a Volkswagen bus.

Before calling it a season, Barber walked up to what was at the time the longest free climb in the valley, a menacing gash splitting the 1,500-foot north faces of Sentinel Rock. Two and a  half hours later, he stood atop the tombstone-shaped wall, having ascended the Steck-Salathe route alone and without any equipment.

It was left to another social maladroit, John Bachar, to drive ropeless climbing in Yosemite to the next level, which he promptly did the next year, in 1975, when he free soloed a multi pitch 5.11 called New Dimensions.

“He was socially awkward,” says Long, “a borderline sociopath. He was his own guy and didn’t get along with a lot of people.”

When they had the climb fully memorized and rehearsed, an attempt would be made to climb the whole thing in one go without falling. If successful, the climber would say he “reappointed” the route.

This new style was called sport climbing, and it was much safer than traditional combing. Sport climbing soon became the world standard, and by utilizing these modern tactics, grades broke the 5.14 mark for the first time in the late 1980s. But Bachar would have none of it. He called its practitioners “hang dogs” and famously stated around this time that climbing without risk isn’t really climbing.

What was Alex [Lowe] like back in those days, before he became famous? I asked her. “He was an asshole,” she says. “All he cared about was climbing. He was obsessed. You don’t do the stuff he does and come down and be normal. It’s a package deal.”

The troubles began when a carpenter named James W. Marshall found flakes of gold in the American River in 1848. This discovery set off the California gold rush, which drove tens of thousands of fortune hunters into the Sierra Nevada. Conflicts between the prospectors and the indigenous tribes who lived in these mountains soon followed.

One of the soldiers in the battalion was a physician named Lafayette Bunnell. Four decades later, in 1892, he would publish a classic book about the campaign called Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851.

In his book, Bunnell recounts his reply: “If my hair is now required, I can depart in peace, for I have here seen the power and the glory of a Supreme being: the majesty of His handy-work is in that 'Testimony of the Rocks.’

Apparently, the park services has decided that people would rather not know that the US government-sanctioned Mariposa Battalion torched the Ahwahneechee’s villages, looted their food stores, and killed Tenaya’s favorite son in cold blood—then brought the great chief to see the body.

He distinguished himself in 2000 with the second free solo of Astroman. A few days later he reclimbed some of the key pitches for a camera crew. The full-page photos splashed across the climbing magazines made Potter a household name among climbers the world over.

As an accomplished BASE jumper, Potter took to sometimes free soloing with a parachute, a sport entirely of his own invention, which he called freeBASE.

As a speed climber, free soloist, highliner, and wingsuit BASE jumper, Potter was without peer. He rampaged around the world practicing what he called his "arts," perhaps in acknowledgment of the Wizard moniker.

The forty-six-tall arch is the centerpiece of Arches National Park in Moab, and appears on the state's license plate. Potter had decided that he would free solo the formation as way to "commune with nature."

It was well-known that the arch was off-limits to climbing, but Potter, having carefully parsed the exact wording of the regulation decided that it didn't strictly prohibit someone from free soloing the formation.

Thanks to Potter, the opportunity to establish new routes in Arches National Park was now severely limited. In one morning of climbing, he had done more damage to the climbing community's relationship with land managers than anyone in the history of the sport.

Neither of them knew Alex, but they certainly knew of him. For the past two weeks, the Monkeys had been all atwitter, as if a cobra had just slid into their nest, because some kid had come out of nowhere and free soloed two of the burliest routes in Yosemite—Astroman and Rostrum—back-to-back in the same day. Only one other person had ever done this—Peter Croft, twenty years before, in 1987.

Unlike so many other sports, climbing has no arena; there are no grandstands at the base of the cliff. Nor is there a scoreboard or official results. If a climber wants his exploits known, he or his partner often just has to tell someone. Climbers call it "spraying," and for really good climbers, the ones with sponsorships and endorsement contracts, it's generally seen as a necessary evil.

But no one denied that Peter Croft was a genuinely humble hard-man. While other elite climbers of his era parlayed their exploits into a comfortable living, what little Croft had in the way of sponsorships or endorsements he supplemented by working unglamorously as a guide.

By Bachar's account, Croft's hands were covered in chalk and he had the unmistakable look in his eyes that said he'd just been to another planet and back.

The Monkeys had seen the kid around; a few had spoken to him and climbed with him. But he was standoffish, which rubbed some people the wrong way. Rumor also had it that he drove his white Ford E-150 which someone had nicknamed the "Pedophile Van," down Highway 140 every night to a pullout just outside the park boundary. The Monkeys took pride in their outlaw status, sleeping illegally under boulders, on ledges at the base of El Capitan, or in their vehicles in unoccupied campsites. But this Honnold kid actually followed the rules. Who does that? wondered Cedar.

Cedar, who soon became a close friend of Alex's, says that Alex thought the whole Stone Monkeys scene—the pot smoking, the drinking, the ape calls, the ridiculous singing and strumming around the campfire at night—was "stupid."

The new kid had some similarities to Peter Croft. When Croft made his first road trip to the valley from his home in British Columbia in the late 1970s, "he was like Huckleberry Finn or the Jungle Boy," said Jo Whitford, Croft's first wife, in an article in Climbing magazine. pg 71

The day before, he called his friend Chris Weidner, who had become his confidant, and told him what he was planning to do.

    "What?" said Weidner. "Are you fucking crazy? You need to rehearse the hell out of it before you try to solo it."
    "I've thought about that," said Alex. "And I've decided I want to keep it exciting."

On a visceral level, it seemed to violate some unspecified law of nature. Moretimer felt sick.

In 1993 Terkelsen had co-founded the Eco-Challenge with Survivor mastermind Mark Burnett. The two had spent years developing reality-TV formulas that centered on relationship dynamics.

Doug and Susie Tompkins had launched the North Face brand thirty years before on October 26, 1966. (The Grateful Dead played at their grand opening, and the Hell’s Angels worked the door. Rumor has it that Electric Kool-Aid was served.)

It was my first time meeting these legends, and I tried to play it cool even though I was feeling high from sitting at the same table and sharing a beer with two of my climbing heroes.

Everest may be the tallest mountain in the world, the crown jewel of the Himalaya, but any serious mountaineer will tell you that it's not the world's ultimate peak. This distinction has always belonged to the world's second highest, K2, aka the "Savage Mountain."

As of 2016, only three hundred or so people have stood on K2's summit, while around 5,000 have climbed Everest.

The summit of K2 is the most elusive, dangerous, and hard-to-reach place on earth. For every four people who stand on top, one dies trying to get there.

We wanted it all—to climb big first ascents and be stand-up family men in the gaps between expeditions.

   "I've been thinking about a new career, one that doesn't require so much travel," he continued. "It's one of the reasons I'm so psyched about this project. I think this could really be a good opportunity for all of us. I love writing, and I see this website as a way to showcase what I'm capable of outside of climbing."

One thing was certain: Expedition reporting had come a long way since George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were dispatching letters with carriers on the 1924 British Mount Everest expedition. In 1953, news of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's first ascent of Everest was sent via a runner from base camp, who took four days to reach the nearest telephone. Thirty years later, high-altitude filmmaker David Breashears broadcast the first live TV images from Everest's summit.

Before Messner arrived on the scene, Himalayan peaks were usually climbed in "expedition style." The idea is simple: You lay the entire mountain, from top to bottom, with ropes. It's a laborious way to climb a mountain, but it's relatively safe and the nylon umbilical cord offers a fast and efficient way to get off the mountain if someone gets hurt or sick or bad weather comes in.

if you sign on with a commercial expedition, even to smaller mountains like Nepal's Ama Dablam, you pay for the privilege of using the umbilical cord, which is typically set by local high-altitude Sherpas or porters.

On Great Trango, we knew we were violating some of those codes—using too many fixed ropes and bolts, "spraying" about ourselves on the Internet, and posing for the cameras—but the compromises seemed unavoidable if we were going to document the climb in the way we had promised our sponsors.

.. a "single-push style," meaning they started at the base and climbed more or less nonstop for sixty hours until they reached the top.

Afterward, Twight wrote an article for Climbing magazine, entitled "Justification for an Elitist Atitude." In it he wrote:

I'm an elitist prick, and I think posers have polluted mountaineering. They replace skills and courage with cash and equipment. They make the summit, not the style, the yardstick of success. Only marginal minds or true individuals used to discover mountaineering. Lack of social support forced them to be autonomous, to turn climbing into a lifestyle isolated from society. We had community back then. Now I'm embarrassed to call myself a climber, because close on the heels of the admission some dilettante will ask whether I've read Into Thin Air or done Everest.

The night before the trio set off on their climb, House read to them from Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel.

Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me the tendency towards positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened. 

"I don't drink," he said. "Never have. I don't smoke or use caffeine either." So that's why the Brits had nicknamed him "the Monk," I thought to myself. But then he qualified his teetotaling with an awkward admission: "Actually, I do have one vice—fornication."

Another unwelcome discovery was a robust population of giant jungle rats mounting a campaign to capture our food stash.

"He was a really, really supportive partner, even though, compared to him, I sucked." But over the next few years, as Alex's fame grew and he became a public figure, Weidner says he also became more self-centered. "I don't know whether he was getting a little older and more comfortable in his skin, or what," recounts Weidner, "but he definitely changed a bit, and I wasn't too psyched about it."

"It was insane how obsessive and nitpicky he was: 'Why do you need to drink that cup of coffee, why are you drinking that wine, why do you put so much salt on your dinner?'" It got so bad that Weidner stopped using salt because it was easier than battling Alex about it.

Being near Alex when he was luminescent felt really good.

I had failed to see or had been unwilling to admit—the sport to which I had dedicated my life was a young man's game. Sure, there were a few outliers like Conrad Anker, "old, bold climbers" who were still pushing the cutting edge into their fifties, but climbing with him had only reinforced the idea that I'm not one of those guys.

After my dad had told me that I was "worm food" when I died, I had been desperate to find something that could give meaning to my existence. But the harder I quested, the more elusive the answers became, and over time, I slowly became nihilistic.

And so I asked myself a question that had never occurred to me before: What would life be like without climbing? It was a question I wasn't prepared to answer, but now that I was no longer gazing upward, wondering, like Alex, where climbing might lead me, I saw, for the first time, the cracks that had formed in the foundation upon which I had built my life.

"But he's not really a climber," replied Alex. In his narrow view of the sport, which he was now revealing for the first time, if you couldn't climb 5.14, what you did in the mountains was some weird type of adventure hiking.

"Who the fuck does this guy think he is?" said Jimmy after Alex had left camp. "I was so incredibly respectful of my elders when I first came on the scene." ... "Well, I can tell you one thing," said Jimmy as he packed away his camera. "I'm never working with him again."

For better or worse, social media was now the primary way climbers interacted with one another and it was how we broadcasted our accomplishments. And it was a rare soul who avoided getting sucked into the vortex.

John Branch of the New York Times got the first interview with Tommy and Kevin when they topped out. Jorgeson gave him the best quote when he said, "I think everyone has their own secret Dawn Wall to complete one day, and maybe they can put this project in their own context." He was echoing the same sentiment expressed by Maurice Herzog in the mountaineering classic Anapurna: "There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men." Honnold stood nearby.

The best climbers, the ones who truly stand out from the rest, the characters who have gone down in history, they've all had at least one superlative climb that defined them, a route that redrew the boundaries of human potential, setting a benchmark for the next generation.

What made Reardon's climb downright mind-boggling was that he claimed to  have done it on-sight. Climbing records and the sport's accepted  history have always relied on an honor system. When climbers claim to  have done routes, they are taken at their word. But there have been a  few notorious characters who famously dishonored the tradition. First  there was Frederick Cook, who claimed the first ascent of Denali in  1906. The photo he supplied of his teammates planting a flag on the  summit turned out to have been taken on an insignificant subpeak located  many miles form the mountain.

He brought his legs up into a crouch and "space dumped" into the void. After taking what might have been the most daring poop in history, he wiped, pulled up his pants, and finished the route in good style.

Dean made it through the notch, but he didn't have enough height to clear the lower-angled terrain in a gully on the backside. He ran headfirst into a rock wall going a hundred miles an hour.

The public response to Dean's death, according to Alex, ranged from "deep respect for a man who greatly influenced his sport to unchecked contempt for someone who threw his life away, squandering what's most precious in search of the next cheap thrill."

.. but 2015 was turning out to be a year of low motivation. "I used to do cool shit," he told Weidner. "Now I'm just hanging out in my van feeling tired and unmotivated." It was possible that wearing the mantle of being the world's greatest free soloist was beginning to weigh on him.

Glancing over at Alex, who was signing posters for his adoring fans, the man leaned in and whispered, "You know Alex's amygdala isn't firing, right?"

The amygdala was located near the bottom of Alex's brain, not far from the roof of his mouth, and it had not yet come into focus. Like most brain structures, there are two amygdalae, a right and a left.

He described Alex to me as someone who is "constantly suppressing some kind of internal intensity."

In the final analysis, what may be most remarkable about Alex is that he is both a "super sensation seeker" and, at the same time, an individual with an unusually high degree of emotional regulation. These two traits are often antithetical, but the fact that they coexist within Alex may have a lot to do with his ability to tread so close to the edge.

As of 2019, 191 people had stood on Annapurna's summit, and 61 had died trying to get there or on their way back down—a fatality rate of roughly 32 percent, the highest of any 8,000-meter peak.

And so I let go of the ambition, which had burned since I first found climbing as a youth, to compete with the best alpinists and adventurers of my generation.

As a climber, Alex is naturally gifted, probably more so than 99 percent of the population, but his maximum grade of 5.14c is still a full tier below the highest echelon of climbing, where the grades top out at 5.15d. The difference between sport climbing and the big-wall linkups that Alex specializes in is like the difference between sprinting and distance running.

Earlier in the year he recounted a story of getting burned off by a fourteen-year-old girl at an indoor climbing center in Denver: "I was like, wow, I can't climb that route. I wish I could climb as hard as that little girl." ... Olympics.. "People don't get it," he said. "I just can't perform at that level." 

[Lynn Hill] She returned to competitions and the next year won a World Cup in which she bested not only all the women but all the men as well. That same year she became the first woman to climb the grade of 5.14.

"You need to take it easy on the sugar," Sanni said. Alex looked at her blankly. "He's been bingeing on M&M'S," Sanni said, catching my eyes.

"I think he is driven by mastery." [Tommy Caldwell]

If you look at people like Peter Croft and the free soloists of the past, they did it under that old-school ethos. They didn't tell anybody about it, and the people in that world admired them for that, while people outside of that world didn't really care because they didn't know it was happening. I think Alex wants everybody to care." [Tommy Caldwell]

I like to think that Alex is so good that it's not that dangerous, but I know that it's Russian roulette." [Caldwell] pg 300

Tommy told Alex that his risk calculus had changed since he became a father—he'd become more conservative as a climber. Alex replied bluntly that Tommy's family "would be fine without him." pg 300-301

And then, in the middle of what may have been one of the boldest feats of athleticism ever, Alex did something that was surprising, casual, arrogant, and inspiring all at the same time. He reached down with his free hand to adjust his shirt where it had bunched up under the strap of his chalk bag.

Peter Croft once explained the feeling you get from free soloing as... a heightened type of perception.

Maybe we're all guilty of ruthlessly overanalyzing Alex's motivations—like we do our own. Perhaps Alex is simply trying to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life," as Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden.

"Do you think its douchey that I have a movie crew?" [Alex asked Croft]

I worried most about John Branch, a sports reporter for The New York Times, who won a Pulitzer in 2013 for his story about the deadly Tunnel Creek avalanche in Washington State.

Once you're one hundred feet above the ground, you might as well be a thousand—the fall will be equally fatal. There's a rule of thumb climbers use to calculate the odds of dying in a ground fall. Land badly (i.e. on your head) from ten feet above the ground, and the chance of it being fatal is 10 percent. At twenty feet, 20 percent. From thirty feet up you hit the ground at thirty miles per hour.

We love to celebrate the purity of our sport—communing with nature, living life on its simplest terms—but the truth is that it's all based on a haphazard short history full of human error and compromise.

Alex looked up. One hundred and fifty feet above and to his left, Matt Irving, a new recruit to Jimmy's team, hung on a fixed rope, his camera pointed at Alex. ... just like Peter Croft had said. The camera guys, the journalists at the base of the cliff, the distraught girlfriend back in the van—it was all a bit distracting.

I remember him back then, and it seemed like he often intentionally tried to make people feel uncomfortable." [Croft]

"I erased all my social media," said Alex, gesturing toward his beat-up iPhone sitting on the van's countertop. "I don't want the distraction in these final days, and I'm a little worried about what all the scrolling on my phone might be doing to my brain. [Alex Honnold]

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," said Steve Jobs, in a commencement address at Stanford in 2005. "You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Colin Haley, one of America's leading alpinists and a partner of Alex's, once told me that he climbs because it satisfies a primal desire to have intensity in his life. He said he doesn't overthink the risks he takes as a climber because the experiences he finds in the mountains are "worth everything."

Climbing, even on some little rock in the woods, is a joyful experience, but doing it  on the side of a geological marvel like El Capitan feels like a spiritual awakening.

Over the winter, I had decided that since I wasn't going to have a partner in Yosemite, or a lot of time to climb, I should do some free soloing. I had written up a list of routes, some of which I had soloed before.

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.

Acknowledgments:

There's a saying among climbers that we are "living the dream." It's almost always said sarcastically, in acknowledgment of the fact that the climbing life is a tricky one, especially when we're not on the wall. No one understands this better than my family. Find the right balance between my passion for climbing and the responsibilities of being a husband and father has been the greatest challenge of my life. And I'll readily admit that I haven't always gotten it right. But I hope this book might one day help my children—Will, Matt, Lilla, and Tommy—appreciate why this sport is so important to me.
For more… find it at BookShop.org or Amazon