Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (11 page)

“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.”

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.

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:

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 off 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.

And he ended the piece with this summit vignette:

After the expedition was over, for all my impatience with the old-school style the other guys seemed to think the route required, I realized that I owed a lot to Mark. He was probably right about my “Yosemite bubble.” In Borneo, I realized that climbing in remote ranges did entail all kinds of techniques I hadn’t had to learn on Half Dome or El Cap.

Mark had truly broadened my climbing experience. His whole thing—exploring, traveling the world, having adventures in exotic places—was new to me, and exciting.

Because, when all was said and done, we’d forged a good friendship. Mark invited me on his next media- and sponsor-supported junket, a truly exploratory climbing trip to an untouched desert landscape full of weird pinnacles and arches in northeastern Chad, in Africa. The trip was planned for November 2010. Without a moment’s hesitation, I signed on.

•
•
•
•

Mark had discovered the Ennedi Desert by staring hard at satellite photos. On a previous expedition to Cameroon, he started wondering about the climbing possibilities in Chad, which borders Cameroon on the northeast. Civil war in the Sudan had provoked a refugee crisis in Chad, making it an inhospitable country for Westerners to visit, but Mark loves that sort of challenge. He knew that expeditions had been active in the Tibesti Mountains, near
the northern border of Chad, but the much more remote Ennedi seemed untouched by climbers. And the satellite photos made it clear that the rock formations there were spectacular.

For his team, Mark put together two threesomes. What he called his “media team,” whose main mission was to film and photograph (even though all three were good climbers), consisted of Jimmy Chin, Renan Ozturk, and Tim Kemple. The “climbing team” was Mark, James Pearson, and myself. James is a Brit who’d made quite a splash on the gritstone crags of his native country, then had taken his act abroad. He was about the same age as me. I’d climbed with James for a day or two in the U.K., but I didn’t really know him. I sensed, though, that his outlook on climbing matched mine a lot better than the more old-school mountaineers I’d gone to Borneo with. By 2010, like me, he was sponsored by The North Face.

Sparsely inhabited today, the Ennedi had once been a thriving homeland to seminomadic pastoralists who herded everything from goats and cattle to camels. The vivid rock art of the region—pictographs painted in red, white, brown, and black—was first discovered in the 1930s. The human figures abound in archers leaping and dancing as they carry their bows. By now, archaeologists have been able to use the rock art to date and define a series of cultures ranging back all the way to 5000 BC.

We arrived in N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, in mid-November. One thing Mark is really good at is arranging logistics in developing countries. For our excursion, he’d recruited an Italian expat named Piero Rava, who at the age of sixty-six ran a trekking company taking foreigners on ambitious photo tours of places like the Ennedi. Piero was a veteran mountaineer himself, having participated in a bold Italian expedition to Cerro Torre in Patagonia in 1970. An amazing spire of granite and ice, Cerro Torre had once earned the reputation as “the world’s most difficult mountain.” Another Italian, Cesare Maestri, claimed to have
reached the summit in 1959, only to have his partner, the Austrian Toni Egger, die on the descent when he was avalanched off the wall. Other climbers doubted the ascent, and it is now generally regarded as a complete hoax, with Maestri and Egger getting nowhere near the top.

The Italian team in 1970 got to within 200 meters of the summit. Had they succeeded, they would have claimed the true first ascent, which was finally pulled off four years later by a team led by Casimiro Ferrari, who had been Piero’s teammate in 1970. It was cool to have a Cerro Torre veteran leading our expedition, and even cooler to know that Piero had fifteen years’ experience in taking trekkers to the Ennedi. He had checked out lines on the arches and pinnacles, but he hadn’t climbed anything, and he assured us that no other climbers had touched the rock there.

Piero spoke almost no English but good French. So I ended up translating for the crew in the jeep. The whole process was kind of fun.

Borneo had been my first taste of a true Third World adventure, but Chad was far more intense. And the impact on me of those three weeks in Africa would be life-changing, in ways I never could have foreseen.

We set off from N’Djamena in a Land Rover and a pair of Toyota Land Cruisers. The Ennedi was 625 miles away as the crow flies, but a lot farther as we ended up traveling. In an essay about the trip, Mark later captured the surreal flavor of our drive: