Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (15 page)

I think a big key to Tommy’s success is his incredible work ethic. He’ll hike four hours to a route, then spend eight hours working it in the rain. Or he’ll haul huge loads to the top of El Cap, then rap down just to check out a potential project. By the fall of 2014,
Tommy had been trying for seven straight years to complete the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall on El Cap, which he knew would be the hardest big wall free climb in the world. I could only imagine the tenacity and drive it would take to work on a single route nearly every season for most of a decade. I don’t think I’d have the patience for such a long-term challenge.

Tommy’s also had some experiences you wouldn’t wish on anybody. In 2000, at the age of twenty-three, with his girlfriend (and later wife), Beth Rodden, as well as two other climbing buddies, Tommy was forced off a big wall in Kyrgyzstan when terrorists shot bullets at the climbers’ portaledge a thousand feet off the deck. Once on the ground, the four were taken prisoner and then forced for days to march and hide as their captors evaded army soldiers hunting them. An unfortunate soldier whom the terrorists had also captured was executed just out of sight of their bivouac. Tommy, Beth, and their two teammates believed they would be executed themselves. They succeeded in escaping one night when Tommy pushed off a cliff the sole terrorist charged with guarding them. (Amazingly, the guy survived, only to be captured by the army and imprisoned under a death sentence.) The four young climbers then ran for the government front line, coming close to getting shot at by mistake. The whole wild adventure is chronicled in Greg Child’s dramatic book
Over the Edge.

The very next year, 2001, Tommy accidentally cut off his left index finger with a table saw. That kind of mishap can end a climbing career. Tommy had the finger sewed back on, but when it simply got in the way of his climbing, he had it removed. Today, at age thirty-seven, he’s climbing as well as he ever has, despite the missing digit.

So I had always admired Tommy from a distance, but when we started climbing together, it was a joy to discover what a kind, generous, unegotistical guy he is. Unlike some professional athletes,
Tommy never toots his own horn, and, as a result, I think he’s gotten less credit for what he’s done than he deserves.

In May 2012, Tommy’s idea for the Yosemite Triple—the south face of Mount Watkins, a route called Freerider on El Cap that weaves in and out of the standard Salathé line, and the Regular Northwest Face on Half Dome—was not simply to pull off the linkup in a single day but to free climb every single foot of all three routes. I knew that would be a tall order, but I was psyched to give it a shot with such a strong and motivated partner.

We started up Watkins at 4:45 p.m. on May 18. It was already hot in the Valley, so we arranged our schedule to maximize time in the shade. The technique we all use nowadays for speed climbing big walls is called simul-climbing. It works like this. One guy takes the rack and leads continuously, not for a single pitch but for as much as 800 or even a thousand feet. He doesn’t stop to belay. Once the rope comes tight to the second, he starts up, too. Both guys climb simultaneously—hence “simul-climbing.” The leader places cams or nuts every so often, or clips fixed gear, so that if either guy falls, the gear catches them in a kind of yo-yo effect, when the rope comes tight between them. You can take some pretty horrendous whippers simul-climbing and still not get hurt, as long as the pro is good.

Ironically, the most dangerous situation in simul-climbing arises when the second falls. If the leader falls, the rope coming tight to the second arrests the plunge, the second acting as a kind of unwitting anchor. But if the second falls, he can pull off the leader. Not good if both guys are falling at once, no matter how good your pro!

But part of what allowed Tommy and me to climb the Triple was using devices like the Kong Duck or the Petzl Micro Traxion, single-directional pulleys that allow the rope to go one way but not the other. When placed strategically, they allow the second
to climb through terrain that would otherwise be considered much too hard—too close to the edge of falling off. Tommy and I could climb such big blocks—sometimes over a thousand feet at a time—because the devices made it safe for the second to climb as hard as 5.12.

Tommy and I led in what we call blocks—big stretches covering as many as twelve or thirteen conventional pitches of, say, eighty to 150 feet each. It’s inevitable that as the leader places pro, he’s going to run through his rack at some point. That’s when you change over and give the rack and the lead to the other guy. We planned beforehand the places where our blocks would end, on ledges where a pendulum or a downclimb or some other unusual maneuver meant you had to manage the rope more carefully than in normal simul-climbing.

We got up Watkins in the excellent time of two hours and forty minutes. Neither of us took a single fall, despite pitches as hard as 5.13a. From there, a combination of hiking, driving, eating, and rehydrating got us to the foot of Freerider at 10:45 p.m. As we’d planned, we hoped to cruise all of El Cap in the dark. That’s not quite as hard as it might seem, as long as you have the route sufficiently dialed so that your headlamp illuminates all the sequences and you don’t get off-route.

In some ways, Freerider on El Cap was the climax of our adventure. One of the most memorable moments came in the wee hours. Tommy was leading up one of the harder corners. As he left his anchor, he said, “I’m too tired to lieback it, I’m just going to stem it,” and then he proceeded to just totally bust out the entire pitch. I didn’t even think you could do that! It’s the middle of the night and it’s really hard to see your feet because it’s dark, he has a headlamp, he’s standing on tiny little footholds that you wouldn’t even be able to see in the light, and he just stemmed it, one foot on each slab, trusting those minuscule holds.

Tommy’s a technical wizard on that stuff. He’s really, really good on granite, so it was cool seeing how he could improvise like that and get away with it.

We got to the top of El Cap just after 5:00 a.m., with the first light of dawn. We’d finished Freerider in 6:15, also a damn good time. Tommy fell twice on the crux face climbing section, but no harm done, since I was belaying him, not simul-climbing. I managed not to come off anywhere.

Our big enemy was fatigue, and it really hit us on Half Dome. Having to free climb 5.12+ after twenty-one straight hours on the walls takes it out of you. It’s really hard, and the prospect of failure—even if it meant “cheating” and using aid or grabbing fixed gear—is always there. The 5.12c variations on the Regular Northwest Face gave us all we could handle.

Each of the three routes has a specific crux. When we got to them we would get all psyched up, but they were all reasonable. The real trial is an overall, cumulative ordeal. Your feet hurt more and more and you get more and more tired. Linkups aren’t super fun. Once you hit hour twelve or fourteen, you aren’t really thinking, “Oh! What a great time we’re having!” You think it will be cool until it isn’t fun anymore.

It was 2:00 p.m. on May 19 when we topped out on Half Dome. Our elapsed time was twenty-one hours and fifteen minutes. Not only a new speed record but also the first free linkup of the three great Yosemite faces.

I was pretty pleased that I had managed to climb 7,000 feet of steep granite—seventy guidebook pitches—without falling once. And I’m equally gratified that, as of 2015, nobody else had duplicated our free linkup, no matter how long they took to do it.

A
S MONUMENTAL AN ACHIEVEMENT
as Yosemite’s Triple Crown with Caldwell was, Alex regarded it in some sense as a warm-up. His goal for months had been to try the Triple solo—not free climbing every pitch, but rope soloing and daisy soloing. As he would later claim, “Doing the Triple with Tommy, I knew, would actually be physically harder than daisy soloing it. After all, climbing 5.12+ when you’re tired is way harder than French freeing the same pitch. By doing it free with Tommy, I learned just how tired I’d be when I got to Half Dome on a solo linkup.”

After the success of
Alone on the Wall
, Peter Mortimer and Sender Films had stayed in close touch with Alex. Now, for a new film, to be titled
Honnold 3.0
, the filmmakers offered to shoot Alex’s attempt on the solo Triple. For Mortimer and company, it would present a new kind of challenge. They would capture Alex’s climb not in staged reenactments, as they had his free solos of Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome, but “in real time,” as he attempted the linkup through a very long day and night. There would be no second takes, no rehearsals. If the camera missed a crucial bit of action, that would be too bad.

Logistically, such a shoot posed a fiendish challenge. The cameramen would have to rappel into positions on the three walls well before Alex got there, then simply hang out and wait for his arrival. To ensure Alex’s comfort level, Mortimer chose shooters who not only were top-notch climbers but also were good friends with Alex. They included Ben Ditto, Cheyne Lempe, Mikey Schaefer, Sean Leary, and Mortimer himself.

Yet in Mortimer’s view, such a project was actually less stressful than the shooting of
Alone on the Wall
had been. As he reflects today, “There was a cleaner ethical boundary for me. Worst-case scenario: If Alex wants to climb something and he falls off and dies,
that’s still his choice. But if he dies during a reenactment, then in some way I’d feel that I killed Alex. I’d have to live with that.”

Even so, every shoot with Alex took its toll on the filmmakers. In June 2011, to provide footage for the
60 Minutes
interview with Alex, Mortimer had agreed to film another free solo in Yosemite. As a side project, the day before the big show, Alex chose to go after the Phoenix, a single 130-foot pitch, but one rated a solid 5.13a. It’s a climb you have to rappel to reach the start, since it hangs over a sheer precipice looming more than 500 feet above the valley floor.

Mortimer had misgivings. As he recalls, “I was almost at the point of telling Alex, ‘No more reenactments.’ But he said, ‘I’m gonna fucking do the Phoenix tomorrow morning. You wanna come?’

“ ‘Do you want me there?’

“ ‘Sure.’ ”

The next day, Mortimer got in position. “I zoomed in on him with my camera,” he remembers. “What I saw brought home the reality of what he was holding onto. It was incredibly stark. The rock was overhanging, his feet were on nothing. The granite looked slippery from spray from a nearby waterfall. He had only three fingertips in shallow cracks.

“I was terrified. It was the scariest thing in my life. I couldn’t handle watching up close, so I had to zoom out.”

Alex cruised up the Phoenix in eight minutes flat. It was the first 5.13 route ever free soloed in Yosemite.

Mortimer tells another story, this time about cameraman Brett Lowell shooting Alex on a free solo on a route on Liberty Cap, a dome also in the Valley, for Sender’s film
Valley Uprising
. “Brett had a fancy new camera. He was all set in position. Alex climbed up to him, then, only a few feet away from the camera, he set out from a locker crack onto a steep slab. Normally child’s play for Alex. But he botched the sequence. Went up, downclimbed, went back up.

“Brett came close to losing it. He thought,
I’m going to film this
guy falling to his death
. He turned white as a ghost. Alex noticed Brett’s distress, and, in the middle of sorting out the moves, said, ‘Hey, no big deal. This is what you do when you’re climbing.’”

Yes, the logistics of filming
my Triple solo for the Sender guys were supercomplicated. But their presence actually made it easier and more pleasant for me. Daisy soloing requires a way lower commitment than free soloing, so it didn’t really matter to me if other people were around, because I have a harness and a rope and I can just hang out. If I was free soloing and there was a cameraman next to me, it would be harder to focus. But it’s nice to have friends around when you’re climbing through the night.

Also, the crew made my own logistics a lot easier. If I was alone, I’d have to figure out car shuttles between the climbs—a big hassle. But with the filmmakers, I had rides already set up. And they could give me food and water on the summits. If I was doing it alone, I would have pre-stashed food and water at various places along the route.

I started up the south face of Mount Watkins at 4:00 p.m. on June 5, 2012. The first pitches were a little wet and buggy, because it had rained the day before, but I felt pretty smooth. Finished the wall in 2:20, twenty minutes faster than Tommy and I had done it two weeks earlier.

It was kind of chaotic driving down to the start of El Cap. There was all this shit on the floor of the van—the filmmakers’ Pelican cases, assorted gear of my own, since I’d use a different rack for El Cap, and I’m trying to eat and hydrate. And it was dark by now. I started up the Nose at 9:30 p.m. I got 150 feet up and realized I’d forgotten my chalk bag. Must have left it among the debris on the floor of the van. Oh, shit, I said to myself. I considered scrambling
back down to get the bag, but by then the van had left. So I just climbed on without chalk. The lower pitches were wet, so I found it a little bit hard and weird.

Climbing in the dark is quieter and lonelier than in the daylight. In some ways, there’s no exposure. You’re inside this little bubble with your headlamp. A fifteen-foot beam of light is the whole universe. There was no danger I’d get off-route, since I knew the sequences so well by now. And yet, you still sense that there’s this void below you, somewhere in the darkness. It’s like swimming in the ocean and realizing there’s a bottomless abyss below you.

When I got to the Dolt Tower, about a thousand feet up, I met two parties: one was a pair of guys bivouacking, the other two were cooking a meal. We exchanged pleasantries, then I asked, a bit sheepishly, “Do you guys have a chalk bag I could borrow?” This guy named Steve Denny unhesitatingly handed over his. It was a new felt bag, and it was full of chalk. Putting my hand into it felt orgasmic. I thanked Steve and told him I’d tie the bag to a tree on the summit, so he could retrieve it later. Then I headed on.