Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (17 page)

Dean likes to insist that he’s not competitive, that he climbs for the spiritual rewards of perfecting his craft. Whereas Hans just lays it out there. The film billboards one of his pronouncements: “I love competition and I’m blatant about it. If it’s something that makes me climb better than before, if it pushes me to do my best, then I see it as a good thing.”

It’s to Sender’s credit that they get Dean to admit that the challenge of Hans’s speed records brings out the competitiveness in
him that’s just beneath the surface. “He was like this little dog humping my leg,” Dean says of Hans, “and so it brought out the little dog in me.” Classic Dean!

The film focuses on Dean’s attempt with Sean Leary to break the record on June 11, 2010. By then, Hans and Yuji’s mark of 2:37:05 had stood for a year and a half. Before launching on the Nose, Dean announced, “I think it’s possible to break the record by a large amount.” But when Sean, coming second, tagged the tree on top of El Cap, the stopwatch clicked off at exactly 2:36:45. They’d broken the record, but only by twenty seconds. That didn’t dampen their wild celebration on top.

Dean and Sean had considered their first attempt only a practice run, so their time was impressive. But before they could push the route to their absolute limits, winter storms hit the Valley and shut down the climbing season.

Watching that film made me want to give the record my own best shot. And I thought it would be really cool if I could do it with the old master, Hans. At the end of my great season in the Valley in 2012—climbing the Triple with Tommy Caldwell, then climbing it solo—I was in such good shape that I thought I should go for the Nose. By then, Hans was forty-seven years old, but I knew that he always stayed in tremendous shape. And I knew that he’d love nothing better than to take the record back from Dean.

Hans is a super straight-up dude with everybody. Like the way he makes no bones about loving competition. To me, he epitomized the successful older climber. By 2012, he had a wife he loved and kids he loved, but the fire was still in his belly. He didn’t hesitate to accept my invitation. He lives in the Bay Area, so he wouldn’t be acclimated to Yosemite. He just came up and took on the challenge as a weekend warrior.

The one thing Sender may have overemphasized in Race for the Nose is the ruthlessness of the rivalry. All the guys who are
interested in the speed record are friends of mine, and of each other. I even gave Sean some beta—route-finding advice—before he and Dean went up to break Hans and Yuji’s record. Some climbers look askance at speed records—they even criticize us for (so they think) corrupting the purism of ascent. My answer is simple: I do it because it’s so much fun.

The whole thing started, I suppose, with the cachet of “Nose-in-a-day,” which has bloomed as the acronym NIAD. That’s still a cherished goal for many climbers. Of course, the whole in-a-day thing is arbitrary. Twenty-four hours is an arbitrary measure. If it had taken me twenty-five hours to do the Triple Crown solo, I’d still have felt pretty good about it.

Going for the Nose speed record is simply a fun game. All this stuff is a game.

Hans and I started our stopwatch on June 17, 2012, the day before his forty-eighth birthday. And I’ll have to say, we climbed the route about as efficiently as is possible. Our teamwork was perfect. The only glitch (if you can even call it that) came in the Stove Legs, on pitches 8 and 9, when Hans slowed down a little. When Hans tagged the tree at the finish line, we stopped the watch. Our time was 2:23:46. Pretty rad, we both thought. We’d knocked thirteen minutes off Dean and Sean’s record. Hans was overjoyed. I was surprisingly pleased myself.

After the climb, as we were walking down the backside of El Cap, I asked Hans, “Hey, what happened there in the Stove Legs?” He said, “I was catching my breath.” “What do you mean ‘catching your breath’?” I needled him. “We were going for the speed record!”

It’s now been more than three years since Hans and I broke the record and nobody has bettered our time. Of course, that’s mainly because no one has tried. We’ll see how long it takes for someone to get properly motivated to go after it.

All the same, someday I’d like to try to break the two-hour frontier.
I think it’s possible. It’s a huge psychological barrier, like the sub-two-hour marathon, but sooner or later, I’m convinced, somebody will do it. If I’m right, that you can’t climb any more efficiently than Hans and I did that day in June 2012, then the only way to do the Nose faster is to get fitter. The upper part of the route is really steep and pumpy. When you’re climbing fast, your forearms get superpumped. The burn is intense. That’s where fitter might mean faster.

That said, and as gratifying as setting the record was, I don’t see speed climbing the Nose as the same kind of major accomplishment that the Triple solo was. It’s on a much smaller scale, much lighter, and two and a half hours of any kind of climbing doesn’t take the mental and physical stamina of linkups on big walls. Or of free soloing.

In the spring and early summer of 2012, I’d had my best season ever in Yosemite. I wasn’t sure what I’d do next, though I had plenty of projects jotted down in “to-do” lists in my climbing and training journals. Would 2013 be another year of consolidation? Not in the ways I might have anticipated. . . .

•
•
•
•

The revelation that had first come to me on our endless drive across the desert in Chad in 2010—that, compared to the men I saw spending all day turning mud into bricks, or the boys beating their donkeys to make them haul water faster, I had it pretty easy in life—had stayed with me. The eternal question was how that revelation should dictate the way I lived, especially after sponsorship made my life even easier.

One answer had to do with lifestyle. Ever since 2007, I’d lived out of the Ford Econoline van I had bought cheap as a five-year-old used car. By 2010, it was still pretty ghetto, but a friend of mine had installed industrial carpeting, side panels, finishing work, and
sturdy insulation. I cooked my meals on a two-burner Coleman stove, slept in my sleeping bag with a bouldering crash pad for a mattress, and read by headlamp.

By 2012, I could easily have rented an apartment or a condo to live in, but I decided to stick with the van. One reason was that it gave me the ultimate freedom—a kind of traveling base camp as I drove from one crag to another, following the changing seasons. A permanent residence would have felt like an annoying anchor. Living in a van reflected my ideals of simplicity, frugality, and efficiency.

Instead of trading in the old Econoline for a spiffier model, I decided to refurbish the vehicle. Now it’s a really well-crafted van, even though it’s got 180,000 miles on it. Between climbing trips in 2013, I left my van with John Robinson, a seventy-year-old retired friend from Sacramento, who had built out his own van. He made all kinds of improvements to mine. In my kitchen area, there’s a five-gallon water tank and, instead of the Coleman two-burner, a built-in range connected to propane tanks. All enclosed in nice, custom-made cabinets.

In back, where I sleep, I have to lie a little bit diagonal, because I’m slightly taller than the van is wide. I’ve put in a sliding curtain for privacy, or to keep the light out when I stop over in a well-lighted parking lot. Instead of the industrial carpet, I’ve now got a linoleum floor—Home Depot’s finest.

What I call my foyer—where the side door opens into what used to be the back seats—is where I take my shoes off. It’s also my bathroom, where I pee into a bottle.

Under the bed platform, John built a big sliding storage drawer where I keep all my climbing gear, just the right size for my bouldering crash pad. Side chambers for other stuff. I even haul around my baseball glove, in case somebody wants to play catch—it’s a good way to limber up the shoulders.

Goal Zero, a solar company that sponsors me, was kind enough to install two sixty-watt panels on the roof of the van. They in turn power an inside battery, which I use to charge my phone and laptop—though it also powers the LED lights in the ceiling and the carbon-monoxide detector that John insisted on installing, saying, “If I’m going to do this, it’s gotta be up to code!”

The Econoline is a full-size van, but I’ve got the smallest engine Ford offers—a 4.2-liter V6. It might not be a powerhouse, but it manages pretty well. And, to be honest, I don’t know anything about cars. I think of mine more as a tiny house that moves.

There are of course drawbacks to living in a van. One is getting hassled by security guards. A few years ago, when I was climbing at Red Rocks, I went to sleep in the parking lot of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. I was awakened from a deep slumber by a loud knock on my window. I had no idea what hour it was. I opened the front door a crack to talk to the guy.

“You can’t camp here like this,” he said irately, as if I was doing him personal harm. “Oh, sorry,” I said, “I thought it was all right since I was in the casino last night.”

“You have to leave,” he went on, with enough disdain in his voice for me to know what he thought of anyone who would dare to desecrate the sanctity of his Palace.

Groggy and irritated, I got in the driver’s seat and took off. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d been harassed like that, nor would it be the last. But for some reason the exchange stuck with me, grating on my nerves. I think it was because I could tell how much he looked down on me, how disgusted he was that someone would consider living in a van. In retrospect, I wish I’d laid into him, asking how someone who spends forty hours a week riding around a parking structure on a neon bicycle has any right to look down on my lifestyle choices.

During that Vegas outing, I used the Whole Foods parking
lot for my Internet service. Their free Wi-Fi was strong enough to cover the whole surrounding lot, so I would park as close as I could to the building and settle into the back of my van for e-mail sessions. In fact, I used the Whole Foods bathrooms at least once a day as well, though I also bought a lot of their organic food, so I felt like it all balanced out.

There’s no convenient camping around Vegas (the Red Rocks campground is ridiculously overpriced and underwhelming), so I split my nights among various hotel parking lots, twenty-four-hour grocery stores, and some of my friends’ streets. Each venue was well-lit and loud with the sound of traffic. Getting rousted by security and told to move along was just part of the game, and being in a place like Vegas for a month or more really made me appreciate moving on to Indian Creek in Utah—at the other end of the car-camping spectrum.

Where Vegas is annoyingly bright and bustling, the Creek is almost oppressively dark and sometimes lonely. The night sky is full of stars and the only sounds are the animals (and occasionally drunk climbers). The word quiet doesn’t really do justice to the deep, peaceful calm that settles over the desert at night. The camping is unregulated, so you basically just find an empty spot that suits your fancy and you post up for as long as you’d like. I’ve spent weeks at the Creek and marveled each day at how beautiful the landscape is—it really never gets old.

But what did get old was having no showers, no cell service, and no food. A lot of people, especially Americans, get all excited about “going camping,” about how cool it is to be out in nature with nothing around you. But I think that camping holds a special appeal for those who don’t do it routinely. I like showering, I like eating out, I like being able to call my friends or check my e-mail. And as beautiful or romantic a place like the Creek might be, I eventually tire of camping—even if it’s in a van.

The whole thing is a trade-off. But as of 2015, I still have no plans to buy or rent an apartment anywhere. In my newly spiffed-up van, solar panels and all, I’m pretty content.

•
•
•
•

Making a lifestyle choice, of course, is merely a personal matter. What I’d taken away from Chad was a certain feeling that I had an obligation to do something for others, for those with fewer choices in life and fewer means to accomplish them. By 2012, thanks to sponsorship and commercials, I had more money than I needed to live comfortably. So I established the Honnold Foundation. Its motto is “Helping people live better, simply.” The mission statement I posted on my new website read, “The Honnold Foundation seeks simple, sustainable ways to improve lives world-wide. Simplicity is the key; low-impact, better living is the goal.”

Three years into its operation, the foundation is just getting started. But already we’ve funded projects that I’m excited about. One involves supporting SolarAid, a British nonprofit that runs a campaign to provide solar lamps to four countries in Africa—Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia—to replace the ubiquitous kerosene lanterns that are both costly and toxic. SolarAid’s ultimate goal is to abolish the use of kerosene lanterns in Africa by the year 2020. Some folks might think that’s a pie-in-the-sky dream, but it’s sure worth trying to make it happen.

Another nonprofit we support, called Grid Alternatives, aims to provide solar energy for low-income housing in the United States. So far we’ve focused on California and Colorado. In the spring of 2014, we moved into the Kayenta region of the Navajo Reservation to start providing solar energy to traditional Navajo families, many of whom have spent their whole lives without electricity or even running water.

Some years ago, I went on what I called my God-hating kick,
as I read all the major manifestos arguing against the ideas of religion and an afterlife—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and the like. During that period, I sometimes referred to myself as a “born-again atheist.”

More recently, my reading kick has been focused on clean energy. I’m deeply worried about the future of the world in the face of climate change, the unbridled use of fossil fuels, and so on. It’s this passion, as much as anything, that led to the idea of the Honnold Foundation.