Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (19 page)

Of all the routes on Potrero, the gem is a fifteen-pitch route that arrows right up the middle of the face, called El Sendero Luminoso—“The Shining Path.” The first ascent was put up by Jeff Jackson, Kevin Gallagher, and Kurt Smith in 1992. Two years later, Jackson, Smith, and Pete Peacock freed the whole 1,750-foot climb. They rated it 5.12d. But the climb is quite sustained, eleven pitches of 5.12 and four of 5.11. Jeff is the editor of Rock and Ice, and we’ve corresponded quite a bit over the years, including when I wrote for the magazine or its website.

I first climbed Sendero in 2009, and I’d immediately fantasized about soloing it. But when I came back in the winter of 2013–1 to revisit the route, I realized that it would take a concentrated effort for me to feel comfortable on it. Sendero climbs a north-facing wall with a lot of vegetation, and since the climbing is sufficiently difficult to keep the crowds away, there’s not enough traffic to keep the route buffed clean. Holds were full of dirt and plants, and even though I could climb around them or avoid the particularly prickly cactuses, it’s hard to commit when in the back of your mind you’re wondering if there’s an easier way. Potrero also has a reputation for being chossy, but I think that’s overrated. Yes, there are a lot of loose blocks on the wall, but you just have to avoid grabbing or standing on them. The smooth limestone texture of the wall is actually pretty nice.

Part of the appeal of Sendero for me lay in the technical complexity of the climbing. Potrero is made of slabby, gray, water-runnel limestone. It’s full of small holds and solution pockets. Really subtle features. All the holds tend to face the wrong directions. You get into tricky body positions that require real precision. It’s so stylish—such an old-school climb.

Of course limestone is more porous than granite. Holds just break off unexpectedly. It’s less predictable than granite. There are holds that are sort of “glued” to the wall. You have to trust that the one time you hold it is not the time it rips off the mountain.

The plan that winter was for Cedar and Renan to come down to Mexico to make a short film if I decided to solo Sendero. Almost at once, however, I had my qualms about the project. Ever since my “epiphany” in Chad, I’d agonized over the environmental impact of my climbing. To fly the three of us down to Mexico—not to mention other crew members to operate automated drones to capture footage high on the wall—would be to leave a sizable carbon footprint. Could I really justify burning all that jet fuel and using pricey high-tech hardware just to capture my several hours of play on Portrero Chico? What if we got everybody down there, ready to film, and I chickened out because I decided I wasn’t comfortable going up on the wall without a rope?

In my mind, our Newfoundland trip in 2011 was a classic example of waste. Both a waste of our time and a waste of natural resources. We all flew to Newfoundland, drove to Devil’s Bay, and rented a boat to cruise around the fjords, and we didn’t climb shit. We made a huge impact on the environment—for nothing.

There was no guarantee I’d be up for the free solo. I’ve had other projects I set my eye on—notably Romantic Warrior in the Needles of California, a nine-pitch 5.12b route on a steep granite crack system—that I rehearsed, planned, and then backed off. It was too hot that June, my shoes didn’t feel quite right, I felt rushed by other engagements I’d committed to in the upcoming days, so I realized I wasn’t ready for it. Actually, there are tons of solos that I haven’t done! In such a situation, I have to pay attention to my feelings and my judgment, not to outside pressures. So there was a real possibility in January 2014 that I might be dragging Cedar and Renan and the other guys down to Potrero Chico for nothing.

Starting on January 9, Cedar and I spent four days (with a rest day when it rained) climbing, fixing, and cleaning the route, using ropes and belaying to get the moves down pat and grigris to hold us in place while we cleaned. To get all the dirt, twigs, grass,
and shrubs out of the cracks, we scraped away with our climbing brushes. They’re like toothbrushes with extra-stiff bristles. If we’d really been serious, we would have used something more heavy-duty, like a big scrubber.

Each day, we worked from sunrise to sunset. The more vegetation we pulled off the upper pitches, the more dirt rained down on the lower ones. The more big plants we removed from the route, the more the small ones stood out. Once we started, we couldn’t stop until we saw a perfectly clean slab of limestone. Some of the plants were particularly tough to get out, adapted as they are to rugged conditions. For a week after I returned to the States, I had thorns growing out of my hands. But Jeff Jackson e-mailed me, “God smiles every time you uproot a lechuguilla.”

Purists or nonclimbers might think that by removing natural vegetation from a cliff, you’re altering or even trashing the landscape. I’ll confess to faint qualms along those lines. Cedar and I knew that plants grow back quickly on Potrero, and that the wall would eventually revert to a hanging garden. I didn’t worry much about our impact while we swung around plucking cactuses and ticking holds. I just felt a vague sense of unease that we were putting so much work into something that’s supposed to be so pure and simple.

But at the end of the fourth day, as we rapped down a smooth, clean face, I couldn’t help feeling a giddy excitement. At some point, a switch had flipped from “Maybe I’ll solo it eventually” to “So psyched! Must solo immediately!” I have no idea what flipped that switch, though the climbing did look more inviting without the dirt and plants obscuring the holds. For whatever reason, I was ready, and I knew that I would solo the route the next morning, if the conditions allowed.

That’s the strange paradox, for me at least, about free soloing. It’s the waiting beforehand that’s anxiety-producing. The vacillating
over “Should I do this?” When I finally commit, the stress goes away. It’s actually a big relief to go up there and do it.

January 14 dawned clear. I wasn’t going to delay any longer. I wanted to go up on the route alone, which is sort of the point of soloing. I was seeking out a personal adventure, and the filmmakers knew that any intrusion would fundamentally alter the experience. Renan took up a position far out in the desert at the base so he could get a long shot. Cedar spent several hours guiding the drone pilots up to the summit of El Toro so they could meet me on top and film some summit footage.

I was and felt completely alone. I didn’t know where the other guys were positioned or if they were even watching. I just went climbing, knowing that we could go back up on the route during the next few days to get all the filming done.

The high-tech gear was brought to Mexico by a Boulder-based firm called SkySight. The drone was a small octocopter, maybe half the size of a coffee table, with a super-expensive gimbal that held a RED camera steady. Between the high-quality drone and the top-of-the-line cinema camera, and the fact that the guys at SkySight are among the best in the industry, we were pretty sure we’d capture some amazing scenes. The drone was flown by a pilot using a big controller—a lot like a toy truck. The camera was operated by the pilot’s brother. And they brought along their sister as an assistant to help carry gear and catch the craft on landing.

Renan was there shooting for Camp 4 Collective, which had been hired by The North Face to make a film of the ascent. Camp 4 owns a RED camera, so Renan had been shooting with it for years. And Renan had brought his girlfriend to be a camera assistant, so that brought the filming crew to a total of five people. And then Cedar and me as climbers.

The morning of the solo, nobody said much of anything, because they didn’t want to influence me one way or another. Earlier,
though, everybody had assured me that I should climb only what I felt comfortable with, and that they could shoot any other, easier route if I changed my mind. But it was hard not to feel a little pressure.

We’d rented a small casita sitting atop a hill above one of the many camping areas, which provided a glorious view of the whole area. That morning I opened my eyes lazily, gazing up from the pile of jackets I was using as a pillow through the worn, faded blinds to see the tops of the mountains just catching some morning sun. Despite the pressure, I’d slept well. I almost always sleep well, even before big solo climbs. From the sofa I used as a bed I could easily see Sendero weaving its way up the wall. There was no way of escaping. I followed my normal routine—cereal poured into the yogurt tub, news on my phone. But I lingered, trying to stay patient and let the morning humidity burn off. I focused artificially on my phone, using it to ignore the people around me with cameras and questions, but not really understanding what I read. The only thing that mattered was Sendero, just coming into the light.

Finally, I made the fifteen-minute stroll over to the base of the route, weaving through scrubby, prickly bushes and struggling up a loose scree slope. My light backpack made me feel buoyant as I scrambled up the hill. My shoes, chalk bag, energy bars, and water felt weightless compared to the 600 feet of rope and full rack that we’d been carrying the past few days.

One of my favorite aspects of soloing is the way that pain ceases to exist. The previous four long days of climbing and cleaning had worn out my fingers and toes, but now, as I pulled on the first few holds, I felt none of the soreness. Each edge seemed perfect and crisp, each fingerlock felt like an anchor. Foot jams that had been hideously painful the previous afternoon felt rock solid. Hold after hold, I worked my way up the wall, smoothly and perfectly.

What seemed to me to be the crux of the route came at the top
of the second pitch, maybe 250 feet above the ground. The standard sequence involves opposing side pulls with small and slippery footholds, but I’d found a small two-finger pocket out to the side that felt slightly more secure. As I chalked up, I felt a little nervous. Or maybe just excited. Or maybe just my awareness was heightened. It’s hard to untangle the various feelings, but I definitely felt alive. I knew that this was the only moment on the route where I’d have to try really hard. And that’s exactly what I did, completing the sequence exactly as I needed.

Once I calmed down a little from overgripping, I knew I’d finish the route, even though there were still thirteen pitches to go.

A second crux comes on the fifth pitch, about 600 feet off the ground. The pitch ends in a huge ledge where you can stop and take a breather. On the crux sequence, I was connected to the wall by only a small, sharp limestone undercling above my head. Trusting a tiny smear for my left foot, I raised my right foot almost to my waist, and I levered off it to reach my left hand to a distant jug.

It was by no means the hardest climbing on the route, but the stark simplicity of the movement stayed with me long afterward. To me, that is soloing at its finest: to be nearly disconnected from the wall with the air all around. There’s a certain purity to that kind of movement that can’t be found with a rope and gear. But for all my love of simplicity, it’s not always simple to get to those positions. Here on Sendero, everything came together—a perfect mixture of aesthetics and challenge, hard enough climbing to demand total concentration and commitment on a line of strength that goes straight up the biggest face on the massif.

From there to the top, I climbed easily, trusting my feet more with each step. I used new sequences on a few pitches, trusting myself to find the easiest way through the seemingly blank sea of limestone. On the midway ledge, I popped my shoes off, and again five pitches higher, just to let my toes relax after hundreds of feet of
technical slab climbing. But all in all, I’d found exactly the experience I was looking for: I was only a small dot on a vast, uncaring wall, but for those two hours, I got to taste perfection.

•
•
•
•

We spent the next two days reclimbing and reshooting various pitches of the route. It’s anticlimactic to go back up a route to pose all over it. The triumph of the actual achievement gets lost in what follows. But as I slithered in and out of my harness on various ledges, climbing different sections for the camera and clipping into anchors in between, I tried to remind myself that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to climb a wall like this one without doing some work, and at least I was having fun with my friends.

From the start of our trip, Cedar had wanted to try to redpoint Sendero—lead it free but roped, with no falls. I owed it to my buddy to be his belay partner on such an effort. The trouble was, we had return flights booked for the following morning. So we set out on the evening of January 16 to try to climb the route in the night.

The full moon rose as he started up the first pitch, casting a pale glow across the whole wall. There’s something eerily calm about moonlight. I left my headlamp off, and I fed out slack in the darkness, pondering the last week. Was it worth it? What had we really done?

For the first five pitches, Cedar moved steadily up the wall, the silence punctured only by the occasional “I’m off belay. Line’s fixed!”—my cue to start jugging as fast as I could up the rope he’d tied to his anchor. That way, Cedar could conserve the energy he otherwise would have wasted on belaying and rope management. I tried to jug each pitch in four minutes flat.

It was at this point, however, that the ethical dilemma of my little “project” started to nag at me. Traveling to places like Chad has made me acutely mindful of my own impact on the world
around me. At first, I’d assumed that my carbon footprint would be much lower than that of the average American, because I lived in a van and didn’t own many possessions. But as I read more about the issue, I realized that the amount of flying that I did still left me near the highest percentile of environmental impact. My next thought was to buy carbon offsets—until I researched them and discovered that they weren’t the cure-all I was hoping for. Paying someone to plant trees in the First World seemed far less beneficial than providing clean energy in the developing world, though both could be considered to be offsetting carbon emissions. The first basically pays the rich while the second not only reduces fossil-fuel use but also improves standards of living by saving people money and reducing the health problems associated with burning things for fuel.