Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (24 page)

The close-up footage of the climbing, shot by pros, is superb, and there’s nothing hokey about it. Sequences that Alex performs on Sentinel have every bit the power to make hard-core climbers’ palms sweat that the comparable footage in
Alone on the Wall
and
Honnold 3.0
did.

Logan manages to wring at least one new insight out of the climber, as she wonders how much longer Alex can pursue free soloing at this level. “I don’t think I’ll continue to do this forever,” Alex answers. “But I won’t stop because of the risk. I’ll stop just because I lose the love of it.”

During the filming, Logan, producer Jeff Newton, and the rest of the CBS crew were both charmed and befuddled by Alex’s lingo and his erratic behavior. So much so that they produced a
60 Minutes Overtime
pastiche of outtakes, titled “Dude: The Quirky World of Alex Honnold.” The subhead read: “For
60 Minutes
producer Jeff Newton, shooting Alex Honnold’s death-defying rock climbing was only part of the challenge. Jeff and the whole crew also had to learn Alex-speak, where everything is ‘chill.’ ” The amusing clip focuses on Alex’s possible overuse of four of his then-favorite words:
dude
,
chill
(both verb and adjective),
heinous
, and
mellow
. As Logan and Alex ride in his van, she interjects, startled, “Did you call me ‘dude’?” Alex laughs and answers, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to get used to that.” According to Newton, in Alex’s world, “everything is ‘chill.’ ” So Logan asks, “What is chilling for you? How long can you chill for?”

The cameras follow Alex into his mother’s house in Sacramento. Suddenly, he disappears. The crew finds him in a back room, opening boxes of free gear from The North Face. It’s like Christmas, Logan muses. These “disappearances” may have nettled the crew during production, but now they’re the source of mirth. “He was always doing pull-ups in the middle of the shoot,” Newton marvels. Welcome to Alex’s quirky world.

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From the little-known climber who once hoped that, as he put it, the attention of a sponsor might someday win him a free pair of rock shoes, Alex has by now developed into a thoroughgoing professional. One of his favorite quotes comes from the mouth of basketball legend Julius Erving: “Being a pro means doing what you love even on the days you don’t love it.”

Still, on any given Sunday, Alex would rather be climbing than signing autographs. In the spring of 2014, he agreed to serve on the
film jury of the Trento (Italy) Film Festival. Only when he saw the schedule of presentations did he realize what he’d gotten himself into. “For Christ’s sake,” he confided in a few friends, “now I have to sit through thirty hours of Everest films. Totally heinous.”

Wherever Alex appears nowadays, the event ends with long lines of admirers hoping to exchange a word or two with him and get him to sign a piece of memorabilia, usually a poster. “My default signature,” Alex half-jokes, “is my name, plus ‘Go big!’” (The signature is an efficient scrawl in which the only decipherable letters in his last name are “H” and “d,” but Alex will lavish as many as three exclamation points on his touchstone injunction.) “I suppose,” he adds, “I could write something like, ‘Have a nice day climbing,’ but that’s just too many characters. ‘Go big’—five characters. Exclamation marks are easy.

“At this one event, a really busty chick asked me to sign her boobs. ‘Are you serious?’ I asked. ‘You bet,’ she said, and pulled down her blouse, right there in public. No bra. So I signed my name on her left breast with a Sharpie. But after I stepped back to admire my handiwork, I felt like something was missing, so I added a ‘Go big!!’ to the right breast to even things out.”

In November 2014, a bizarre turn of affairs rocked the American climbing world. Sender Films had completed
Valley Uprising
, a wild and woolly history of climbing in Yosemite that ran at nearly ninety minutes, mixing archival footage dating back to the 1950s with new clips shot for the movie. In a real sense, the film was Sender’s magnum opus to date, and it was received with universal acclaim, winning the grand prize at all eight of the first film festivals in which it was entered. Needless to say, Alex’s free soloing was prominently featured, as were Dean Potter’s highball slacklining and deploying a BASE-jumping chute as a safety valve when he falls off overhanging walls.

The film debuted in Boulder on September 11, before a long-sold-out
house. After that, it was screened in venues all across the United States and in Europe. But suddenly, in early November, Clif Bar—one of Alex’s principal sponsors, as well as a sponsor of other leading climbers—announced that it was canceling support for five of its stars: Dean Potter, Steph Davis, Cedar Wright, Timmy O’Neill, and Alex. Apparently chief executives of the company had seen a showing of
Valley Uprising
in Berkeley, not far from company headquarters, on September 18, and they were not pleased. Ironically, Clif Bar was a major sponsor of the film itself. But it took the company almost two months to act.

In a carefully crafted statement, Clif Bar explained why it had fired some of its highest-profile adventurers: “We concluded that these forms of the sport are pushing boundaries and taking the element of risk to a place where we as a company are no longer willing to go.”

All five climbers were taken completely by surprise. Says Alex, “I was up on a four-day climb on the Muir Wall in the Valley, and all of a sudden I was getting all these texts on my iPhone. I first heard about it from my mom. She wrote, ‘Did you know you just got fired by Clif Bar?’”

The reaction in the climbing world was incredulous and derisive. Did the Clif Bar execs have no clue what it was that the climbers they sponsored were doing? Did it take watching
Valley Uprising
for them to wise up? After all, the company had sponsored Alex for the previous four years, Dean Potter for more than a decade.

The
New York Times
covered the controversy as the lead story on its sports page on Sunday, November 16. A photo of Alex free soloing in Yosemite—a still from the Sender Films shoot—took up the full half page above the fold. Reporter John Branch tried to cover the story evenhandedly, but the brunt of the criticism inevitably fell on Clif Bar. Dean Potter lashed out, “[W]hat they did was a filthy business move. . . . It seemed sleazy that Clif Bar would use some
of my best climbs, and some of Alex’s best climbs, as a marketing tool on one hand, but then fire us on the other.” Cedar Wright complained, “It shows a lack of understanding for the sport, and a lack of respect for the athletes who have helped build their brand.” As many observers pointed out, Clif Bar features a climber in silhouette on the cover of every one of its products.

Alex was asked to write an op-ed piece about the controversy for the
New York Times
. His piece appeared on November 20, four days after John Branch’s news story. In it, Alex took a tempered and philosophical view of the fracas. He wrote,

Alex cited another statement in the Clif Bar broadside: “This isn’t about drawing a line for the sport or limiting athletes from pursuing their passions. We’re drawing the line for ourselves.” Then he explained: “In essence, that’s the same way I feel when free soloing. I draw the lines for myself; sponsors don’t have any bearing on my choices or my analysis of risk.”

Alex ended the op-ed with a resounding affirmation of the risk-taking that lies at the heart of all adventure:

The overwhelming majority of commenters on Clif Bar’s action, even among nonclimbers, concluded that the company had simply blown it, in the process making fools of themselves. Many suggested a boycott. “I’m firing Clif Bar for stupidity,” wrote a typical blogger. Yet the response to Alex’s essay was more measured. He was widely praised for his restraint and magnanimity. Out of the debacle, he emerged unscathed.

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Toward the end of 2012, Alex and Peter Mortimer started tossing around the idea of filming an ascent of a building. As Mortimer later told
Outside
magazine, “We thought, wouldn’t that be a rad next thing to do?” Alex agreed.

Soloing a skyscraper was not an original idea. For more than a decade, the French climber Alain Robert had made a career out of free soloing tall and iconic buildings, including the Eiffel Tower, the Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago, and the National Bank of Abu Dhabi. Since most countries outlaw skyscraper ascents, Robert ran the constant threat of getting arrested in midclimb—which happened more than once. As famous as his daring feats made him in France, however, Robert remains little known in the United States.

An American, “Spiderman” Dan Goodwin, had also made a name for himself in the 1980s, soloing such skyscrapers as the Sears Tower, but by 2012, his deeds were largely forgotten.

What Mortimer proposed, in order to make the project a novel one, was to film Alex’s climb live. The extra
frisson
of watching an athlete in real time who might just possibly fall to his death was the kicker that got National Geographic Television on board. Next came the search for the right skyscraper. Self-evidently, the ascent
would require not only the permission but the full cooperation of the authorities, so most of the buildings in the United States and Europe were out of the running. Also, according to Alex, “It was surprisingly hard to find something inspiring enough. A building that dominates the skyline and is actually worth climbing.”

Alex and Pete first checked out the world’s tallest skyscraper—Dubai’s 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa. “Just the scout is a life-list experience,” Alex told
Outside
. But he decided against the attempt, claiming, “The Burj was just too hardcore for me. It’s the El Capitan of buildings.”

Elaborating on his scout, he adds, “There’s this little crack formed by the corners of the building that I couldn’t get my fingers into at all. Instead, I had to pinch these opposing window frames that are maybe six feet apart and really slopey, so it made for very insecure climbing. Everything about it was just too much, the scale, the difficulty. The windows are plated glass, so it’s like looking into a mirror as you climb, which is kind of scary since you see the skyline of the city laid out way below you. I heard that Dubai has something like sixty of the hundred tallest buildings in the world. Seeing them all down below you looking like toys is kind of unnerving, plus you see your own face, all sweaty and strained, looking right back at you from a few inches away.

“It’s a hard building. Maybe someday. . . .”

From Dubai, Alex and Pete traveled to Taiwan to check out Taipei 101, at 1,667 feet then the world’s second-tallest skyscraper. (Since 2012, two taller buildings have gone up, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel in Saudi Arabia and One World Trade Center in New York City; two others, both in China, are under construction.) Taipei 101 seemed to fit the bill. But the planned live TV broadcast—kept secret by Mortimer and National Geographic—was delayed for a year by logistics and bureaucratic red tape.

Meanwhile, in June 2013, Nik Wallenda tightrope-walked across
the gorge of the Little Colorado River in Arizona. The event was broadcast live on the Discovery Channel, with a ten-second delay in case something went drastically wrong. The event was a huge media success, with thirteen million spectators tuning in, setting a thirteen-year record for the channel. Alex’s skyscraper climb promised to be every bit as gripping and spectacular. Plans proceeded apace, and National Geographic Television went public with the news.

In December 2013,
Outside
ran a feature about the upcoming event. Grayson Shaffer’s reporting was judicious, but the title and subtitle—“Alex Honnold Isn’t Afraid of Skyscrapers” and “Climbing’s biggest name makes his bid for international stardom by risking death on live TV”—smacked of tabloid journalism. For the lead photo, Alex dressed up as a Depression-era steelworker, complete with baker-boy cap, overalls, and suspenders atop his bare upper torso, lunch-bucket at his side, as he sat atop a girder seemingly hundreds of feet above the street. The photo was an homage to the famous black-and-white picture called “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” (often attributed to Lewis Hine but actually shot by Charles C. Ebbetts), which depicted eleven nonchalant workers sitting side by side eating lunch on a girder during the construction of Rockefeller Center in 1932. Depending upon one’s taste, the Honnold parody came across as either clever or cheesy. Alex himself found the photo cheesy, but he adds, “I thought it was fun getting all dressed up and pretending to be an actor.”

Shaffer asked Alex how much he was being offered by National Geographic to perform the stunt. He reported, “Honnold won’t discuss specific figures, but he acknowledges that he’ll be paid ‘vastly more than anything I’ve encountered in the climbing world’ for the project.”

Response to the
Outside
article was mixed. Along with the usual cheers from the sidelines (“Big time goal, Alex. Bravo”), there were murmurs of disappointment. For perhaps the first time in his career,
the pithy phrase
selling out
was associated with Alex Honnold. Wrote one
Outside
commenter, “What sucks is the greatest climber who ever lived now has to resort to climbing a building for cash? . . . It might be fun to watch on the news, but to climbers I feel like it’s treason.” And another: “It’s fine if you want to climb a building for money, but don’t try to convince me that you are doing [it] because you are inspired.”