Read Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure Online
Authors: Alex Honnold,David Roberts
He was a man of very few words. We’d drive for hours with almost no conversation. He wasn’t comfortable expressing his emotions, but belaying me tirelessly and driving me all over the state was his own way of showing love.
From childhood on, there was an elephant in the room. It was that my parents weren’t happily married. They didn’t fight openly—it was more just a kind of chilly silence that filled the house. For Stasia’s and my sake, they waited till after I graduated from high school to get a divorce. But we knew they were going to split up, because we occasionally read Mom’s e-mails. The real bummer for them was that they were so much happier after they got divorced, and they stayed friends.
I’m sure a shrink would have a field day with the fact that, to this day, I have a hard time remembering the details of my childhood. In 2011, when Alex Lowther interviewed me for a profile for Alpinist, he started quizzing me about the early years. I told him
that my memories were fuzzy and unreliable. “Ask Ben about this stuff,” I said. Ben Smalley and I had been best friends since first grade.
L
OWTHER DID JUST AS
Alex suggested, contacting Smalley, who by 2011 had become an air force lieutenant. Smalley’s sardonic portrait of Alex as a kid and teenager rounds out the picture of the dorky misfit Alex genuinely considered himself, even after he started to attract the notice of the climbing world. According to Smalley, as told to Lowther,
Alex wore sweatpants to school. Every day. There was a gray pair and a blue pair. He wore T-shirts that were two sizes too big, and they said things on them like, “I hiked the Grand Canyon,” “Visit Yellowstone,” or “How to Identify Deer Tracks.” He was very good at capture the flag. Defensively. He could talk to you about the War of 1812 for an hour. It wasn’t so much that he was shy, as he just didn’t even bother to try. Like, he would speak to you if you spoke to him. He wore hoodies in class, always with the hood up, and he would just sit there, but he always knew the answer if a teacher called on him. He’s got sort of a Holden Caulfield thing going on, maybe, in that he’s always on the lookout for a phony.
When that passage was read out loud to Alex, he confessed, “Ben’s got me down.” All the details about his youthful persona, Alex confirmed. The passage stirred up other memories. “I still love sweats,” he said. “I never wear jeans.” And: “I had another T-shirt from Banff or Jasper, with a picture of a bear on it, but a bear with antlers. It read, ‘I am not a bear.’ It was part of some kind of don’t-feed-the-bears campaign.
“About the War of 1812—my dad gave me a book about decisive battles in history. The
Monitor
and the
Merrimack
, Hannibal crossing the Alps, that kind of thing. I loved history. It wasn’t that I hated school—just that I was an uncool kid. I had a hard time talking to strangers.”
In Lowther’s profile, Smalley went on:
His parents were not very happily married. His father would sit on the couch most nights, reading until he fell asleep. I would say [Alex] got worse in high school, actually. He withdrew further. He hung out with the kids who played Pokémon in the math room at lunch. During sophomore year, Alex got his first girlfriend. Her name was Elizabeth Thomas. She went by E.T. That should give you some idea of the social circle she ran in. I just don’t think Alex thought the typical high school stuff was for him. He considered himself more of a loner.
Says Alex, “E.T. was cool. Ben didn’t like her. She was half-Irish, half-Japanese. A nice girl, real smart. We were a couple for maybe three years.”
In high school, Alex consistently scored high marks, finishing with a weighted grade-point average of 4.8. Yet he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to go to college. At the last minute, he applied only to two branches of the University of California—at Davis and Berkeley. Accepted by both, he chose Berkeley.
The single year he spent at one of the elite bastions of higher learning was, Alex feels now, a waste of time. “I had vague plans to major in engineering,” he says. “But I didn’t make any friends at Berkeley. I can’t recall a single student or a single professor. I should have lived in a dorm, instead of the two-bedroom apartment a friend of our family let me sublet. I spent a year basically in isolation.
“I did have a job as a security guard. For fourteen dollars an hour,
I’d walk around by myself all night. I had a police radio. Sometimes I’d escort girls back to their dorms.
“The second semester, I stopped going to classes. I’d buy a loaf of bread and an apple and go out to Indian Rock”—a diminutive crag in the suburban Berkeley Hills—“and do laps. I just couldn’t hack college.” That summer, like most freshmen, he moved back home with his mother.
Alex’s parents’ divorce became final in May of his freshman year. Two months later, on July 18, his father was rushing through the Phoenix airport, trying to make a tight connection, when he dropped dead of a heart attack. Alex got the news when he came home from a long hike. He recalled the event to Alex Lowther:
The house was open, all the windows were open and stuff, but like, everything was dark; nobody was in the house. And, I was like, “Mom?”—“Mom?” And went and found Mom sitting outside in the pool. Sitting with her legs in the pool. Just sitting there crying. And she was just like, “Your dad died.” I don’t remember what she said, but basically like, “Your dad died,” and then she went to bed.
I don’t remember disbelieving her. But for all I knew, he could still be alive. I never saw a body. There was never a real funeral. This little can of ashes showed up one day, and people said he was dead. I read all the articles about him. For a while I would see people on the bike path. People who looked like Dad, with a big beard and just all big, and I would be like, “Oh!” And then, “Oh, that wasn’t him.”
Ben Smalley told Lowther, “I kind of had to yell at him about it. ‘Why aren’t you upset?’ I think deep down, Alex never did any mourning.”
“Did you mourn at all?” Lowther asked Alex.
“I was too young and angstful,” he answered. “I had too much anger.”
Alex clarifies: “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Mom when she told me Dad had died. It’s that my family doesn’t do funerals. Dad was cremated in Phoenix. There was a memorial service at Lake Tahoe. I thought, ‘Huh, I’ll never see him again.’ But there was no closure.”
Charles Honnold was fifty-five when he died. Alex was nineteen. The event crystallized Alex’s decision to drop out of Berkeley. Supported by the interest from his father’s life insurance bonds, he “borrowed” his mother’s minivan and set out for various California crags and the life of a dirtbag climber. In 2007, he bought a used Ford Econoline van that he converted into a cozy garret-on-wheels. Eight years later, after many home improvements, and despite his fame and unexpected wealth, Alex still lives in the van. His default residence is his mother’s house in Sacramento, where he spends a few weeks each year.
Whether or not he truly mourned his father’s death, the loss had a profound impact on Alex’s outlook on life. His mother’s parents had been devout Catholics, and both Stasia and Alex attended Catholic services when they were young. The effect was to turn Alex into a confirmed atheist. As he sardonically commented in a 2012 YouTube video, “At no point did I ever think there was ever anything going on with church. I always saw it as a bunch of old people eating stale wafers. . . .”
His father’s death brought home the
carpe diem
injunction to live the only life he has to the fullest. In a 2012 Q&A for
National Geographic Adventure
, Alex came up with a startling metaphor. He was asked, “If you don’t believe in God or an after-life, doesn’t that make this life all the more precious?”
Alex responded: “I suppose so, but just because something is precious doesn’t mean you have to baby it. Just like suburbanites who have a shiny new SUV that they are afraid to dent. What’s the point in having an amazing vehicle if you’re afraid to drive it?
“I’m trying to take my vehicle to new and interesting places. And I try my very best not to crash, but at least I take it out.”
The Regular Northwest Face route
on Half Dome begins with a 5.10c finger crack that happens to be one of my favorite pitches on the whole climb. The next two pitches are only 5.9 and 5.8. It was a good warm-up for the two thousand feet of climbing above me.
But then, on what’s normally the fourth pitch, I ran into the first bolt ladder. There are two variations that bypass that blank section on either side. I’d climbed first one, then the other, on my two roped free climbs of the route. On the left is the two-pitch Higbee ’Hedral, rated a stern 5.12a, first freed by Art Higbee on his 1976 ascent with Jim Erickson. On the right is the Huber ’Hedral, named after the German climber Alex Huber, full-on 5.11d. (’Hedral is slang for “dihedral,” a vertical inside corner in the rock. Thanks to Art and Alex for the handy alliteration of their last names!)
Even though the Huber variation is one grade easier, it’s less secure. You have to traverse across a wall that’s so smooth it’s like polished glass. I thought about what it would take, then told myself, Screw that, and chose the Higbee ’Hedral instead.
The crux 5.12a sequence comes in a short boulder problem off a big, comfortable ledge. It made, I thought, for secure soloing, since if I couldn’t connect the moves I thought I could jump off and land on the ledge. But those are some of the hardest moves on the whole route, and I had to shift my mentality from cruising up fun cracks to actually cranking on small holds. I laced my shoes up extra tight, then powered through the six-move boulder problem without hesitating.
The rest of the pitch was quite dirty. Half Dome is so much
higher in altitude than the other walls in the Valley that it has some of the feel of an alpine mountain. And with mountains, you get loose holds that you have to test before pulling on them. (Pulling loose a single hold, obviously, can spell the difference between life and death when you’re free soloing.) You also get dirt and even vegetation in the cracks. Because the free variations are tackled so seldom, they don’t get “gardened” by climbers the way the regular pitches do. It’s a scary business to be on rock that ought to be reasonable to climb, only to have your fingers scraping through wet dirt or your toes jammed on clumps of moss or scrawny little shrubs. But I followed the faint trail of chalk marks that Brad and I had left two days earlier, and managed to avoid most of the vegetation and dirt. As I rejoined the normal route, I relaxed and mentally shifted gears back into cruise mode. I had about a thousand feet of climbing above me until I got to the next hard pitch. I wanted to go slow and steady, so as not to get tired. A slow jog, rather than a sprint.
I had my iPod with headband ear buds so I could listen to tunes while I climbed. When the going got harder, I’d knock one earbud out. If it was really serious, both buds, so I wouldn’t be distracted. The headband then would just dangle from my neck. That day I was cycling through some songs by Eminem, especially “Lose Yourself.”
The beautiful day was holding steady, but I had no time to look around and admire the scenery. Scenery is what you get to enjoy when you’re belaying your partner on a conventional roped climb. When I’m free soloing, even on the easier pitches, I’m totally focused on what’s in front of me. The universe shrinks down to me and the rock. You don’t take a single hold for granted.
The sheer magnitude of the wall came home to me as I climbed. I realized that this project was way more serious than Moonlight Buttress, even though both routes are rated 5.12.
Pretty soon I was halfway up the route, a thousand feet off the deck. Here the line, as first climbed in 1957, suddenly traverses to
the right to access an enormous chimney system. The final section of blank rock before the chimney is normally tackled by a fifty-foot bolt ladder. The previous time I’d free climbed the route, I circumvented the bolt ladder via a 5.12c pitch, using the bolts for protection but not aid. But now as I was approaching the ladder, I got cold feet about soloing it. The pitch is extremely insecure: slopers and scoops, shallow indentations you can barely hold with flattened fingers, and which you have to “smear” with your feet, straining your ankles so that you can get as much friction as possible on the holds with the soles of your shoes. Then those moves are followed by a down mantle. It’s a tricky move, like lowering yourself off a table with your hands extended downward, palms gripping the edge of the ledge. Balance is everything, and it’s hard to look down to see where to place your feet. And the feet have to find a narrow ridge of granite on which you step before you can let go of the mantle and move on.
The free variation Higbee and Erickson worked out in 1976 breaks off to the left a pitch before the bolt ladder and circles around this whole section of the wall, rejoining the route another pitch above. I’d never climbed it, and I’d heard that it was loose and dirty, but suddenly adventurous 5.10 seemed a lot more fun than insecure 5.12c. The variation is a pretty devious line, as you climb a long 5.9 gully straight up, followed by a meandering 5.10b scuttle toward the right, after which you have to downclimb a hundred feet of 5.10 to get into the chimney system.
I broke off the normal route at a random point and started wandering upward, trying to find the 5.10 variation. But as I moved, I started to get confused about the line. The bushes I was climbing through gave me pause. There were no real signs of human presence here—no chalk marks from previous climbers, no fixed pitons, or even scars where they might have once been driven and removed. I started to worry that I was completely dropping the ball.
I was literally in the center of Half Dome, a thousand feet off the ground, possibly off-route, on dirt.
I said to myself, Holy shit! This is hardcore. I hope I can find my way back. It wasn’t true panic that I felt—just an uncomfortable anxiety. It would have helped a lot if I had climbed this variation before. But I guessed this is what I’d bargained for when I told Chris Weidner I wanted to keep the challenge “sporting.”