Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (6 page)

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Fear. It’s the most primal element in cutting-edge climbing, or indeed, in adventure of any kind. Even nonclimbers can recognize that fact, when they watch footage of me free soloing. That’s why the first question out of their mouths is usually, “Aren’t you afraid . . . ?” (They don’t have to finish the sentence—“that you’re going to die?”)

I’ve done a lot of thinking about fear. For me, the crucial question is not how to climb without fear—that’s impossible—but how to deal with it when it creeps into your nerve endings.

Interviewed later by Sender Films, my Valley buddy Nick Martino claimed, “Honnold’s on another level than anyone else out there. It’s like he doesn’t feel fear or any of the normal emotions that anybody else feels. He has this ability to just shut his brain off and do the sickest climbs that have ever been done.”

Thanks, Nick, but that just isn’t true. I feel fear just like the next guy. If there was an alligator nearby that was about to eat me, I’d feel pretty uncomfortable. In fact, the two worst doses of fear I’ve experienced in my life so far—both the result of heinous misadventures that sprang from seemingly minor mistakes—didn’t come when I was free soloing. If I learned anything from those two screwups, it’s never to take for granted even a casual outing in the backcountry.

It was the day after Christmas, 2004. I was nineteen. My dad
had died five months before, so I decided to hike up an easy peak that had been a favorite destination for both of us—Mount Tallac near Lake Tahoe. It’s all of 9,739 feet above sea level, but it rises a respectable 3,250 feet from its base. I’d climbed it a ton of times, but never in winter. We had actually scattered some of Dad’s ashes on the summit the previous summer, shortly after he died.

In Dad’s closet, I found an old pair of snowshoes. I’d never snowshoed before—never even done much of anything in the snow. As it turned out, they weren’t very good snowshoes for this sort of outing—they didn’t have crampons attached to the webbing. But I didn’t know any better.

As it also turns out, the snow had fallen about a month before, and it had been dry ever since. So the snow had turned to a hard, icy crust.

I didn’t want to take the slower, circuitous normal trail, with its ups and downs, so I just headed up one of the couloirs. I was tramping along, but the surface underfoot really sucked. And there was a crazy wind that day. I got most of the way up the couloir before I said to myself, This is bad. I tried to turn around to descend, and I just slipped.

I remember sliding down the hill, whipping out of control. I went at least several hundred feet. I had time to think
, Oh my God, I’m going to die!

I came to in the rocks. I’d been knocked out cold, whether for mere seconds or for longer, I couldn’t tell. I think I must have hit the rocks with my feet, then rag-dolled over and crushed my face. I had a broken hand. I thought my leg was broken, but it turned out it was just badly bruised. I had a punctured sinus cavity in my face and several chipped teeth. I’d been wearing gloves, but the thumbs had torn off—I must have been trying to self-arrest with my hands. The skin on my thumbs was like raw meat, as if they’d been sliced with a carrot peeler.

My mom had given me a cell phone for Christmas. I got it out and managed to call her. I don’t remember this, but Mom later claimed my first words were, “Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing?” Mom called 911.

The normal rescue helicopter couldn’t get in to where I had fallen, so they brought in a California Highway Patrol chopper. It took a while. Pretty soon I was lucid again. I could see lakes in the distance that I recognized. But I was still asking myself, “Why am I here?”

I must have been in shock. All the fear had occupied those few seconds of whipping down the icy slope, in the form of sheer terror and the conviction that I was about to die, but now I felt a deeper sort of dread: How badly am I hurt? Am I going to get out of here all right?

There was an Indian family out snowshoeing who came along from below. Two strapping twenty-five-year-old lads and their parents. They helped load me into the chopper. Within minutes I was in an emergency room in Reno. It would take months for me to fully recover, especially because I kept climbing while my broken hand was healing. I still have scar tissue on my right thumb where the skin was scraped off.

This is still the only real accident I’ve suffered. And what a complete debacle it was, thanks to my ignorance of snow and snowshoes. If this happened today, I’d be mortified. But I’d also self-assess, then hike out under my own steam. It’s embarrassing to have to be rescued by helicopter. When I tell the story today, now that I’ve done so much serious climbing, the only way to treat it is as comedy. Maybe farce.

I’d started keeping my climbing “bible” the previous month. That day, writing left-handed because I’d broken my right hand, I recorded

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The most scared I’ve ever gotten while climbing came when I was twenty-one, a couple of years after my snowshoe fiasco. I was with my second serious girlfriend, Mandi (short for Amanda) Finger. She was a solid 5.13 climber I’d met at Jailhouse Rock, a sport-climbing crag near Sonora. She was five or six years older than me, but we hit it off. We climbed together at Joshua Tree and Red Rocks near Las Vegas. We even talked about going to Europe.

Anyway, on this particular day we decided to climb a three-pitch 5.12 route called the Nautilus, in the Needles, a range of granite spires near the Kern River. The routes are trad climbs with the occasional bolt anchor. The Needles as a whole have a well-earned reputation for being intimidating.

The Nautilus is actually on the east face of a formation called the Witch. It takes a long and tricky approach, winding between and around other towers, then scrambling up to the base, just to get to the start of the route.

I led the whole way. The first pitch is a classic 5.12b. I climbed it in style, thinking, “Ah, sweet!” According to the topo, or route diagram, that I had with me, the next pitch was 11+, followed by a 5.10 finish. I didn’t have any major trouble with the second pitch, but at the top I saw that the bolt anchors were way out in space, on the blank wall to the right, away from the crack system I’d climbed. It looked like a 5.11 traverse just to get to the anchors to clip in and belay.

So I said, Screw that. I’ll just keep going. Combine the third pitch with the second in one long lead. I had a seventy-meter rope, so I figured it would reach.

What I didn’t know was that the last pitch was loaded with loose, refrigerator-size stones that you had to lieback past—“death blocks,” as climbers call them. We were in shade, it was cold, and by now I’d developed serious rope drag from all the bends in the rope as it linked the pieces of pro I’d placed on the previous pitch. There I was, doing strenuous liebacking, trying not to dislodge any of the death blocks, and the rope drag was making it really hard to pull up any slack. On top of that, I couldn’t get in any protection, as I’d used up most of my rack on the third pitch. All I had left was a Black Alien—the smallest cam anybody manufactures—a few nuts, and three carabiners.

The climbing just felt too hard. No way it was 5.10. Later I found another topo that rated the last pitch at 11+. Basically, I was getting gripped—grasping the holds too hard out of fear and uncertainty.

Mandi had been stuck in her belay way below me for about an hour. Now she yelled up encouraging comments, like, “I’m cold! I’m scared! Can we go down?”

If I could have gotten in an anchor to rappel off, I probably would have gone down. Instead, I kept fighting my way upward. I placed no pro in the last forty or fifty feet. If I came off there, I’d take a really long, bad fall, with all those big blocks to worry about pulling loose or cutting the rope. The dread was mounting. I was seriously scared.

The last pitch ends in a little roof that caps the whole route. I got to just below the roof, but here the rock turned all licheny and dirty. The rope drag was horrible. There was a last mantle move to get over the roof, but I couldn’t figure out which way to do it. At last I found a crack to get the Black Alien in, and I just busted for the top. I did a really hard move, a full-on iron cross, crimping on tiny holds.

It was so fucked. As I sat on top, belaying Mandi, I had only
one meter of rope left. I’d used up the other sixty-nine linking the last two pitches. And I could barely pull up the rope, the drag was so bad.

That’s the most frightened I’ve ever been climbing, and it came not on a free solo but on a conventional roped climb. All because of an impulsive decision to skip the bolt anchor and an ignorance of just how difficult the top pitch was.

Today, I would have handled the whole thing better. I’ve got more tools in my tool kit now. Maybe I could have downclimbed, or placed less pro on the second pitch so I had more left for the finish.

But as I sat there, emotionally exhausted, hauling the heavy rope that was tied to Mandi, I thought I was ready to give up climbing for good. Maybe I should go back to college, I said to myself
, and finish my education.

Of course, by the very next day, everything seemed different. I wasn’t about to give up climbing. I’d just make sure to avoid getting stuck in cul-de-sacs like that last pitch on the Nautilus.

Easier said than done.

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On September 6, 2008, a thousand feet up the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, as I pushed through dirty cracks and vegetation, wondering if I’d gotten off route on the Higbee-Erickson free variation, I sensed the threat of another cul-de-sac. My anxiety wasn’t ratcheted up to the level of genuine fear, but it got my attention. So I focused hard, took a deep breath, and sorted out my options.

I told myself it wasn’t a do-or-die situation. Climbing down is almost always harder than climbing up, but I still felt that I could have downclimbed the whole route so far, all thousand feet of it, if I had to. For that matter, if I got into a truly nasty predicament, I could always sit and wait, even for a day or two, until some other
climbers came along, ask to tie in with them, and finish the climb as their probably unwelcome guest. “Hitchhiking,” I call it. Other climbers in Yosemite have chosen that means of escape, or even have had to be rescued by helicopter, but I’ve never had to resort to either gambit, thank God—except for my ignominious chopper rescue on Mount Tallac, but that wasn’t climbing. On Half Dome, “hitchhiking” would have really sucked, and a helicopter rescue would have been even worse.

As I later realized, I had climbed too high before traversing right. For all I know, on that traverse I was inventing a new variation to the Higbee-Erickson free variation, charting new waters. The variation is supposed to end with a hundred-foot downclimb of a 5.10 finger crack. I actually had to downclimb 150 feet. Eventually, though, I found some old nylon slings hanging from pitons, and that bolstered my confidence. But then I found it hard to get my fat fingers into the 5.10 crack. I could only lodge the first knuckle in a crack where other climbers—Lynn Hill, for example—could have sunk all three knuckles on each finger. So the downclimb felt distressingly “thin,” harder than 5.10, and the pitch took me a long time. In all, the variation cost me a ton of time—in actuality, maybe fifteen minutes, though it seemed an eternity—and a lot of stress, and I was relieved to finally get back onto the clean, well-traveled path.

I put on my headband iPod again and switched back into autopilot mode for the next five hundred feet of chimney climbing. It felt great to be in a clean, secure chimney. A pleasant routine of squirming my back, stemming my feet, palming, and repeating for hundreds of feet. I took it slow and steady, enjoying the climbing. And that brought me to Big Sandy, an enormous ledge system 1,600 feet up the wall.

So far, I’d eaten none of my food and drunk none of my water. Big Sandy isn’t the only place on the route where you can sit down,
but it’s such a spacious ledge you could have a barbecue there with friends (if you could get them up there in the first place). I spent a few minutes taking off my shoes and relaxing. It had taken me about two hours of climbing to get here, and now I needed a breather. I ate my bars and drank the water, so I wouldn’t have to carry the weight through the next hard pitches. Some climbers might have tossed the plastic flask once it was empty, but I’ve always believed in packing out your trash, so I stuck it back in my pocket. Soon enough, I retightened my shoes, set my iPod to repeat Eminem, and started climbing again.

The day was getting warmer, even though I was still in shadow. At some point I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my waist, cinching it with an over-and-under tuck of the sleeves. My short rest stop hadn’t really felt like relief, because I knew the hardest part of the climb was still above me. That final challenge hung over me the whole time I sat on Big Sandy, ramping up my concentration and intensity for the crux to come.

Resting can be a double-edged sword. When you’re free soloing, the pain in your feet and your fatigue just seem to vanish. When you rest, those annoyances come back. You have to snap out of it and get serious again.

The next three pitches above Big Sandy are called the Zig-Zags, presumably for the single, zigzagging crack/corner system they follow. Rated 5.11d, 5.10b, and 5.11c, they’ve always seemed harder to me. Maybe it’s because I happen to have huge fingers, but the thin crack set in a steep, polished corner has always felt more like 5.12. Aesthetically, the Zig-Zags represent the best Yosemite has to offer, perfect clean corners with staggering exposure. But I wasn’t thinking about the amazing view of the Valley as I carefully liebacked my way up the first tenuous pitch.