The Impossible Climb Read online

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Mark Synnott

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Title page artwork by Clay Waldman, climbingmaps.com

  Photograph on this page of Cathedral Ledge © Peter Doucette

  Photograph on this page of Great Trango © Mark Synnott

  Photograph on this page of El Capitan © Christian George

  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Synnott, Mark, author.

  Title: The impossible climb : Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life / Mark Synnott.

  Description: New York, New York : Dutton, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018007271 | ISBN 9781101986646 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101986653 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Honnold, Alex. | Mountaineers—United States—Biography. | Free climbing—California—El Capitan.

  Classification: LCC GV199.92.H67 S96 2018 | DDC 796.522092 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007271

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_2

  For

  Tommy,

  Lilla,

  Matt,

  Will, and

  Hampton

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  Part One

  YOUTH

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The Hon Is Going to Solo El Cap”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Crazy Kids of America

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Vision of the Stonemasters’ Lightning

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Stone Monkey

  Part Two

  THE PROFESSIONAL WORLD

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Crashing the Gravy Train on the Vertical Mile

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Secret Weapon, Mr. Safety, and Xiao Pung

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nonprofit

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Secret Dawn Walls

  Part Three

  TOPPING OUT

  CHAPTER NINE

  Amygdala

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Source

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Her Attitude Is Awesome”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Fun

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prologue

  The Ditch, as climbers sometimes call Yosemite Valley, typically remains summer hot well into September, but a rogue cold front had blown in overnight. A wan sun slouched low to the east, barely discernible through a thick, overcast sky. Tiny droplets of water saturated the air. Alex wondered, Is the rock getting slippery? The friction still felt okay, probably because a stiff breeze was drying the stone as quickly as the moisture-laden air was wetting it. But the rock had absorbed the raw gray cold, and that was starting to bother his feet. His toes were a little numb, and the size 42 shoes felt sloppy on the glacier-polished granite. He wished he’d worn the 41s.

  Years earlier, when he first contemplated free soloing El Capitan, Alex had made a list of all the crux sections on Freerider, the parts that would require careful study and extensive rehearsal. The traverse to Round Table Ledge, the Enduro Corner, the Boulder Problem, the downclimb into the Monster, and the slab section on pitch 6, six hundred feet off the deck, which he now confronted. Of all the various cruxes on the 3,000-foot-high route, this one haunted him most, and for a simple reason: It’s a friction climb that is entirely devoid of grips on which to pull or stand. Like walking up glass, thought Alex.

  He couldn’t help thinking about the fact that it had spit him off before. It’s only rated 5.11, which, while still expert-level climbing, is three grades below Alex’s maximum of 5.14. But unlike the overhanging limestone routes in Morocco that Alex could bully into submission by cracking his knuckles on the positively shaped holds, the crux here required trusting everything to a type of foothold called a smear. As the name implies, a smear involves pasting the sticky-rubber shoe sole against the rock. Whether the shoe sticks depends on many factors, including, critically, the angle at which it presses the rock. The best angle is found by canting one’s body out away from the wall as far as possible without toppling over backward. This weights the foot more perpendicular to the stone, generating the most friction available. The more a climber can relax, the better a smear feels. Conversely, a tense or timid climber instinctively leans in toward the rock, questing for a nonexistent purchase with the hands. To rely solely on such a delicate balance between the necessary adhesion and teetering past the tipping point in a high-consequence situation is perhaps the most dreaded move a rock climber can encounter.

  Alex had climbed this section of El Cap twenty times and fallen once on this move. A guy who keeps numerical records of every climb he has done since high school, he had noted to himself in recent days that 5 percent of his attempts at this move had gone awry. And those were low-consequence situations; he had worn a rope clipped to a bolt two feet below his waist.

  He had obsessed about free soloing El Capitan for nine years, nearly a third of his life. By now he had analyzed every possible angle. “Some things are so cool, they’re worth risking it all,” he had told me in Morocco. This was the last big free solo on his list, and if he could pull it off, perhaps he might start winding things down, maybe get married, start a family, spend more time working on his foundation. He loved life and had no intention of dying young, going out in a blaze of glory. And so one in twenty wasn’t going to cut it. He needed to get this move, along with the other crux sections, as close to 100 percent as possible.

  But Alex wasn’t thinking any of this. He had trained himself not to let his mind wander when he was on the rock. He was famous, after all, for his ability to put fear in a box and set it on an out-of-the-way shelf in the back of his mind. The life questions, the analyses—he saved that stuff for when he was hanging out in his van, hiking, or riding his bike. At that moment, he was just having fun and not thinking about anything except climbing and climbing well.

  Details, whether they rose to the surface of his mind or not, did factor into the climbing equation he was in the midst of solving: how he wasn’t sure how his right foot felt because his big toe was slightly numb, or how the callus on the tip of his left index finger seemed glassy on the cold rock, or that his peripheral vision, key for picking up all the subtle ripples and depressions in the rock, diminished when he had his hood
up, as he did now.

  Back in the 1960s, when this section of El Cap was pioneered, the first ascensionist drilled a quarter-inch hole in the rock here, hammered in an expansion bolt, clipped an étrier to it, and stood up in this stirrup to reach past the blankness. That bolt (since replaced with a much beefier three-eighths-inch stainless steel version) was still right here, next to Alex’s ankle.

  Balancing on his left foot, Alex lifted his right leg high and squeegeed his toe onto the blank seventy-five-degree-angle rock. Trusting more than feeling the friction, he rocked the full weight of his body onto this smear.

  It held. But only for a second.

  Oftentimes, a foot slip can be checked by bearing down on the handholds. But Alex’s palms were laid flat against the smooth, holdless slab; nothing counteracted the pitiless pull of gravity. Alex was weightless and picking up speed when the heel of his right foot hit a bulge in the wall, snapping his ankle over hard. But before he could register any pain, the rope tied to his harness came taut and he skidded to a stop. It could have been a short, routine fall like the other time he’d slipped, but Alex had chosen not to clip to the bolt protecting the crux, because he wanted to feel out, and perhaps ease into, being ropeless on this section of Freerider. He dangled some thirty feet below where he had come off.

  “Ow, ow,” whimpered Sanni, who was now only ten feet down and to the right of Alex. While he was in the air, Sanni had tried to reel in a handful of rope to shorten the fall. She was pulling with her left arm, her right down by her hip. When Alex’s 160 pounds hit the end of the rope, the force of the fall pulled Sanni up violently, snapping her against the tether that connected her to the anchor and slamming her left arm against the cold granite.

  “Are you okay?” Alex asked his girlfriend.

  “I’m okay, it’s just a bruise,” she called up, her breaths coming fast and ragged. “Are you?”

  “I think I’m okay, but my ankle really hurts.” Alex looked down and saw his right ankle swelling. Bright red blood was splotched across the wall around him. He pressed his fingers into his knee. It felt spongy and full of fluid, like something had burst inside of it.

  “I’m gonna try to weight it,” he said. He put down his foot on a small shelf and tried to step up. Lightning bolts of pain shot up his leg. “Okay, that feels really bad, sickeningly bad.”

  Alex’s first foray onto Freerider for the season could have been worse. Had this been his free solo attempt, he’d be dead at the base of the wall.

  CATHEDRAL LEDGE, NEW HAMPSHIRE

  PART ONE

  Youth

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The Hon Is Going to Solo El Cap”

  Jimmy Chin took a deep breath, puffed out his cheeks, and exhaled slowly. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he whispered. “Can you keep a secret?” We stood chest to chest in the Jackson Hole aerial tramway, crammed in with about a hundred other ruddy-faced skiers. It was February 2016, and I was in the Tetons with two of my sons, ages seventeen and fourteen, for their February school vacation. They huddled a few feet away, ignoring me and trying to catch a glimpse of the mountain through a foggy plexiglass window. We had run into Jimmy a few minutes earlier in the line for the tram. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year.

  “Of course,” I whispered back. “What’s up?”

  Jimmy leaned in until his face was a few inches from mine. His eyes grew wide. “The Hon is going to solo El Cap this fall,” he said.

  “What? You’re messing with me, right?”

  “I swear.”

  I looked around to see if anyone had overheard, but everyone was grooving to AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” which pumped from a speaker overhead. Jimmy stared back at me, his mouth hanging open.

  “He told you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Chai and I are making a film about it. The only people who know about this have all signed NDAs, so please keep it on the down low.” Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is Jimmy’s wife, and, like him, she’s an award-winning documentary filmmaker.

  “Is he doing Freerider?”

  “Yep.”

  “When?”

  “Probably in early November.”

  As the reality of what I had just been told sank in, the core of my body quivered. El Capitan. Without a rope. Whoa.

  I had climbed Freerider. Or, I should say, I had attempted it. I got to the top after several days of brutal effort, but not before the climb spit me off numerous times along the way, ropes and protective equipment arresting each fall. On a few of the hardest parts, the cruxes, I simply couldn’t hang on to the fingertip jams and the flaring cracks where my hands wouldn’t stick. So I had been forced to use “aid,” meaning I hung on mechanical devices I slotted into cracks in the rock. I cheated. Freerider is so named because it’s a “free” climb, which means it can be ascended with nothing more than your hands and feet, the rope acting only as a safety net, in case you slip off. The very best climbers can scale Freerider without aid, but I couldn’t think of a single person who hadn’t fallen at least once on the way up.

  So what in the world was Alex Honnold thinking? El Capitan is 3,000 feet of sheer, gleaming, glacier-polished wall. And he planned to attempt it alone. Untethered. With no equipment. No fail-safe. Hoping for precision in each grab, in each step. One slip, a toe placed a centimeter too high, a shoe canted off a few degrees, a hold grabbed with the wrong hand—and Alex would plummet through the air, possibly screaming, as the ground rushed upward at 120 miles per hour. If he fell off the Boulder Problem, which is the crux of the route, 2,100 feet up the side of the wall, he could be in the air for as long as fourteen seconds—about the time it would take me to run the length of a football field.

  I knew it was Alex’s dream to be the first to free solo El Capitan—I just never thought it would actually happen. When I took him on his first international expedition to Borneo in 2009, he confided to me that he was thinking about it. In the ensuing years, Alex joined me on more climbing expeditions, to Chad, Newfoundland, and Oman. Along the way, I experienced many classic “Alexisms,” like him explaining at the base of the wall in Borneo why he didn’t climb with a helmet, even on dangerously loose rock (he didn’t own one); or the time in Chad’s Ennedi Desert that he sat yawning and examining his cuticles while Jimmy Chin and I faced down four knife-wielding bandits (he thought they were little kids). Perhaps the most classic Alexism of all occurred below a 2,500-foot sea cliff in Oman, when he strapped our rope to his back and told me that he’d stop when he thought it was “appropriate to rope up” (the appropriate place never appeared). But Alex and I also spent countless hours talking about philosophy, religion, science, literature, the environment, and his dream to free solo a certain cliff.

  I often played his foil, especially when it came to the subject of risk. It’s not that I’m against the idea of free soloing—I do it myself on occasion. I just wanted Alex to think about how close he was treading to the edge. Like most climbers, I had an unwritten list of the people who seemed to be pushing it too hard—and Alex Honnold was at the top. By the time I met him, most of the other folks on my list had already met an early demise (and the rest weren’t far behind). I liked Alex, and it didn’t seem like there were many people willing to call him out, so I felt okay playing the role of father figure. And Alex didn’t seem to mind. In fact, it seemed as though he enjoyed engaging me on the topic of risk, and he climbed over my arguments with the same skill and flair with which he dispatched finger cracks and overhangs. What it all came down to was that for Alex Honnold, a life lived less than fully is a fate worse than dying young.

  I looked over at my two sons, still peering through the tram window, eager to ski. Alex was only twenty-nine years old. If he allowed himself to make it to my age, he might have more things outside of himself to live for; presumably his desire for risk would diminish in kind—as it had for me.

  But most of all, I wondered,
now that Jimmy had burdened me with the knowledge that this was happening, what I should do about it. Should I try to talk Alex out of it? Could I? Or should I support this mad enterprise and help him achieve his dream?

  * * *

  —

  “COME WITH US,” I said to Jimmy, when we off-loaded from the tram. “We’re heading into Rock Springs. There’s a ton of good snow back there.”

  “I want to,” he replied, “but I can’t. I have a lot on my plate right now. I just came up to clean out the pipes. I have to get back to work.”

  He fist-bumped Will and Matt, then leaned in to get me.

  “I think I want to write about this,” I said, as our gloved fists connected. I had quickly decided that it wasn’t my place to try to stop Alex. And if it had been one of my sons or my daughter committing to a challenge like this, I’d try to have the same respect for their decision. It would be hard, but I’d try.

  “Yeah, I figured. I’ll call you,” said Jimmy, jabbing his poles into the snow and pushing off. A few seconds later, he disappeared into the gloom.

  * * *

  —

  JIMMY AND I SPOKE FREQUENTLY over the next few months. It had been a year since he and Chai had debuted Meru, the first film they co-directed. Meru tells the story of a last great problem of Himalayan climbing, called the Shark’s Fin, which Jimmy, Conrad Anker, and Renan Ozturk finally solved in 2011. Well-made mountaineering films usually have their moment within the climbing community; then they fade into obscurity. But Jimmy, with Chai’s help, had turned Meru into a smash hit. It won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, was shortlisted for an Oscar, and finished out as the highest-grossing documentary in 2015.

  Hollywood had discovered Jimmy and Chai. Companies like Sony, Universal, and 21st Century Fox wanted to know what they were doing next. Jimmy told me that one day he was cold-called by a guy named Evan Hayes, the president of a production company called Parkes+MacDonald. Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald are legendary Hollywood producers. In 1994, they helped start DreamWorks SKG motion picture studio, where they went on to produce three Oscar-winning films in a row—American Beauty, Gladiator, and A Beautiful Mind. Hayes had just finished producing the film Everest, a drama inspired by the 1996 Everest tragedy that formed the basis of Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. Hayes loved the climbing genre and wanted to make another film in the same space. And he had been in the audience at Sundance when Meru got a five-minute standing ovation.