The Impossible Climb Read online

  Hayes tossed out some ideas he had for mountaineering-related films, but none of them captured Jimmy’s imagination. They were about to hang up when Jimmy decided to share a half-formed notion that had been floating in his mind for the past few months.

  “Well, there is this one idea I’ve been playing with,” he said. And then he told Hayes about Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest free soloist. He didn’t mention El Capitan, because at that moment he had no idea Alex was thinking about the free solo. In all the years he had known Alex, he had never once asked him about it. And Alex hadn’t yet told a soul that he was seriously considering it.

  “That’s it,” said Hayes. “That’s the film.”

  Jimmy backtracked. “Well, um, yeah, but I’m not really sure I actually want to make that film. I need to think about it.”

  Later, he talked it over with Chai, and they decided she should call Alex to size him up, ascertain if he had enough depth to hold together a feature-length documentary. It was during the call with Chai that Alex mentioned, ever so casually, that he might want to free solo El Capitan. Chai isn’t a climber, so the significance of what Alex had just dropped didn’t immediately register.

  “When Chai told me about El Cap, I backed right off,” Jimmy told me. “That’s when I knew that I really didn’t want to make the film. When you live in this world and you see the aftermath . . . dying isn’t that glorious.” For the next two months, Jimmy avoided Hayes. And he hardly slept.

  Jimmy needed advice and direction, but he hadn’t bounced the idea off any of his mentors because he worried they would judge him harshly for even considering it. Then he found himself in Manhattan at the same time as his old friend Jon Krakauer. As they strolled down an avenue on the Upper East Side, Jimmy told Krakauer about his idea for the documentary. He said it was a story about “following your dreams” and the choices that one makes when faced with life-or-death decisions. Then he mentioned that Alex had said he was thinking he might free solo El Cap as part of the project.

  According to Jimmy, Krakauer replied, “Oh, so that’s really what it’s about.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” replied Jimmy.

  “Well, he’s going to do it with or without you, and if he wants it filmed, you’re the people to do it.”

  “So? Should I do it?” asked Jimmy.

  “I’ll watch it,” said Krakauer.

  A lot had to happen. A lot had already happened. This story is about what led up to an impossible climb. To understand what Alex would soon attempt, you need to know some things about how he lived and the world in which he became the man he is. It’s a climbing world. Not everyone lives in it. But I’m happy, even proud, to say I still do. I guess you could say that I’ve been lucky that my path in life happened to intersect with Alex Honnold’s and Jimmy Chin’s, and with those of a whole bunch of other people who helped lay the foundation for what was going to happen.

  Alex was going to climb beyond himself, beyond all of us.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Crazy Kids of America

  What happens when you die?” I asked my dad one day, as he sat reading The New York Times in the sunroom of our family’s brick colonial.

  My father lowered his paper and looked me in the eyes. “You’re worm food, Mark.” Snapping his paper back into place, he went back to his reading, just like that, as I stood there dumbfounded.

  That night, while lying in bed, I turned the brief conversation over and over in my ten-year-old mind. If there’s nothing on the other side, I reasoned, if heaven and hell are figments of our collective imaginations, then death must be absolute—an eternal void from which there is no return. Worm food. Forever.

  From then on, contemplation of my own nonexistence consumed me. How does one become reconciled, I wondered, to the idea that at some unknown future date one will cease to exist? What was I supposed to do with my limited time on earth? I tried to rationalize my way out of this existential conundrum, but the thoughts began to loop endlessly inside my head—and I couldn’t find the off switch.

  * * *

  —

  MY IDOL AT THE TIME was Evel Knievel. My dad bought me a windup Evel on his stunt bike, and I spent hours launching the plastic superhero off elaborate ramps built with discarded shoe boxes and shingles. I loved the spectacular wipeouts when he failed to clear the Matchbox cars and toy soldiers I’d line up underneath him. I turned to the real thing with no hesitation. On a long, unused dirt driveway behind the home of some senior citizens, my friends and I used two-by-fours and plywood to build a ten-foot-high ramp-to-ramp jump. The ramps were about twice our height and prone to collapsing when we hit them at high speed on our bikes. I crashed so many times, and required so many stitches, that authorities at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital questioned my father on suspicion of child abuse.

  At night I would wait for my parents to fall asleep, and then I’d sneak out of the house through the window of my third-floor room. I’d slide down the slate shingles, hang off the gutter, and quietly jump down onto the flat copper roof above my dad’s study. A quick shimmy down a drainpipe and I was free. Sometimes, I would strip myself naked, save for shoes and socks, and streak through the neighborhood playing ding-dong ditch. I’d ring a house’s doorbell, retreating to a nearby bush to hide. When my bleary-eyed neighbors opened their front doors to see who had rung the doorbell in the middle of the night, I’d shoot them with bottle rockets accurately launched from the end of a Wiffle ball bat that I’d sawed in half and glued back together into the shape of a tommy gun.

  My discovery of risk taking as an existential salve guided me to long friendships with people who more or less shared this habit, but my young friends often lacked motivation for my style of daredevilry. One day, while I was rooting around in my father’s den, I found a box of fancy wooden matches with gold tips that he must have picked up on one of his business trips. I had a clandestine site in the woods behind my house where I set afire all manner of things, from candles and birch bark to bottle rockets and Black Snakes novelty fireworks, so I pocketed the matches.

  On the way to the bus stop the next morning, I decided the matches were too precious to burn. As I held up one of my new treasures between my fingers, the other kids in my neighborhood gazed in awe.

  “Is that real gold?” asked one of them.

  “It is indeed,” I replied.

  “Can I have one?” he asked.

  The bus stop was next to a small, shallow, scum-filled pond. It was early winter, and a thin veneer of ice covered the black muddy water. Bobbing in the ice about fifty yards from shore was a foam takeout coffee cup.

  “Retrieve that cup,” I told him, “and this thing is yours.”

  Seconds later, he was off, breaking the ice with his fists as he half swam, half waded through the freezing swampy water. He never made it to school that day, but he got the match—and became the first of the “Golden Fellows.”

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE NEXT couple of weeks, the gold-tipped matches kept my friends motivated as we worked our way through an important mission I laid out for the Golden Fellows—to dance on the chimney of every house in the neighborhood. As each of my friends, from the scrawniest to the beefiest, found his route up a typically snowy roof and did his Solid Gold moves on or above its ridge, we’d laugh and whoop. The boy would scramble down, a grin splashed across his face, burning with the adventure, awaiting his prize. I’d make a ceremony of the presentation of the Golden Match in the middle of the icy night.

  When I handed out the final gold-tipped match, it was like the Once-ler felling the last Truffula Tree in The Lorax—everyone packed up and went home. There were still several houses left on the list, so I persevered alone, scaling drainpipes, friction climbing up slate roofs, and going hand over hand across gutters, but it just wasn’t the same dancing my little jigs on top of people’s houses without anybody watching
and cheering me on.

  * * *

  —

  EVERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON my mom would push us kids into the back of our lemon-colored Chrysler station wagon and pick my dad up in the parking garage below the Bank of Boston. There, my dad would assume the wheel for the three-hour drive up to our vacation house in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. My mom sat next to him, her primary job to keep him plied with cans of Coors and to act as a sounding board as my dad vented about the irritations and venal corruptions of the world of banking in which he lived much of his life.

  My sister and I slid around the back seat, seat belt–less, bored, annoying each other however we could. I learned that if I developed what my dad called “diarrhea of the mouth”—a common tactic was to chant the slogan for Coca-Cola, which at the time was “Coke is it!,” but add an “sh” to “it”—my parents would offer me money to shut up. The pay was only twenty-five cents, but with this I could play a game of Pac-Man at an inn near our house, or I could get a Charleston Chew at the candy store. My parents, I’m sure, had no idea how carefully I followed their conversations during these silent contests or how deeply they resonated. All these years later I can still remember the names of all the people who were trying to undermine my dad, who was a senior vice president. My obsession with the black eternal void of death that was coming down the pike made me vitally aware that how you spent your time alive mattered. Banking, or anything like it, certainly didn’t sound like time well spent. Years later, when my dad would ask me what I planned to do with myself after graduating from college with a philosophy degree, I’d tell him in all seriousness, “I’ve decided not to have a career.”

  * * *

  —

  IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, I used the Golden Fellows model to start a new club that I called Crazy Kids of America, which quickly drew in my ski-racing buddies. The club included some noteworthy characters, including Tyler Hamilton, a compact ball of energy who always had a sly sparkle in his eyes, and who’d go on to become Lance Armstrong’s right-hand man in the Tour de France, and Rob Frost, who was small for his age but scrappier than a junkyard dog, and who is now a high-angle cameraman and filmmaker. Even Chris Davenport, today a legendary extreme skier, joined us occasionally for Crazy Kid missions, his catlike athletic ability and rambunctious daredevil spirit making him a perfect fit for our crew.

  I had learned from the Golden Fellows that the reward for completing a stunt shouldn’t be something in finite supply, so for Crazy Kids of America, I created ranks. But instead of captain, sergeant, lieutenant, and so forth, I used the various superheroes—Spider-Man, Batman, Robin, Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman—and when I ran out of superheroes, I added on Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Each rank was further divided into junior, middle, and senior. Depending on how dangerous the mission was, you could gain a certain number of ranks.

  Our specialty was pole-vaulting across ice-choked rivers with bamboo ski gates that we’d filch from our ski team lodge at Wildcat Mountain. A few of my top lieutenants—including a senior Aquaman and a junior Batman—and I became highly skilled vaulters, propelling ourselves across fifteen-foot spans of water. Of course, we had picked the sturdiest gates from the supply, leaving the rest of the kids to choose from the leftover bamboo poles, which were flimsy and prone to snapping in half at the very worst times.

  Every mission followed a similar routine. A top-ranking Crazy Kid and I would find a jump across the small river that ran past the Wildcat Base Lodge. We’d pull off the feat by the skin of our teeth; then I’d offer up a few ranks, and my senior superheroes and I would apply intense peer pressure to the lower-ranked kids to follow suit. “You’ve totally got this, dude,” I’d call to a junior Wonder Woman from the far side of the river, rubbing my hands together in anticipation of a spectacular failure.

  Many a fledgling Crazy Kid took what we called the Nestea Plunge. A new recruit once showed up wearing his ski boots (rather than the Moon Boots the rest of us wore) and then proceeded to attempt a varsity-level pole vault from an ice-slicked rock over the most turbulent section of the river. We knew it was sheer folly to shoot for Spider-Man rank without some practice first, but who were we to stop him if he wanted to try? He missed badly and completely disappeared underwater. He resurfaced a short distance downstream and, like the good Crazy Kid that he was, scrapped his way back to shore.

  Our ski coaches pretended they were unaware of their team’s extracurricular activities, but they must have noticed the rapidly dwindling supply of ski gates and our banter about who had risen to which rank. And in a show of tacit approval at the end-of-the-season banquet, they let me give out my own Crazy Kids of America awards. Each Crazy Kid got a cardboard Burger King crown on which I had pasted our logo—a hand-drawn pencil rendering of a kid pole-vaulting over a river. The top-ranked kids got parachute men, which we saved to launch off the top of Cathedral Ledge, a five-hundred-foot cliff in nearby North Conway.

  Most of the parents appreciated my contribution to New Hampshire youth culture, “Live free or die” and all that, but a few of them thought I was reckless and a bad influence. At least one kid, after taking the Nestea Plunge and going home nearly hypothermic, was forbidden from further engagement in our club’s activities.

  * * *

  —

  FROM WHERE MY DAD was sitting in his station wagon, he could clearly see the vertical wall of granite through an opening in the towering pine trees that lined the base of Cathedral Ledge. In the foreground stood two fifteen-year-old boys. One of them was yours truly, his hyperactive son, who had stayed back in kindergarten because he was a biter—and couldn’t count, do his ABCs, or tie his shoes.

  Perhaps it was the tightly laced Converse Chuck Taylors on my feet, or the hardware-store white utility rope neatly coiled over my shoulder, or the fact that my buddy Jeff Chapman, a top Crazy Kids lieutenant and a frequent partner in crime, stood by my side, but for once, my dad—who had an uncanny knack for failing to observe much of anything—realized that something was up.

  “Hey,” he called over, his arm hanging out the window of the K-car. “What exactly are you guys planning to do here?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” I replied. “Don’t worry about us. Just come back in a few hours to pick us up.”

  My dad gave the scene a good hard look, then delivered the wood-paneled door two hard slaps. “Okay,” he said. “You boys have fun.”

  * * *

  —

  EVERYTHING I KNEW about rock climbing had been gleaned from a poster my dad had hung on the wall in my bedroom. It pictured a craggy-jawed man hanging by his fingertips from the lip of an overhang, suspended in thin air with nothing but a skinny rope tied around his waist. Why my dad bought me that poster never occurred to me; he was a boring banker who enjoyed outdoor pursuits like skiing and hiking, but he wasn’t one to push boundaries. No one had told me that it was a vintage poster from the earliest days of the sport, before the invention of harnesses and kernmantle ropes. And I didn’t ask.

  With the poster as our sole how-to manual, Jeff and I established our cardinal rule: The leader must not fall. But we decided whoever followed behind should have the security of the rope being held from above. This way, only one person had to risk his life.

  For our first rock climb we chose a mossy gully in the center of the wall. With its ample supply of trees and vegetation, it appeared an ideal route to the summit. We took turns clawing our way up through the loose rock and vegetation, and when the rope ran out, we would untie, give it a couple of loops around a tree, then use the friction against the bark to provide security for the second climber. The higher we climbed, the steeper the wall became, until we stood on either side of a stout hemlock growing from a matrix of hard-packed dirt, moss, and rusty beer cans. Above us loomed the crux pitch, a vertical wall of loose blocks stacked on top of one another like a life-size game of Jenga.

  It was Jeff’s lead, but he wasn’t sure he was up
for it. I certainly wanted nothing to do with the crumbling wall that hung above us, so I offered up a few Crazy Kids ranks. By this point I had become a bit of a master at persuading kids to do dangerous things, and Jeff was not immune to my charms; plus, I very rarely gave anyone the opportunity to achieve junior Tom Sawyer status. A few minutes later, he was several body lengths above me, clinging to a mossy house of cards. When he reached over his head for a grip in a horizontal crack, a television-size flake shifted, raining pebbles and dirt down the wall onto my head. “I think I’m going to fall,” he cried out.

  “Hold on a second,” I called up, untying from the rope and then using it to lash myself to the hemlock like someone about to be burned at the stake. After several turns around the tree, I locked the end off with a series of half hitches, knots I’d learned how to tie by trial and error. Satisfied there was no way I was going anywhere should he come hurtling down, I called up to Jeff something obnoxious like, “Okay, you can fall now.”

  Jeff looked down between his legs and saw me lashed to the tree. Two things were clear: He was going to die (or at least be badly mangled) if he fell—and I wasn’t. Something about this situation seemed to violate our honor code, and the injustice of me not bleeding and broken by his side at the base of the cliff inspired him to pull it together and climb back down.