Read an Excerpt
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 were in the giant red tram, traveling four thousand feet to the summit of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, standing chest to chest and surrounded by a hundred other ruddy-faced skiers all looking forward to a long powdery run from the summit. Jackson Hole, located in western Wyoming next to the Grand Teton National Park, is famous for its difficult terrain, deep powder, and the many world-class big-mountain skiers who call it home. The highest peak in the range, the Grand Teton, tops out at 13,775 feet and welcomes thousands of climbers annually. Climbing this jagged, craggy peak is considered a rite of passage for any aspiring mountaineer. Skiers get a glimpse of the dark, pointed pinnacle of the Grand as they exit the tram and click into their skis.
It was February 2016, and I was with two of my sons, ages seventeen and fourteen, for their February school vacation. They were huddled together a few feet away, ignoring me and trying to catch a glimpse of the mountain through a foggy Plexiglas window. We'd run into Jimmy a few minutes earlier in the tram line. This was the first time I’d 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 the music that was blasting 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 nondisclosure agreements, which means we are not allowed to talk about it, 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. Jimmy and I had known each other for more than fifteen years and had been on many expeditions together, so I wasn’t surprised he was letting me in on his secret. Oftentimes, I would write the stories of our expeditions and Jimmy would take the photos, so we made a good team.
“Is he doing Freerider?” I asked, referring to the route up El Capitan that is composed of complex crack systems on the southwest face of the wall. It is a merciless mix of height and steepness that takes even the most experienced climbers several days to complete.
“Yep.”
“When?”
“Probably in early November.”
As the reality of what I had just been told sunk in, the core of my body quivered. El Capitan—the world’s most majestic cliff. 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 several times. And most importantly, I had 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 my hands would slip from the flaring cracks. I had been forced to use “aid,” meaning I hung on mechanical devices I slotted into cracks in the rock. I cheated. Freerider got its name because it’s a “free” climb, which means it can be ascended with nothing more than your hands and feet, but climbers use a rope and harness to act only as a safety net, in case they slip off. The very best 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, affectionately known as “the Hon,” thinking? El Capitan is three thousand feet of sheer, gleaming, glacier-polished wall. And he planned to attempt it alone. Untethered. 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 angled off a few degrees, a holdgrabbed with the wrong hand—and Alex would plummet through the air as the ground rushed upward at 120 miles per hour. If he fell off the Boulder Problem—which is the hardest section of the entire 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 in me that he had been thinking about it. Borneo, a large island in Southeast Asia’s Malay Archipelago, offered a new kind of big wall terrain and demanded a different kind of climbing than Alex had ever experienced. Borneo proved to be a good stepping-stone on Alex’s path toward a ropeless ascent of El Capitan. In the ensuing years, Alex joined me on more climbing expeditions to Chad, Newfoundland, and Oman. Along the way, I witnessed 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 Plateau that he sat yawning and examining his cuticles while Jimmy 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,” and instead climbed the entire way without ever even looking back to see how I was doing.
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. At times, it occurred to me there were lessons he just hadn’t learned yet, like in Borneo when he realized, the hard way, why a helmet is a good thing. 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 like he enjoyed engaging me on the topic of risk. What it all came down to was that for Alex Honnold, a life lived less than fully is a fate worse than dying—a point on which I wholeheartedly agreed.
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 live many more years, he might have more things outside of himself to exist for; presumably his desire for risk would diminish in kind—as it had for me.
But most of all, I wondered what I should do now that Jimmy had burdened me with the knowledge of what was happening. Should I try to talk him out of it? Could I? Or should I support this mad idea and help my friend achieve his dream?
“I think I want to write about this,” I said to Jimmy as our gloved fists connected. I had quickly decided that it wasn’t my place to try to stop Alex. And if it were one of my children 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.
When Jimmy and I spoke that day in the tram, it had been about a year since he and Chai had debuted Meru, the first film they codirected. Meru tells the story of a last great problem of Himalayan climbing called the Shark’s Fin that Jimmy, Conrad Anker, and Renan Ozturk finally solved in 2011. Jimmy, with Chai’s help, had turned Meru into a mainstream smash hit. It won the audience choice award at the Sundance Film Festival, was shortlisted for an Oscar, and finished as the highest grossing documentary in 2015.
Hollywood had discovered Jimmy and Chai, and now companies like Sony, Universal, and 21st Century Fox wanted to know what they were doing next. Jimmy was intrigued with the idea of making a film about Alex, the world’s greatest free soloist, but he had hesitations about putting Alex in a position where he might feel pressure to perform because he was in front of a camera. And that was before he knew that Alex was thinking about soloing the most important cliff in the world.
Jimmy talked to Chai about the possibility of Alex being the subject of their next film, and they decided that she should call Alex to size him up and ascertain if he had enough depth to hold together a feature-length documentary. It was during this call 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 said 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, he hardly slept.
A lot had to happen. A lot had already happened. This is the story of what led up to an impossible climb. To understand what Alex was planning to attempt, you need to know some things about how he lived and the world that he grew up in. It’s a climbing world. Not everyone lives in it, and it’s not perfect. 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 and Jimmy Chin and with a whole bunch of other people who helped lay the foundation for what came next.
Alex was going to climb beyond himself—beyond all of us.
