Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure by David Roberts, Alex Honnold Page A
Authors: David Roberts, Alex Honnold
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monolith of granite soaring out of dense rain forest. Some of its earliest explorers got lost in the jungle just trying to find their way to the mountain, and even today, Kinabalu still has untouched walls that challenge the best mountaineers.
The trip was the brainchild of Mark Synnott. Thirty-nine years old at the time, Synnott was a veteran mountaineer with a record of bold first ascents all over the globe. By 2009, he had perfected the art of getting magazine assignments combined with corporate sponsorship (usually by The North Face) to launch exotic adventuresin the far corners of the world, his teams comprising some of the top American climbing stars. For
Men’s Journal
and Borneo, he recruited Conrad Anker (who found George Mallory’s body on Everest in 1999), photographer Jimmy Chin, filmmaker Renan Ozturk, and Kevin Thaw—all four veterans of other landmark expeditions. Anker, who had become the team captain for The North Face, had recently anointed the wunderkind of Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome with TNF sponsorship.
Now Anker tried to convince Synnott to add the twenty-three-year-old Honnold to the Borneo team. Says Synnott now, “I was pretty apprehensive. I’d never met Alex. In general, I don’t like going off with guys I don’t already know. There’s a big potential for personality conflicts. And Alex had never been on an expedition.”
The team’s objective was an unclimbed, nearly vertical wall on the north side of the mountain, rising out of a forbidding abyss called Low’s Gully. The place had an evil reputation, cemented by a catastrophe in 1994 when a ten-man British army team out on what was supposed to be a six-day training mission got entangled in a thirty-one-day survival ordeal. That disaster was vividly recounted in the book
Descent into Chaos
, by journalist Richard Connaughton.
Synnott had another source for his misgivings. Aware of Alex’s deeds as a free soloist, Synnott worried “what kind of insane stuff” the young hotshot “might pressure me into doing.” As it turned out, the two got along well in Borneo. “We hit it off right off the bat,” Synnott remembers. “Alex has a wide-open personality. He deals with people well. There’s no pretense. No bullshit.”
Still, there were “quirky little things” that caused minor disputes between the leader and the rookie. “On his rack,” Synnott claims, “he set up all his cams the way he would in Indian Creek”—the crag in southern Utah famed for short, steep crack climbs. This meant that Alex couldn’t free up carabiners to use in all the different waysmountaineering requires. “So I had to take his rack apart,” Synnott adds.
“‘What are you doing?’ Alex asked me.
“‘Dude, this doesn’t work here.’”
According to Synnott, Alex “wouldn’t use shoulder slings”—long nylon loops that minimize drag by redirecting the climbing rope as it zigzags from one piece of protection to the next.
“What do you do about rope drag?” Synnott asked him.
“I just skip pieces,” Alex answered. (In other words, he runs out his lead much farther than normal between points of pro, risking much longer leader falls.)
“Alex didn’t like to use little stoppers” (the smaller styles of nuts for protection). “He said, ‘I don’t need this shit.’ Then he’d get to a place where there were only tiny cracks, and he’d say, ‘Wow, nothing else fits.’
“Alex had been living in this Yosemite bubble, where you don’t need to learn all the tricks of mountaineering.”
Despite those quirks, on Kinabalu, Synnott admits admiringly, “Alex did some pretty sick stuff”—long, highly technical leads with a minimum of protection.
The deft, amusing piece that Synnott wrote for the March 2010 issue of
Men’s Journal
opens with a scene at the base of the wall in which a priceless bit of repartee evokes the “Yosemite bubble.”
“Where’s your helmet?”
“Uh, I don’t have one,” Alex replies,
The trip was the brainchild of Mark Synnott. Thirty-nine years old at the time, Synnott was a veteran mountaineer with a record of bold first ascents all over the globe. By 2009, he had perfected the art of getting magazine assignments combined with corporate sponsorship (usually by The North Face) to launch exotic adventuresin the far corners of the world, his teams comprising some of the top American climbing stars. For
Men’s Journal
and Borneo, he recruited Conrad Anker (who found George Mallory’s body on Everest in 1999), photographer Jimmy Chin, filmmaker Renan Ozturk, and Kevin Thaw—all four veterans of other landmark expeditions. Anker, who had become the team captain for The North Face, had recently anointed the wunderkind of Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome with TNF sponsorship.
Now Anker tried to convince Synnott to add the twenty-three-year-old Honnold to the Borneo team. Says Synnott now, “I was pretty apprehensive. I’d never met Alex. In general, I don’t like going off with guys I don’t already know. There’s a big potential for personality conflicts. And Alex had never been on an expedition.”
The team’s objective was an unclimbed, nearly vertical wall on the north side of the mountain, rising out of a forbidding abyss called Low’s Gully. The place had an evil reputation, cemented by a catastrophe in 1994 when a ten-man British army team out on what was supposed to be a six-day training mission got entangled in a thirty-one-day survival ordeal. That disaster was vividly recounted in the book
Descent into Chaos
, by journalist Richard Connaughton.
Synnott had another source for his misgivings. Aware of Alex’s deeds as a free soloist, Synnott worried “what kind of insane stuff” the young hotshot “might pressure me into doing.” As it turned out, the two got along well in Borneo. “We hit it off right off the bat,” Synnott remembers. “Alex has a wide-open personality. He deals with people well. There’s no pretense. No bullshit.”
Still, there were “quirky little things” that caused minor disputes between the leader and the rookie. “On his rack,” Synnott claims, “he set up all his cams the way he would in Indian Creek”—the crag in southern Utah famed for short, steep crack climbs. This meant that Alex couldn’t free up carabiners to use in all the different waysmountaineering requires. “So I had to take his rack apart,” Synnott adds.
“‘What are you doing?’ Alex asked me.
“‘Dude, this doesn’t work here.’”
According to Synnott, Alex “wouldn’t use shoulder slings”—long nylon loops that minimize drag by redirecting the climbing rope as it zigzags from one piece of protection to the next.
“What do you do about rope drag?” Synnott asked him.
“I just skip pieces,” Alex answered. (In other words, he runs out his lead much farther than normal between points of pro, risking much longer leader falls.)
“Alex didn’t like to use little stoppers” (the smaller styles of nuts for protection). “He said, ‘I don’t need this shit.’ Then he’d get to a place where there were only tiny cracks, and he’d say, ‘Wow, nothing else fits.’
“Alex had been living in this Yosemite bubble, where you don’t need to learn all the tricks of mountaineering.”
Despite those quirks, on Kinabalu, Synnott admits admiringly, “Alex did some pretty sick stuff”—long, highly technical leads with a minimum of protection.
The deft, amusing piece that Synnott wrote for the March 2010 issue of
Men’s Journal
opens with a scene at the base of the wall in which a priceless bit of repartee evokes the “Yosemite bubble.”
“Where’s your helmet?”
“Uh, I don’t have one,” Alex replies,
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