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Sporting

El Capitan, My El Capitan

Alex Honnold at the 1,000-foot level of his free-solo climb of El Capitan.Credit...Tom Evans

Alex Honnold woke up in his Dodge van last Saturday morning, drove into Yosemite Valley ahead of the soul-destroying traffic and walked up to the sheer, smooth and stupendously massive 3,000-foot golden escarpment known as El Capitan, the most important cliff on earth for rock climbers. Honnold then laced up his climbing shoes, dusted his meaty fingers with chalk and, over the next four hours, did something nobody had ever done. He climbed El Capitan without ropes, alone.

The world’s finest climbers have long mused about the possibility of a ropeless “free solo” ascent of El Capitan in much the same spirit that science fiction buffs muse about faster-than-light-speed travel — as a daydream safely beyond human possibility. Tommy Caldwell, arguably the greatest all-around rock climber alive, told me that the conversation only drifted into half-seriousness once Honnold came along, and that Honnold’s successful climb was easily the most significant event in the sport in all of Caldwell’s 38 years. I believe that it should also be celebrated as one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.

Like all mature athletic endeavors, climbing has sub-disciplines that call for different genetic gifts and venerate different accomplishments. Alpine climbing demands perverse cardiovascular endurance coupled to a lust for suffering, while its devotees have trouble getting lathered up over anything that doesn’t involve a delicious risk of death by avalanche or freezing. Indoor-gym climbing rewards one-finger pull-ups fired by a deeply spiritual connection to textured polyurethane, plus emotional tolerance for the sight of shirtless young men with complicated mustaches spidering up fiberglass overhangs.

Fear of falling is about as primal a fear as we humans have, and that fear is present to some degree whether you are 10 feet off the ground or 3,000. In this sense, Honnold’s specialty — free-soloing — is a distillation of the entire climbing world’s collective fantasy life. Vanishingly few elite climbers make careers out of free-soloing, and plenty call it irresponsible and deplorable, but in their heart of hearts they all recognize it as the final word in bad-assery.

As for El Capitan, every climber from Everest base camp to the Brooklyn Boulders gym recognizes it as the indispensable cliff. There are bigger cliffs on Baffin Island and smaller but steeper cliffs elsewhere, but no cliff anywhere combines such unrelenting steepness, glassy smoothness and inspiring immensity — horizontal as well as vertical — with a quality of such coherent unity, of being a single solid object so gigantic as to reliably induce a tingling awareness of creation’s incomprehensible mystery.

I can tell you from experience that first-time El Capitan climbers sometimes find its vastness and verticality so overwhelming — inducing such a heady fusion of vertigo and agoraphobia — that, even stitched to the wall by a fortune’s worth of gear, they flip out and retreat. I can tell you that when such unsteady souls do manage to reach the upper headwalls — typically after three or four days of continuous upward toil and terror and wild, screaming fun, living in filth on canned chili and candy bars — they have been known to drop daypacks full of mission-critical equipment and watch in horror as those daypacks free-fall through space for thousands of feet toward pine trees so far below they look like miniature shrubs in a model railroad diorama.

El Capitan does have vertical fractures that allow expert climbers to insert their hands and feet and sometimes entire legs and arms and then twist and flex those body parts in highly technical and painfully exhausting ways that do create a temporary grip over the abyss. Still, so much of that cliff is devoid of anything that normal human beings would recognize as handholds or footholds that the overwhelming majority of El Capitan climbers resort as I did to artificial aid. We insert hardware into cracks, clip nylon stirrups to that hardware and stand in the stirrups. Even then, we struggle to stay calm in an environment that feels like a mile-wide plain of smooth stone that we happened to be lying upon when it flipped to vertical and swung us higher into the sky than any of the world’s tallest skyscrapers yet reach. The mental strain of burying all that fear for all that time becomes its own monumental effort.

Elite climbers do “free climb” El Capitan, meaning that they make all upward progress with hands and feet on the rock, and with gear employed only as a safety net. But the nature of the rock is such that no amount of finger strength can make it feel entirely secure. Much of the terrain is so smooth that it can be ascended only by identifying half-imaginary indentations, pressing shoe rubber against those indentations — smearing, as the technique is known — and then hoping that the rubber sticks while you ease upward.

Nobody is better acquainted with this aspect of El Capitan than Caldwell, whose 2015 climb of the Dawn Wall on El Capitan, with Kevin Jorgeson, is considered the hardest long free climb ever done. “If you don’t have your body position exactly right, you can easily slip and fall,” Caldwell told me. “And if you’re at all nervous, there’s a downward spiral where you pull harder with your hands and lean in closer and your feet shoot out, so it takes incredible confidence.”

The overwhelming majority of “free” ascents of El Capitan involve many falls along the way. El Capitan also has remarkably few proper ledges; almost all “free” ascents, as a result, involve quite a lot of resting on ropes and hardware between upward pushes. Nobody keeps reliable records of these things, but Honnold’s best guess as to the number of prior ascents with zero falls and zero resting on ropes was perhaps one or two, including his own final practice run with Caldwell. Virtually nobody, in other words, had ever climbed El Capitan without dangling from the safety net, which helps to explain why El Capitan was for so long the final word in free-solo hypotheticals, as in, “Do you think it’s even possible? Will anybody ever free-solo the Big Stone?” The doubt that drove those questions was skepticism that a human mind could maintain such focus — and drive such fierce physical perfection — for so unbearably long.

That’s where Honnold comes in. I first met him in 2014, at the Yosemite home of a mutual friend named Ken Yager. Honnold already had such a reputation for extreme boldness that I was surprised to find a nerdy young man with big ears and brown eyes and an impish impulse to tease — gently, sweetly — anyone burdened by the average human terror of death-by-plummeting. Anybody who knows Honnold well can tell you that he is smart, funny, intellectually sophisticated, polite and considerate. He reads nonfiction, expresses genuine curiosity about others and earns the caring affection (and anxiety) of family, friends and even acquaintances like me. Honnold climbs more than anyone alive — endless thousands of feet, roped and unroped, all over the world — and has, for a decade, honed his system for tackling ever bigger free-solos.

Like an outdoorsy performance artist, Honnold rehearses big free-solos on rope first. He commutes up and down cliffs with gear in order to work for entire days on small tricky sections. He memorizes long sequences of complex movement like a clever middle-schooler memorizing Pi to a hundred decimal places. Honnold is also a student of Yosemite climbing history who has methodically bested the marquee climbs of every Yosemite free-soloist before him, and he has spent years quietly preparing himself for the free-solo to end all free-solos. In the final weeks, Honnold told me, he climbed a particularly smooth stretch about 500 feet up, on rope, five times in a row with only his feet, no hands.

“It still felt really insecure and I still always felt like the feet might slip,” he said, “but at the same time you’re like, ‘Well, it’s worked every time.’

Honnold’s sang froid on big cliffs is also so peculiar that even the world-class climbers who consider him a dear friend struggle to believe that it really is just sang froid and confidence, and not borderline-suicidal recklessness or at least a missing screw. Last fall, Caldwell had a nightmare that Honnold appeared at his front door bloodied and broken from a fall.

Jimmy Chin, himself a world-class big-wall climber and another mutual friend of Honnold’s and mine, spent much of the last year making a documentary film about Honnold with his wife, Chai Vasarhelyi, during Honnold’s preparation for El Capitan. Chin told me that he felt terrible inner conflict over his involvement in the project, at least at the beginning: What if the presence of cameras encouraged Honnold to do something he would not otherwise have done?

I have heard other filmmakers say similar things about Honnold in the past, and still other friends of Honnold’s joke that when Alex was a baby his mother must have stepped on his amygdala — the brain region that controls fear. Last year, fMRI testing at the Medical University of South Carolina tilted the scales toward precisely that explanation — an underactive amygdala, not a negligent mother — by confirming that Honnold’s fear circuitry really does fire with less vigor than most.

All sports select genetic outliers and provide systems for their self-development. That’s half the pleasure of being an observer. So it seems only fair to consider Honnold’s amygdala — and his self-control, discipline and strong fingers — in those terms.

In the weeks before the final ascent, Chin told me, he came around to believing that Honnold was ready and gave an explanation along the same lines. “If you look at Alex’s body right now, I have never seen anything like it,” Chin said. “But he also has this capacity to compartmentalize fear, to rationalize it. His brain is so powerful that if a thought or feeling is not serving him he can put it away.”

That’s not to say that Honnold’s friends stopped feeling wonderment and worry. During Honnold’s final practice run with Caldwell, Honnold climbed first through the hardest single section on the cliff, a spot more than 2,000 feet up called the Boulder Problem — a short and extremely intricate sequence of delicate movements that Honnold worked for years to master and memorize. After Honnold finished the Boulder Problem, he perched just beyond it to give precise instructions to Caldwell, who is inarguably the better technical climber.

“It’s a very glassy, smooth, insecure crux,” Caldwell told me. “You have just a couple of little ripples for your feet and some very bad small, sloping handholds. Alex was right above me and I followed his instructions and I still fell.”

Honnold himself never grew comfortable enough with that move to have a member of Chin’s film crew present. “It was a little too intimate and if I did fall, some dude would be traumatized,” Honnold said, explaining that he asked Chin to deploy only a remotely operated camera there.

“Something definitely could have gone wrong,” Chin told me, of Honnold’s climb. “But Alex was going to ace that exam. There was no doubt. He had prepared in every way possible and he functions best when the stakes are that high. Was I nervous, still? Of course, but if you saw him climbing … Alex moved beyond the zone. It was effortless. It was brilliant. I don’t even know if he was breathing hard.”

Reasonable people consider projects like these idiotic to the point of outrage. That is perfectly defensible. Honnold doesn’t have children, but he does have a mother who loves him very much. If you count yourself among those inclined to negative judgment, and even if you don’t, I hope you’ll indulge a mental exercise for fun. Allow your mind to relax into the possibility that Honnold’s climb was not reckless at all — that he really was born with unique neural architecture and physical gifts, and that his years of dedication really did develop those gifts to the point that he could not only make every move on El Capitan without rest, he could do so with a tolerably minuscule chance of falling. Viewed in that light, Honnold’s free-solo of El Capitan represents a miraculous opportunity for the rest of us to experience what you might call the human sublime — a performance so far beyond our current understanding of our physical and mental potential that it provokes a pleasurable sensation of mystified awe right alongside the inevitable nausea.

Daniel Duane is writing a book about the Sierra Nevada.

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