The Impossible Climb

I was lucky enough to get an advance review copy of a new book coming out in March 2019: The Impossible Climb: A Personal History of Alex Honnolds’s Free Solo of El Capitan and a Climbing Life, by Mark Synnott. It’s pretty dang awesome. Highly recomended. Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest climber, went 3000 feet up shear mountain face, alone with no ropes. An achievement so incredible that the New York Times called it “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.” And since free solo climbing involves personal high-stakes risk-management at altitude, as pilots we can both marvel and learn along the way.

Writing about his friend Dean Potter’s death flying a wingsuit down a mountain, Alex says:

“No one spends 20 years at the cutting edge of their sport by being an adrenaline junkie all the time. Most people had only seen his climbing and flying through short YouTube videos and never got a glimpse of the years of training behind them. Dean actually had a thoughtful and conservative approach, building up to things slowly over time as he became physically and psychologically prepared.”

Good stuff. But what’s great about this book is most of it shows us this process, rather than being Alex safety lectures. It’s written by his friend and climbing companion, an insider who has climbed El Cap over 20 times, who also has written for magazines like National Geographic, Climbing, Skiing, Outside, etc. Smooth easy style. It goes deeper. For example, on risk, some argue that the risks of wingsuit flying or free solo climbing are immoral. But Alex saw these people as hypocrites because many of them risked their own lives on a daily basis by sitting on the couch eating potato chips:

“I was 19 when my father died from a heart attack. He was a 55-year-old college professor and had led what was by all appearances a risk-free life. But he was overweight, and heart disease runs in our family. No matter the risks we take, we always consider the end to be too soon even though in life more than anything else quality shoud be more important than quantity.”

In addition to his life, and his life climbing, this smart readable book covers some bigger ideas. What is climbing? Is Alex’s brain not right? Does social media and GoPro help or hinder? And is there Zen at the top of mountains?

So climbing is walking up a mountain, right? An athletic pursuit. Shoes help. Chalk on the hands for grip up the really steep bits. But what about ropes attached to bolts driven into the rock? What about paying for huge teams of sherpas to lay ropes and ladders up Everest so you then walk up? It’s been said that skills and courage have been replaced with cash and equipment. This is a purity question. Worth asking. Free solo is the pure answer, although it may be too much for most of us. But it’s purity puts the modern mechanized methods into relief. For flying, this is being an Airbus co-pilot or a drone operator versus flying solo in a sailplane. Although personally, I will now wear a parachute in the sailplane when I can.

Alex has had brain scans, and the results have been controversial. Does he lack the brain structures that process fear? Is he disabled? Or would that be a superpower? The truth seems to be unknowable right now, I don’t think neuroscience is advanced enough to make fine enough distinctions here. If he were not afraid, he would be dead by now. Alex reads probability books and talks deeply with other experts in risk management. He is clearly working deliberative practice, slowly and incrementaly working on weak areas to become better.

“I’ve actually been making a conscious effort to reassign all the neural pathways I used to use for math for memorizing beta.”

[In rock climbing beta is detailed information about every aspect of the rock, the gaps, the paths, etc]

[In rock climbing beta is detailed information about every aspect of the rock, the gaps, the paths, etc)

A few days before the climb Alex erased all his social media:

“I don’t want the distraction in these final days, and I’m a little worried about what all the scrolling on my phone might be doing to my brain. I’m kind of nostalgic for the old days before I had a smartphone. I used to do a lot of quality thinking … back then.”

Which brings us from brain functions to selfies. Being filmed, the watching audience of camera crews and posterity, changes how we act. This had to be managed during Alex’s attempts at history, with millions of Twitter/Instagram followers, National Geographic, plus a full film crew. And while we don’t have that when we fly, the influence of just one camera needs to be recognized. And managed.

“When I was Alex’s age, we called it ‘Kodak courage’ —the tendency for people to push beyond their limits when performing for the camera. Nowadays, in a world where fatal wingsuit accidents are captured by blinking, helmet-mounted GoPros, we might aptly call it ‘GoPro bravado.’ Even more insidious is the way social media has made it possible for people to feel pressure to perform, even when they’re alone.”

The book also explores why people climb. Is it for Twitter followers, or the thrill, or something more? A joy of knowing that your life cannot be experienced more fully? Peter Croft is quoted as explaining the feeling as:

“A heightened type of perception. … everything comes into high relief. That’s just what happens to your body and your mind when you’re focused intensely on the feedback you’re getting from the environment and there are no other distractions. You become an instinctive animal rather than a person trying to do a hard climb, and the perception doesn’t immediately go away when you get to the top. It dulls over time, but for a while it feels like you almost have super senses. Everything is more intense—the sounds of the swifts flying around or the colors of the Sun going down. A lot of times I don’t want to go down, I don’t want it to end.”

That’s a great description of being in flow. The author describes climbing with Alex as being fun:

“Moving so fast over so much stone, I wondered whether it’s how a bird feels when it flies, or a monkey as it swings through the canapy—a joy so deeply rooted in your soul that it makes you feel like you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.”

That’s what flying feels like for me!

The book covers Alex’s history, his girlfriend, his other climbs. It’s not too technical, but enough that we get the real feeling of modern climbing techniques. It covers his first attempt at El Cap, and the later victorious assent, four hours of life-and-death flow. It cycles back to the what is climbing question. Or rather why?

“My own awareness of being on a stage … precluded the Zen I had always found in climbing.

It’s not about bragging rights, or book sales, or ‘likes’, or hot dates. It’s about doing the climb, learning, growing. It’s not about the summit, the author says he’s climbed El Cap 23 times, and never walked the final way up to the actual summit. What did Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest climb do right after completing the world’s greatest climb? That afternoon he did hangboarding. It’s a cheap simple training device that works on finger strength.

The author told Alex a normal person would probably take the afternoon off after they free soloed El Cap. They were working on an interview for National Geographic, sitting together in Alex’s van:

“But I’ve been hangboarding every other day, and it’s the other day.”