Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure Read Free Page A

classes of their own, ranging from 5.13a through 5.13d. Top-notch climbers recognize that there is as great a gap in difficulty between 5.13b and 5.13c as between 5.8 and 5.9.
    At the moment, the hardest climbs in the world, of which there are only a handful, are rated 5.15c.
    In the last twenty years, expansion bolts have given rise to the phenomenon of “sport” climbing—as distinguished from “trad” (short for “traditional”), in which climbers place and remove nuts and cams for protection. On a sport route, permanent bolts placed as closely as six or eight feet apart, often driven on rappel beforethe route has been attempted, allow climbers to get up very hard free routes on rock that won’t take cams or nuts, with almost bombproof safety. The leader simply clips into one bolt after another as he climbs. For the belayer, catching the leader’s fall is routine.
    Sport climbing has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years. There are now hotshot teenagers who can climb 5.14 sport routes but who have never led a single pitch of trad, and wouldn’t have a clue how to do so.
    Because the YDS 5.1 to 5.15 system measures only the pure difficulty of the hardest move, nearly all the top-rated climbs in the world are on short sport routes on easily accessible crags. To put up a 5.15 route, an expert such as Chris Sharma or Adam Ondra will “work” the sequence of moves for weeks or even months on end, falling harmlessly hundreds of times, before he can complete the climb in one try without a single fall. That kind of climbing is so specialized that the Ondras of the world practice almost no other art.
    Ironically, then, trad climbing is more “sporting” than sport climbing—and more daring and dangerous.
    But free soloing is another whole game. When Alex Honnold performs one of his long free solos, he does away altogether with ropes, with a partner to catch his fall, with pro of any kind (no bolts, pitons, nuts, or cams) to use for artificial holds or to safeguard a fall. Because the chances of falling on even a 5.11 or 5.12 climb are considerable, only a few practitioners have dared to push free soloing beyond the 5.11 level—and then usually on short routes, and only after “rehearsing” the line by climbing it with a rope and a partner many times to memorize every hold and sequence. (For that matter, when you’re climbing without a rope, you can fall off and die on a 5.4 route if a handhold or foothold breaks loose.)
    Free soloing, then, is the most sporting—the purest—form of rock climbing ever devised. It’s the ultimate adventure on rock—with the ultimate stakes if you make the slightest mistake.
     
    People ask me all the time how I got into free soloing. But I don’t think they quite believe me when I give an honest answer. The truth is that when I started climbing outdoors, I was too shy to go up to strangers at a crag and ask if they’d like to rope up with me.
    I first started climbing at age ten at an indoor gym in my hometown of Sacramento, California, but I did very little outdoors before the age of nineteen. I was so antisocial and tweaky that I was actually afraid to talk to strangers. Though I was already climbing 5.13, I would never have gotten up the nerve to approach other guys at a crag like Lover’s Leap near Lake Tahoe and ask if I could rope up with them.
    So I just started soloing. The first route I did was a low-angle 5.5 slab called Knapsack Crack at Lover’s Leap. Then I tackled a much steeper three-pitch route called Corrugation Corner, rated 5.7. I overgripped the shit out of it, because I was really scared and climbing badly.
    But I quickly got better. I’ve always been a compulsive ticker. From the very start, I kept a bound notebook in which I recorded every climb I did, each one with a brief note. My “climbing bible,” as I called it, was my most precious possession. In 2005 and 2006, I did tons of routes at Joshua Tree, on the granite boulders and pinnacles in