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

the desert east of Los Angeles. I developed a voracious appetite for soloing. I’d do as many as fifty pitches in a day, mostly on short routes up to 5.10. A sample entry from my bible:
    10/7/05
    18 pitches—kind of a low-day
    5.7 to [5].10b
    I couldn’t start the left Peyote Crack. Weird.
    I soon got so that I felt pretty comfortable soloing. I discovered that if I had any particular gift, it was a mental one—the ability to keep it together in what might otherwise have been a stressful situation. By 2007, I had soloed a few pitches up to 5.12a in difficulty. I felt like I was ready for a big next step.
    Still, back then I had no thought of becoming a professional climber, or even of attracting any attention for what I did. In September 2007, I went to Yosemite. I had my eye on two legendary routes—the north face of the Rostrum, a beautiful 800-foot granite pillar, rated 5.11c, and Astroman on Washington Column, a touchstone 1,100-foot route, also rated 5.11c.
    Way back in 1987, Peter Croft had stunned the climbing world by free soloing both routes in a single day. No one had repeated that feat in twenty years. Of the two climbs, Astroman is significantly harder and more serious—more physically taxing and more insecure. Only one other guy had free soloed Astroman—Dean Potter in 2000. Still climbing hard at age forty-three, Potter has recently specialized in combining hard routes with wingsuit BASE jumping. He was another influential free soloist I looked up to as a role model.
    On September 19, I free soloed both Astroman and the Rostrum. I’d climbed both routes before roped up with partners, but I couldn’t say that I had either route dialed. I was glad that day to find no one else on either climb. I didn’t tell anybody beforehand what I was going to try. I just showed up and did them. They went really well—I felt in control the whole way on both climbs. In my “bible,” I noted only
    9/19/07
    Astroman—5.11c—solo
    Rostrum—5.11c—" "
    I added a smiley face after Astroman, but no other comments.
    That evening I called a friend (it might have been Chris Weidner) and told him about my day. That’s how the word got out. I’ll admit that the double solo stirred up a certain buzz in the Valley (as climbers call Yosemite), but only among the hardcore locals. In my mind, the fact that I did both routes in one day, just as Peter Croft had, wasn’t particularly significant. What was significant was committing to doing them at all. And succeeding gave me the confidence to start imagining even bigger free solos.
    ••••
    Five months later, in February 2008, I drove to Indian Creek in southern Utah. The Creek is a mecca of short, beautiful cracks on solid Wingate sandstone. I was in terrific form there, climbing roped up with various partners. I onsighted the hardest routes, getting up them on my first try without falling. Routes up to 5.13b or c. But I’d been climbing so much, I’d developed a bad case of tendinitis in my left elbow. At first I didn’t even know what was wrong—I thought I’d hurt my biceps from sheer overuse. But at the Creek, after only two or three pitches, the pain was so intense I’d have to shut it down. One day on, then two days off. I’d go mountain biking with my friend Cedar Wright, just trying to mix it up. But it drove me crazy not to be able to climb more.
    Weirdly enough, by contributing to my general angst, the tendinitis was good for Moonlight Buttress. It takes a certain hunger to be motivated to go do something big. At the Creek, I was so fit and climbing so well, but I was also hungry to do more, because I had to limit my days on rock to a lot fewer than I wanted.
    And Moonlight Buttress was a project I’d been dreaming of for years, ever since Bill Ramsey and I had climbed it a few years before. Which is why I found myself in Zion, sitting in my van all day in the rain on March 30 and 31, 2008, visualizing everything that could possibly happen on that