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

up the left-hand side of the nearly vertical wall. That summer as I got in shape making loops and traverses in the High Sierra, Half Dome became my muse, a random source of motivation that drifted through my thoughts while I strolled along one ridge after another. The notion of trying to free solo the route was intimidating, yet irresistible at the same time. In terms of sheer grandness, it would be a big step up for me—an even greater challenge than Moonlight Buttress.
     
    T HE REGULAR NORTHWEST FACE ROUTE was pioneered in 1957 by Royal Robbins, the finest American rock climber of his day, and two partners, Jerry Gallwas and Mike Sherrick. Two previous attempts, including one by Robbins, had gotten no higher than a quarter of the way up the 2,000-foot wall. The face, which inclines at an average pitch of eighty-five degrees, is intimidating in the extreme. As Steve Roper writes in
Camp 4
, the definitive history of early climbing in Yosemite, “The view upward [from the base] is overpowering. It doesn’t seem possible that humans can climb such an enormous cliff with normal techniques”—i.e., ropes, pitons, and bolts.
    It took the 1957 trio five days to complete the ascent, during which they pulled out all the stops: using their newly invented chrome-molybdenum pitons and expansion bolts for direct aid, lowering Robbins fifty feet so he could “pendulum” sideways across the blank granite to reach a chimney system, and enduring four bivouacs as they hung from slings and stirrups. The key pitch, led by Gallwas, involved strenuous aid on pitons and bolts that reached a “disturbingly narrow” ledge stretching across the face only 200feet below the summit. Thank God Ledge today is one of the most famous features anywhere on American rock.
    The YDS scale from 5.1 to 5.15 measures only pure difficulty, with no regard to danger. Another scale within the YDS, however, is grade ratings, which indicate the overall difficulty, danger, and required commitment of a long route on a big wall or a mountain—in short, the “seriousness” of a major ascent. Until very recently, the system ranged only from Grade I to Grade VI. A few landmark ascents in the last decade—nearly all of them in the remote ranges—have been tentatively rated as Grade VII, but by and large the pinnacle of the scale remains Grade VI.
    The first Grade VI ever climbed in the United States was Robbins, Gallwas, and Sherrick’s 1957 ascent of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome. At the time, it was matched only by a few routes in Europe.
    In 1976, nineteen years after Robbins’s team climbed the wall, Colorado-based climbers Art Higbee and Jim Erickson made the first free ascent of the Regular Northwest Face route, eliminating all the aid moves—almost. (It was Erickson’s tenth try to free climb the route.) Roped together, belaying every pitch, using pitons, nuts, and bolts for protection, the duo required thirty-four hours of extreme climbing to reach a point only one hundred feet short of the summit. There, to their chagrin, they had to resort to aid to surmount the final obstacle. That glitch rendered the deed a “magnificent failure” in Higbee’s and Erickson’s eyes, but subsequent climbers, impressed by the achievement, have granted them the first free ascent. Higbee and Erickson rated the climb solid 5.12—close to the highest level of technical difficulty accomplished at the time anywhere in the world. The single passage on which they had to resort to aid would also prove to be the dramatic crux of Alex’s 2008 climb.
    By 2008, no one had ever attempted to free solo a Grade VI climb, let alone succeeded on one.
     
    That September, my elbow seemed healed, and I was in top shape from all that cruising around the High Sierra. Dwelling on Half Dome for months had put me in a mental state where I felt I had to do it. Maybe I’d just spent so much time thinking about it that now I had to clear it from my mind.
    I’d climbed the route