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

pool. Sitting with her legs in the pool. Just sitting there crying. And she was just like, “Your dad died.” I don’t remember what she said, but basically like, “Your dad died,” and then she went to bed.
    I don’t remember disbelieving her. But for all I knew, he could still be alive. I never saw a body. There was never a real funeral. This little can of ashes showed up one day, and people said he was dead. I read all the articles about him. For a while I would see people on the bike path. People who looked like Dad, with a big beard and just all big, and I would be like, “Oh!” And then, “Oh, that wasn’t him.”
    Ben Smalley told Lowther, “I kind of had to yell at him about it. ‘Why aren’t you upset?’ I think deep down, Alex never did any mourning.”
    “Did you mourn at all?” Lowther asked Alex.
    “I was too young and angstful,” he answered. “I had too much anger.”
    Alex clarifies: “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Mom when she told me Dad had died. It’s that my family doesn’t do funerals. Dad was cremated in Phoenix. There was a memorial service at Lake Tahoe. I thought, ‘Huh, I’ll never see him again.’ But there was no closure.”
    Charles Honnold was fifty-five when he died. Alex was nineteen. The event crystallized Alex’s decision to drop out of Berkeley. Supported by the interest from his father’s life insurance bonds, he “borrowed” his mother’s minivan and set out for various California crags and the life of a dirtbag climber. In 2007, he bought a used Ford Econoline van that he converted into a cozy garret-on-wheels. Eight years later, after many home improvements, and despite his fame and unexpected wealth, Alex still lives in the van. His default residence is his mother’s house in Sacramento, where he spends a few weeks each year.
    Whether or not he truly mourned his father’s death, the loss had a profound impact on Alex’s outlook on life. His mother’s parents had been devout Catholics, and both Stasia and Alex attended Catholic services when they were young. The effect was to turn Alex into a confirmed atheist. As he sardonically commented in a 2012 YouTube video, “At no point did I ever think there was ever anything going on with church. I always saw it as a bunch of old people eating stale wafers. . . .”
    His father’s death brought home the
carpe diem
injunction to live the only life he has to the fullest. In a 2012 Q&A for
National Geographic Adventure
, Alex came up with a startling metaphor. He was asked, “If you don’t believe in God or an after-life, doesn’t that make this life all the more precious?”
    Alex responded: “I suppose so, but just because something is precious doesn’t mean you have to baby it. Just like suburbanites who have a shiny new SUV that they are afraid to dent. What’s the point in having an amazing vehicle if you’re afraid to drive it?
    “I’m trying to take my vehicle to new and interesting places. And I try my very best not to crash, but at least I take it out.”
     
    The Regular Northwest Face route on Half Dome begins with a 5.10c finger crack that happens to be one of my favorite pitches on the whole climb. The next two pitches are only 5.9 and 5.8. It was a good warm-up for the two thousand feet of climbing above me.
    But then, on what’s normally the fourth pitch, I ran into the first bolt ladder. There are two variations that bypass that blank section on either side. I’d climbed first one, then the other, on my two roped free climbs of the route. On the left is the two-pitch Higbee ’Hedral, rated a stern 5.12a, first freed by Art Higbee on his 1976 ascent with Jim Erickson. On the right is the Huber ’Hedral, named after the German climber Alex Huber, full-on 5.11d. (’Hedral is slang for “dihedral,” a vertical inside corner in the rock. Thanks to Art and Alex for the handy alliteration of their last names!)
    Even though the Huber variation is one grade easier, it’s less