#2: Why Would Anyone climb 3,000 feet without a rope?

+ a badass septuagenarian + a love/hate relationship with heroic stories

I have a big birthday next month, and was thinking Meh. Everything will be closed that day, everybody will be away, why bother organising anything.

Then I saw this story:

Screenshot: The New York Times, published on 26 October 2021 · Photo: Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York Times

The septuagenarian

For her 70th birthday, Dierdre Wolownick decided to climb El Capitán in Yosemite National Park, for the second time. She had already done it in 2017, through a different route, becoming the oldest woman to ever scale what she calls the “ocean of granite”.

Wolownick is, also, the mother of superstar rock climber Alex Honnold. She says she initially took up climbing in her 60s to relate better to her son. At the same time, she seems to have made climbing Her Thing¹:

“I was just a lumpy old middle age woman completely taken with jobs and chores. I was scared, too, and sometimes you need a little help to do something totally new and alien to you. But after a month or two I had had enough conversations with myself and so I said, OK, today, you’re not going home after work. You’re going to go straight to the climbing gym. And I did.” ª

The outlier

The year that his mum first climbed El Capitán, Alex Honnold tackled the 3,000-feet southwest face of the same monolith, without a rope. Any minor mistake meant he would fall and die.

The 2018 Oscar-winning film Free Solo documents his quest. It’s a beautiful, gripping film, even if you don’t know the first thing about climbing:

[SPOILER ALERT: Honnold did not fall and is the first and only person who’s ever free solo-ed El Capitán. Below is a photo of him and his pregnant wife, Sanni McCandless Honnold, in Sardinia five weeks ago:]

sannimccandless

A post shared by Sanni McCandless Honnold (@sannimccandless)

Now. Why Would Anyone climb “the most impressive wall on earth” without any safety gear?

First off, Honnold’s exceptional brain doesn’t compute fear² like yours and mine do. Beyond that, here are Honnold’s self-declared motivators, both intrinsic and extrinsic:

• Enjoyment

“Why does anyone have a hobby or passion? It’s because I find meaning and fulfillment in it, it’s beautiful, and I enjoy it. You could also say that my brain chemistry is addicted to the feeling […] but the overarching thing is that I love the feeling of dangling” ^

• Excellence

“In some way the drive is like curiosity, the explorer’s heart, wanting to see what’s around the corner. And part of it is being a perfectionist. If I’m gonna do something, I want to do it well.” ^

“This is your path and you will pursue it with excellence. You face your fear because your goal demands it. That is the warrior spirit.” *

“There is pressure, but it’s mostly internal. I’ve basically devoted my life to climbing, and I don’t want to put in all this effort and still suck at it. That would be lame.” ^

“You know, like, nobody achieves anything great because they’re happy and cosy.” *

• An exacting upbringing

“My mum’s favourite sayings are: ‘presque ne compte pas’ [in French], ‘almost doesn’t count’, or ‘good enough isn’t’. No matter how well I ever do at anything, it’s not that good. The bottomless pit of self-loathing. I mean, that’s definitely the motivation for some solo-ing.” *

“It’s, like, always about excellence and perfection. And I was certainly raised that way, you know, that you need to perform.” *

• Also, shyness

[As a child] “I was doing a lot of solo-ing, just a lot of climbing by myself, just because I didn’t know anybody and I didn’t want to talk to anybody.” *

What would I do if my children took up deadly hobbies? (So far I have toddlers who climb on the dining table to grab sharp objects, and a 4-year-old who fancies joining a group of pyrotechnic demon-dancers.)

Of course, I’d like to think I’d respect, nay embrace their passion like Wolownick does:

“I think when he’s free solo-ing is when he feels most alive, most… everything. How can you even think about taking that away from somebody?” *

And OF COURSE, I’d be super chill about it all, let the kids’ intrinsic motivation lead the show, and they would never fall into a bottomless pit of self-loathing! EASY-PEASY!

Being intentional

I have a love/hate relationship with tales of extraordinary athletic achievements. At first glance, I find them alienating, hence de-motivating. But I also like how stories of outliers push me to examine my own choices.

There’s the initial gut reaction: “that’s insane/selfish/stupid”; “I would leave you if you did that”; “Warrior Spirit, LOL” —judgments I can be prompt to spit out.

If I stop here though, I can’t see what I might share, deep down, with people like Honnold. I keep potential realisations, and growth, at bay.

Curiosity? Adult demands for ‘excellence’? That I know. Honnold’s elation as he reaches the summit, grinning: “So delighted. So delighted”? That’s intrinsic gold.

If I take a deep breath, I also notice that I envy Honnold. Not his abilities, but his freedom, his drive, his “give-no-shits” (his wife’s words) certainty.

As he puts it:

“I wonder if people that hate on risk-taking are as intentional in their choices as I am. How many people are choosing to live in a way that best suits their values and best fulfils them?” ^

Touché.

More than a supporting cast

The most relatable part of Free Solo, to me, is the nerve-racking experience of pretty much everyone around Honnold: the filming crew, his fellow climbers, his then-girlfriend McCandless, his mother.

I do not want to romanticise the lives of those gnawing at their nails on the sidelines of heroic feats, especially women in the shadow of manly exploits. But I wouldn’t mind getting a taste of the life-affirming clarity that seems to ripple around Honnold’s close circle.

I crave some of McCandless’ deliberateness. While Free Solo sometimes portrays her as an amateur thorn in Honnold’s side, she appears to have found Her Thing, too:

“Somewhere deep down I was realizing the pain of forever being seen simply as an extension of my significant other. […] Slowly, I recognized that my frustration might be coming from a lack of confidence that I would find my own way.” º

“We had to discuss not only the prospect of death, but what we each needed to truly feel alive.” º

I will leave you with Wolownick’s flavour of give-no-shits attitude, before I go think about what I really want to do on my birthday:

“Look, there’s somebody telling you every step of your life what to eat, what to wear, that you can’t sleep without this drug, and it’s all nonsense. You can decide for yourself what you think you’re capable of.” ª

1. The quotes marked with * come from Free Solo, which is available to stream on Disney+ (at least where I live).

Those marked with ª come from Wolownick’s 2021 Q&A with the New York Times.
Those marked with ^ come from this 2015 National Geographic interview with Honnold.
Those marked with º come from this 2021 essay by McCandless in Outside magazine.

2. I recommend this 2016 Nautilus article about Alex Honnold’s brain, where J.B. McKinnon writes: “it’s a fair bet that Honnold’s threat-response circuitry started out on the cool end of the spectrum—which would explain why his younger self saw a powerful appeal, rather than lethal danger, in the photographs of his ropeless climbing heroes. At least as important as the brain that Honnold was born with, however, is the one that he has wired for himself through thousands of hours of risk-taking.”