Free Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure by David Roberts, Alex Honnold

of their hardest routes barefoot.
    Mortimer and Rosen rounded up their team of American rock stars, including Cedar Wright, Renan Ozturk, Matt Segal, Topher Donahue, and Heidi Wirtz. Alex went along as the promising rookie. For the film, the directors lured sixty-one-year-old Bernd Arnold—the grandmaster of the Elbsandsteingebirge from the late 1960s through the ’70s and ’80s—to act as guide for the awestruck Americans. In the film, although Arnold speaks virtually no English, he gleefully shows his charges the ropes (as it were), encouraging themto take off their shoes and scramble barefoot to get used to the strange rock. Arnold’s comrades blithely underscore the seriousness of the routes with gallows humor. As one of them says, in accented English, “If you fall, you can become legend.”
    The climactic scene of this episode in
The Sharp End
unfolds after the Americans have succeeded on some of the classic routes but now want to make their own mark to salvage a bit of pride. They gather beneath a sharp vertical arête, a route that even the locals declare too dangerous. The talk is ominous and fearful. Wearing a hoodie, looking like the antisocial nerd Ben Smalley remembered from high school, Alex is almost silent. But then he quietly spouts, “We’ve been here for an hour, talking about how hard and how scary this is. We should just go do it.”
    So Alex takes the sharp end. His progress up the terrifying arête, superbly filmed, uses his buddies’ spontaneous comments as voice-over. Cedar Wright says, “He’s hesitating there for ten minutes. He’s looking at a ninety-foot fall. He could hit the ground.” In the film, you can hear Alex’s short bursts of panting breath. But the smooth, exquisitely calculated movement is a work of art. Fear for his safety transmutes into his comrades’ praise. “Watching Alex is pretty inspiring,” one says, “because he keeps it together so well.” Another: “Alex is in a different head space—his ability to stay calm and not get pumped, all the way to the top.” And after Alex finishes the climb, yet another: “That’s not a pitch I want to lead.” Cedar Wright: “I’m definitely a little jealous.”
    Wordless, Alex stands on the summit of the spire and grins.
    ••••
    After Alex free soloed Half Dome in September 2008, Mortimer and Rosen decided they wanted to shape a whole film around the prodigy’s extraordinary deeds. But no one had witnessed Alex’s climbs on either Moonlight Buttress or Half Dome. The solutionwas self-evident: approach Alex and ask him whether he’d be willing to reenact passages on those two routes for the camera.
    Mortimer remembers, “He wasn’t reluctant at all. He was up for it. ‘Yeah,’ he told us, ‘I love the idea of getting some footage on those walls.’”
    The logistical problems of filming that footage, however, were monumental. By the spring of 2009, when Sender was ready to shoot Moonlight Buttress, there were several parties on the route, climbing it in old-fashioned style, with plenty of aid. Fortunately, those parties were toiling low on the route. Mortimer and still photographer Celin Serbo decided to rappel down some 400 feet from the summit, hang on parallel ropes, then film and photograph Alex free soloing the upper pitches close up with the aid parties well out of the frame. Alex would rappel down those 400 feet, take off his harness, and start soloing upward.
    Mortimer had deep misgivings about what he was asking Alex to do.
What if he falls to his death
, he worried,
just for the sake of our film? I can’t imagine how I could live with that.
His film crew was equally apprehensive. “As we gathered in Springdale the night before the reenactment,” Mortimer says, “we were completely stressed out. We were at a pizza parlor. We waited until Alex went to the bathroom, then we said to each other, ‘I don’t know if we should do this.’
    “When Alex came back, I started to ask, ‘Alex, are