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

you sure—?’
    “He burst out, ‘You guys are such pussies! You mean I’ll have to call someone else to shoot this?’”
    The passages Alex soloed for the camera were the 5.12 pitches above the crux 180-foot inside corner, where a perfect finger crack into which he locked his first digits had given him such exhilaration when he’d first soloed the route the previous April. Mortimer: “It was cold. And it was windy. The exposure up there at the top of Moonlight Buttress is crazy. It’s as vertigo-inducing as anything on El Cap. While we filmed, just a few feet away from Alex, we weresuper careful not to move an inch, so as not to distract him. You don’t want to drop a lens cap or knock loose even the tiniest stone.”
    Even so, Mortimer and his cameramen were gripped. The finger-locked digits, the feet pasted flat against the smooth wall, seemed to give Alex only the most marginal purchase on the world. Below him stretched an 800-foot void. If he fell, he might strike nothing before slamming into the ground at the base of the wall. At that moment, Alex turned to the camera and said, “So, do you want me to make this look like it’s hard for me?” According to Mortimer, “Alex was actually thinking, ‘Oh, those guys must be so bored.’” A little later, Alex jammed his knee into a crack, then suddenly let go with both hands. “No hands kneebar, baby!” he exulted.
    A few months later, a slightly different crew, including Mortimer’s directing partner Nick Rosen and cameraman Tim Kemple, gathered to shoot Alex reenacting parts of the Regular Northwest Face route on Half Dome. In the interim, two of America’s best mountaineers, Johnny Copp and Micah Dash (both featured in
The Sharp End
, as they explored the Shafat Fortress in India and the Chamonix
aiguilles
in France), disappeared on Mount Edgar in western China, along with cinematographer Wade Johnson, who had worked on
The Sharp End
. Living in Boulder, all three were close friends of the entire staff of Sender Films. Not only that, but Sender was crafting a film around the attempt on the massive, unclimbed southeast face of Mount Edgar.
    It was only when the trio missed a return flight out of Chengdu that a rescue effort was launched. Top climbers from Boulder and elsewhere, including Nick Rosen, immediately flew to China to initiate a search. They were aided by Chinese troops. On June 7, 2009, Copp’s body was found at the base of the wall, Johnson’s the next day. It seemed clear that a gigantic avalanche of mixed rock, snow, and ice had scoured the wall, engulfing the climbers. Dash’s body was never found.
    Remarkably, much of Johnson’s footage was recovered intact at base camp. Mortimer and Rosen used it to put together a film in homage to their friends.
Point of No Return
is a haunting, unforgettable work. Knowing the tragic fate that awaits the three young climbers, you watch their tearful goodbyes to girlfriends at the airport, their boisterous antics at base camp, with a sense of mounting dread. But you also see the monstrously scary, nearly continuous barrage of falling rocks and ice that had made the trio decide to abandon the route even before coming to grips with it.
    It’s torturous to learn that the men’s final mission was simply a scramble up to a cache above base camp to retrieve equipment they had stowed a few days before. Watching them head off to their doom, you want to scream at the screen,
Just go home! Leave the fucking gear!
    In the wake of the disaster, which shook the whole American climbing community, Mortimer and Rosen approached Half Dome with Alex in a somber, even psyched-out mood. “We had absolutely no stomach,” says Mortimer, “for anything crazy or on the edge. We were going to restrict the filming to the easier pitches down low, then rap down a few hundred feet from the summit to film Alex finishing the Zig-Zags and traversing Thank God Ledge.”
    Despite the fears and sorrows of the filmmakers,
Alone on