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

the Wall
comes across as a blithe celebration of climbing; it’s even lighthearted in places. The film is a minor masterpiece. No one can watch it, even for the fourth or fifth time, without feeling palms turn sweaty as Alex performs his ropeless dance on vertical rock. And the film never fails to inspire a heated debate among climbers and nonclimbers alike over the ethics of free soloing. (Some nonclimbers simply cannot bear to watch the film.)
    A testament to Mortimer and Rosen’s cinematic skill lies in the fact that most viewers don’t realize they’re seeing a reenactment. Instead, the film looks and feels like a documentary of twoof the boldest exploits of twenty-first-century climbing. For comic counterpoint, the film intercuts the footage on Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome with Alex giving a tour of the Econoline van that serves as his home (narrator Rosen: “Do you have girls in here a lot?” Alex, guffawing: “Do I look like I have girls in here a lot?”), and with a visit to Alex’s childhood home in Sacramento, where his mother proudly shows off all the magazine covers featuring her son, while he cringes in embarrassment. The film closes lightheartedly, too, with Alex eating food out of a bowl with a twig in lieu of cutlery, as he riffs about being like a tool-using chimp using a stick to ferret out ants. “This is what makes us human,” he cracks.
    The heart of
Alone on the Wall
, of course, lies in the dazzling footage of Alex on his two big walls. Interspersed with this action are sound bites from Alex’s peers. Says Cedar Wright, one of Alex’s best friends, “When you meet Alex Honnold, you’re gonna be like, ‘Huh, this guy is a bumbling, dorky, awkward goofball.’ Until he steps on the rock, and then he’s literally a whole other person. He becomes this poised, graceful, calculated badass dude.” John Long, the Stonemaster who shared in the first one-day ascent of the Nose on El Cap in 1975, marvels about Alex’s free solo of Half Dome: “It took some vision to get up there, but it took some frickin’
balls
to actually do it.” Climbing buddy Nick Martino declares, “Frickin’ Honnold is walking on the moon, as far as I’m concerned.”
    As the footage of the actual climbing spools by, Alex comments in voice-over: “There’s all the little things you have to think about, like left-right, which sequence you’re doing, but there’s nothing I’m really thinking about—I’m just doing it.” And: “I love the simplicity of soloing. You never climb better than when you’re soloing.” And: “Doubt is the biggest danger in soloing. As soon as you hesitate, you’re screwed.” But even Alex seems at last to realize the magnitude of his deeds, as, standing on the summit of Moonlight Buttress, grinning with happiness, he utters, “When I think about it, it’s frickin’ rad!”
    The climax of the film dramatizes the stall-out that gave Alex his five minutes of “very private hell” only 150 feet below the top of Half Dome. But Mortimer and Rosen were not about to ask Alex to repeat that terrifying sequence of “miserly smears” on the 5.12 slab above Thank God Ledge, where, on September 6, 2008, he had confronted the very real possibility of falling almost 2,000 feet to his death. Instead, in the film, Thank God Ledge itself serves as the locus for the freakout. As Alex sidles carefully away from the camera along the narrowing ledge, facing out with his back to the wall, he pauses. In voice-over, he narrates, “Basically, when I’m soloing, normally I have like a mental armor. You could say I’m in the zone. Something that’s protecting my head from thinking too much. And for some reason”—he laughs at the memory—“on Half Dome I ran out of what armor I had. . . . I had a mini-nervous breakdown.”
    In the film, the invisible cameraman, Tim Kemple, tells Alex that he can traverse back to safety if he doesn’t like the feel of this predicament. But Alex shuffles