THE IMPOSSIBLE CLIMB

Alex Honnold, El Capitan and the Climbing Life

By Mark Synnott

When he was 10, Mark Synnott asked his father what happens when you die. “You’re worm food,” his dad replied. The horror of nothingness! The absence of anything! Cue an adolescent obsession with what Synnott calls “risk-taking as an existential salve.” As a teenager in New Hampshire, he organized his ski-racing buddies and led them up cliffs and into half-frozen water, assigning prizes and ranks as motivation in his own invented game of institutionalized chicken. He’s compelled less by death itself, it seems, than by taunting the moment when death becomes inevitable: after you’ve fallen, before you hit the ground.

Fast forward, and it’s no surprise that the daredevil teenager became a full-time rock climber. Climbing allows him to enter “the now” — what Buddhists might call mindfulness — not just while clinging to rocks in midair but while “strolling down a fairway or looking out the window at a birch tree swaying in the breeze. That’s … when I knew I had found my calling, the reason I was alive — to seek out and climb the great big walls of the world.”

Synnott’s new book, “The Impossible Climb” — part memoir, part exploration of the climbing culture — gives context for Alex Honnold’s historic unroped ascent of El Capitan, Yosemite’s 3,000-foot slab of “glacier-polished granite” (a climb that was recently documented in the film “Free Solo”). Synnott lays out a series of generational portraits of climbing communities, chronicling the rise and fall of progressive dirtbag cultures along with the waves of ethical debate that have characterized each generation. Is it cool to put bolts in walls? What about, like, a lot of bolts? How about “spraying” — a climber’s term for gossiping about private accomplishments — or climbing in vulnerable ecosystems? If you fall while climbing and get caught by a rope, do you have to start over at the bottom?

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If Synnott’s own generation has an enduring question, it’s how to balance the solitary ethos of climbing with the demands of an audience hungry for coverage, particularly in the first years of internet storytelling. After Synnott’s 1999 ascent of Trango in northern Pakistan, heavily documented by the now-defunct sports website Quokka, a climbing purist wrote in The American Alpine Journal that the ascent was “business climbing” — a sick burn if there ever was one. “Were their accomplishments equitable with the amount of publicity it garnered?” the critic asks. They were not. But do they need to be? Synnott grapples with these questions even as he takes sponsorships that place him in the cross hairs of the discussion. When the North Face hires its first team of professional climbers in 1994 — a heretofore unheard-of position that introduces the politics of corporate alignment to daredevils on the fringes — Synnott isn’t among them, but he does make the team in a subsequent year, further enabling both his quest for adventure and his corporate allegiance. “Sellout” is an insult, sure, but it’s also a code word for success, and money makes adventures happen.