Thats right folks, we here at Crank Climbing are at least semi-literate.
Through my lovely girlfriend’s attendance of a book expo, I was able to pick up a pre-release copy of Alex Honnold’s Alone on the Wall. If you don’t know who Alex Honnold is, you may be living under a rock, and that goes for everyone, not just the climbers out there. In the past few years he has been a staple of some of Sender Films best regarded works, as well as appearing in just about every media outlet, including 60 Minutes with Lara Logan
Now, as this is a pre-release, I cannot quote the book directly as some things are subject to change. I can tell you that it’s going to clock in at around 250 pages, but the reading goes fast and there is a beautiful photo spread in the middle. It walks us through Alex’s meteoric rise through two points of view – the first his, and the second that of David Roberts. While at first I thought this might be confusing, the edition I read used italic font for Alex’s thoughts, and standard print for David’s. At times the two simply give accounts of the same event, one there in the present, and one capturing the impact on the larger climbing community and hammering home the magnitude in a way that Alex ‘No Big Deal’ Honnold might not do on his own. At other times, it serves as more of a call and response, trading back and forth the different perspectives and leaving the reader to decide where in the middle the truth lies.
The book itself is divided into eight chapters, one each devoted to milestone moments in Alex’s career:
1. Moonlight – Alex’s first big splash, free soloing the 1200′ 5.12+ crack
2. A Very Private Hell – his free solo of the Northwest Face of Half Dome
3. Fear and Loving in Las Vegas – repeating the Half Dome climb for the cameras, and meeting his then girlfriend Stacey
4. World Traveler – a tale of the first big sponsored objectives, and an eye opening experience about how the rest of the world lives
5. Triple Play – Yosemite’s first 3-in-a-day figurative “sprints”, first with Tommy Caldwell, and then solo as captured in the Reel Rock Tour’s Honnold 3.0
6. The Speed Record – Hooking up with Hans Florine to literally sprint up the Nose of El Cap
7. Fitz – Completing the Fitzroy Traverse with Tommy, and venturing into fastlight alpinism
8. Above and Beyond – A peek into the future
One thing that comes across is the personal growth of Honnold. At only 29 as of this writing, he and I are within about 9 months of each other in age. In his earlier twenties, there were moments when he didn’t speak with much tact, or didn’t have a wide enough perspective on things. The book, to its credit, does not shy away from these events. Alex is a smart, well read young man, and is self-aware enough to identify that he’s made a lot of personal growth, and that in those middle years, his then-girlfriend Stacy Pearson was responsible in a way for “humanizing” him. Personally, I can’t fault a person who has emotionally progressed like that – at 22 I wasn’t exactly well-spoken at all times either and I wasn’t a sponsored climber with a microphone hanging on my every word.
While I view the book through the lens of a climber, efforts are made to clarify things for the lay-audience. Grading scales and the cryptic climbing vocabulary are explained before immersing the reader into paragraphs of climber-speak. The last chapter of the book deals in part with the death of Sean Leary in a BASEjumping accident in Zion park. While Dean Potter makes repeat cameos by name throughout the book as a major inspiration to Alex’s career, its a bittersweet read knowing that shortly after these copies came off the printing press, Dean was no longer with us. I expect there may be a heavy addendum added if there is time prior to final release.
The only real faults I can find in this book many be fixed by the final edit. In some places it get repetitive, like the same thought was placed on two consecutive pages and just hadn’t been caught yet. As a boulderer without any big wall experience, I found it enlightening how much vertical mileage each of these routes covered if only by the number of references to foottoe pain due to the fit of his shoes (Come on La Sportiva, get it together!). Being in the same age bracket as Alex, I can say that while I am comfortable with the personality he exudes at times in the book, it might not resonate with every reader. I have read books where the author’s personality came off as complete tooljerkdouchebag and it noticeably tainted the reading experience for me (‘What Mad Pursuit!’ by Francis Crick comes to mind).
A lot of people might poke fun, or think it pretentious for anyone to release a memoir at 29 years old. Alex Honnold has had a lot of success in those three decades, and I think he is poised for a lot more in the future. An analogy – The Red Hot Chili Peppers released their first ‘Greatest Hits’ album in 1992, and I doubt many of us recognize the majority of those tracks. Here’s hoping that Alex’s career follows a similar arc, and that his “Californication” is yet to come.