Mark Synnott > Quotes

“Peter Croft once explained the feeling you get from free soloing as a heightened type of perception. A little edge that you need to stand on looks huge—everything comes into high relief. That’s just what happens to your body and your mind when you’re focused intensely on the feedback you’re getting from the environment and there are no other distractions. You become an instinctive animal rather than a person trying to do a hard climb, and that perception doesn’t immediately go away when you get to the top. It dulls over time, but for a while it feels like you almost have super senses. Everything is more intense—the sounds of the swifts flying around or the colors of the sun going down. A lot of times I don’t want to go down, I don’t want it to end.”
― Mark Synnott, The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life

“Have you ever stood near the edge of a high place, like a rooftop, or a cliff-side overlook, and felt a strange compulsion to step off the edge, almost like the abyss was calling to you, beckoning you to take that leap into the void? If there was nothing between you and oblivion but one hand clinging to a rock, can you say with 100 percent certainty that you wouldn't just let go? As I asked myself this question and tried to quantify things that are probably unquantifiable, I wondered if this fear of a kind of suicide, the fear that perhaps we're not actually in control of our actions and thoughts, lies at the heart of why people react so viscerally to free soloing.”
― Mark Synnott, The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life

“The difference between sport climbing and the big-wall linkups that Alex specializes in is like the difference between sprinting and distance running. One relies primarily on power, the other on endurance. Alex is a long-distance thoroughbred, not a sprinter, and no matter how hard he trains, he will never be able to pull as hard as the world’s best sport climbers, guys like Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra, and Alex Megos; just like how Haile Gebrselassie will never beat Usain Bolt in the hundred-meter dash—and Bolt will never beat Gebrselassie in the 10,000 meters. The point is that while sport climbing and big walls are part of the same sport, they’re entirely different disciplines. One of the things that makes climbing unique, though, is that the different disciplines can be combined. The Dawn Wall, which combined powerful cutting-edge sport climbing with the drawn-out effort of a medieval siege, is a perfect example.”
― Mark Synnott, The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life

“Sometimes science is the excuse for exploration. I think it is rarely the reason. “Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose, of man’s desire to conquer the universe.”
― Mark Synnott, The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest

“But of such imaginary joys does human happiness full often consist: and what matter, if even less than this, the anatomy of a fly’s toe, or whatever else, will serve to make men happy and proud of themselves?”
― Mark Synnott, Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery

“of power midflight. While Allen languished at around 24,300 feet, Bartek plugged the drone into his computer and worked on hacking into the battery’s security system.”
― Mark Synnott, The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest

“Try to tell him that free soloing is dangerous, and he will argue the point, every time. The closest I've come so far is to get Alex to admit that the "consequences" of a fall while free soloing would be "disastrous." But then he'll quickly point out that just because a consequence may be severe, its probability of occurring does not increase. The consequences, he'll say, are equally dire if your hand slips off the steering wheel and you swerve into the oncoming lane and collide head-on with a Mack truck.”
― Mark Synnott, The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life