Sufferfest: 700 Miles of Pain and Glory

Cedar Wright: Yeah there's tons of pain, exhaustion, but the same time there's a lot of beauty, and laughter, and really special moments, and it all combines into this unforgettable life experience. Woo! Yeah!

So, how does a...a little kid, well, named Cedar Wright. Obviously hippie parents, right? ...and an amazing dresser later in life become...the superman of rock climbing, that I am today? Well, actually, some people might disagree with that statement. But basically it started for me in Yosemite Valley. I started out living in my truck. And doing, kind of, what climbers call the dirt-bag existence. And that basically involves, you know, diving in dumpsters, surviving on next to nothing and climbing all the time in this place, Yosemite Valley. And I soon got a job on Yosemite Search and Rescue. And this is my first sponsorship in a way. It was... it was a way for me to live full time in Yosemite Valley. Occasionally, I would perform a rescue, help drag somebody off a cliff or carry somebody down with a sprained ankle from a trail. It allowed me to really hone my craft as a climber. And because I had my Bachelor's in English, I started to write about my exploits and tell stories. And this led eventually to climbing sponsorship. I actually convinced some... companies that they should sponsor me, including The North Face.

That would really kinda transform my whole life. It allowed me to travel the world and have these incredible adventures all over the globe. And also do some really sketchy, awesome stuff like this. This was in the Ukraine. This is a 600-foot fall. And actually the rope breaks, so I'm gonna-- I don't want you guys to see...the next part. But I had a remarkable recovery and I'm here with us today. Eventually that led into filmmaking. Because I had appeared in some films, I started to be really interested in how that all worked. And I started working with a bunch of my friends and shooting a bunch of really good climbers. And also Alex Honnold.

And you have to wonder how this like, you know, extreme badass, legendary free-soloist and all round rock god came from this. You know?

Alex: Yeah, yeah. He is... I wonder myself and then got to... got eventually to this.

Alex: Climbing Half Dome took me two hours and 15 minutes. And it's hard to be completely focused and completely on your game for that long. Basically, when I'm soloing, Normally I have almost, like, a mental armor. You could say I am in the zone. I have something that's, let's say, protecting my head from thinking too much. And for whatever reason on Half Dome I ran out of whatever armor I had. I found myself like 1800-feet off the ground. I was like, “What am I doing up here? Why am I doing it?” You know, just all the questions all a sudden entered my mind. I think doubt is probably the biggest danger in soloing. Because basically as soon as you start to hesitate then you're screwed.

Alex: Just a sec. I'm freaking out actually. I just had this, like, mini-nervous breakdown. I never had anything quite like that happen before.

Cameraman: Just come back if you're not feeling it.

Alex: Right. That's the thing, I'm like...

Alex: Nothing really happened. It just all happened inside my head, while I stood there for a few minutes. At some point in there I just dealt with whatever was going on and then just climbed it. Yeah, it was cool to, like, escape, you know, my little prison. I haven't had a moment of panic like that in a really long time. I was like... Once I made that move and was suddenly into the easier terrain, it was fantastic. And I just charged the summit.

So, that looked pretty mellow.

Alex. Looks pretty chill. Yeah, super mellow. Yeah, yeah, thanks Cedar for that rousing intro. That was a delight. Like you said, I mean, I guess, I'm predominantly known as a free-soloist but... in reality I spend probably 95 percent of my time climbing with a rope, with partners. You know, just doing conventional climbing. I grew up climbing in a gym. And so, this represents like a very small percentage of my climbing even though it makes all the best photos. And part of what has drawn me to this kind of soloing, and being up on walls like this, is just sort of the adventure. Like, this is sort of the adventure end of the rock-climbing spectrum. I wouldn't say it's uncertain because obviously I'm not like going up on these walls just rolling the dice being like, Let's see what happens. You know, there's a lot of confidence, I know I can climb these but it still feels quite adventurous. You're still alone in this position where you're like, “This is pretty amazing,
I can't believe I'm here.”

And so, that feeling of adventure, like, that I get from soloing and this kind of stuff, is kind of what led us into Sufferfest One, which is a bike tour that we did two years ago now. And we climbed the 15, 14,000-foot peaks in California, as a bike tour. But so you can see this is Mount Whitney and the Keeler Needle next to it. And that's, you know, the tallest peak in California. Looking at those peaks you can see it's, like, big granite walls, lots of scrambling, lots of climbing. And so, for our bike tour we basically soloed whichever routes, you know, inspired us, like, on all these 14,000-foot peaks. And, you know, that's kind of getting back to the adventurous routes of climbing for us, you know? It was cool to, like, get on bikes, even though we don't know anything about them and then go climb these mountains in kind of a cool and new way.

Cedar: Yeah. And then I was all, “Alex, we should do Desert Towers in the Four Corners. It'd be epic. You know, it's like... every tower is, like, super unique. And in the meantime, over the last few years, I've started the Honnold Foundation, which is sort of like an environmental non-profit and just my way of giving money back to environmental groups that improve standard of living. And I've been sort of looking for a hands-on project to support because I've just been giving grants to other non-profits. And this seemed like a perfect opportunity because Cedar's idea of doing Desert Towers works in really nicely with the Navajo Reservation. This is in Monument Valley, which is basically the most dense cluster of desert towers, the most iconic desert towers in the whole country. But, at the same time there are 18,000 Navajo living without access to power in this region. And so... I found the opportunity to support this group, Elephant Energy, which does installation, well, solar installation work with Navajo. And it seemed like a perfect opportunity to kind of tie that together with the climbing trip. You know, make it like a nice adventure but give it slightly more of a purpose. And, I mean, it made for a really nice final destination to wind up on the Navajo Reservation with these epic towers. And it just-- It sort of made sense, and so we're like, “All right, let's try to make this happen.”

I look good in spandex. Oh, yeah. I threw out the idea of a tower bagging tour. And Alex was stoked on that because he's been doing a bunch of alternative energy non-profit work and we would be climbing on the Navajo Nation where he wanted to do a solar installation. And so we put together an itinerary of 45 of the raddest towers in the desert, and planned to basically bike over 800 miles starting in Southwest Colorado, moving into Utah, popping over to New Mexico and then finishing the trip in Arizona, where we would be doing our solar project. So, I thought it would be appropriate that we would start our mission with the first desert tower ever climbed. Nice. It's begun. Oh, yeah. All right, summit one. Now we're headed over to The Medicine Man over yonder. Cedar: The attraction of desert towers is that not only are they beautiful but, you know, it's a summit. It's more than just, like, enjoying climbing. It's about getting to the top. To me they call out to be climbed. Alright, Honnold, I'm off belay. Oh, yeah!

Cedar: So, we're stoked, two down. Now we just have to ride 80 miles to the Fisher Towers.

Alex: We think we would've learned from our last mission not to just blindly follow Google Bike directions. We went the wrong way already. - We're off to a... - Well, it's like... is that surprising? No.

Cedar: True to form, we ended up instantly off route, and biking for 15 miles of mountain biking on hybrid bicycles.

Alex: We sort of envision this trip being like great climbing on good rock. Then starting on day two we were, like, in straight choss in the Fisher Towers. Choss is pretty much the catch-all term for loose rock, or things falling off, or things that are coated in mud. I mean, Choss is, like, the inclusive term for all things bad about rock climbing.

Cedar: As a testament to the quality of rock in the Fisher's, less than three months after we climbed Cobra Pillar it fell over. Whoo!

Alex: Pretty amazing. Cedar: That evening after climbing the Titan we hopped on our bikes and rode about 20 miles over to Castle Valley. I think it was on the ride over to Castleton that I realized how screwed I was. We'd climbed seven towers, biked over a hundred miles, and I was worked. And this was day three of a three-week trip.

Alex: The thing with everything on this trip though is that you're like, Urgh, this is so hard. And then it gets worse. And you're like, “Urgh, now we are really building character. And we got cell service and we got a text from one of our friends saying, FYI. There's a strong wind advisory for tomorrow. Gusts up to 55 miles an hour. Sandstorm.”

Cedar: It could be fine. How bad could it be?

Alex: I can see a wall of sand and dust. Raging with the wind you can see a wall of rain coming towards us. We just stood on the summit and when you lifted your hand, it went buzz, electricity style. It's time to get down off this tower.

Cedar: Things are getting grim up here. It's been a long day.

Alex: Oh, no!

Cedar: And then Honnold almost rode off the cliff. Dude, you got f****** worked. Can you see my buttocks? That was... I told you I went down kinda hard. It got my arm, got my whole leg. Oh, my God, dude, your ass is like ripped open. That is not good. Dude, that lower one is bad. Is it wrong for me to say, better you than me? Sufferfest was... Sufferfest today.

Cedar: I found out on these trips that, you know, there's gonna be these moments that're just really heinous. But at the same time there are also some unexpected and amazing things that happen. So, there I am on the highway, I gotta take a leak, so, I just pull over randomly and I walk out into the desert, and I hear this whimpering sound to my left.

Cedar: Well, we found a puppy in a ditch and, like, gave him a place to sleep last night. Somebody just threw him on the side of the road. It's super grim.

Cedar: Poor little guy. Little Sufferpup. What have we got rocking here?

Alex: Oh, we got some... We're making dog kennels here now. Come out, pup. Cedar: Sufferpup.

Cedar: With our new buddy Sufferpup in tow, we headed to Indian Creek, which is the Mecca for crack-climbing in the world.

Cedar: This, like, red sandstone desert out here in the Four Corners is some of the most beautiful land in the world. It's really just something to behold. And that's why I love doing these trips is to really embed yourself in the landscape, to really slowly move through it, so you can really appreciate just what a beautiful and incredible place this is, you know? Now we're going to be entering the Navajo Nation and then we'll climb a few more towers and then start working on our solar project.

Alex: The climbing on this trip really culminated in the Whale. It was almost like our final exam because it combined horrific choss and horrific weather, and this one just really horrible experience.

Cedar: Whoo! Tower number 45, hard to believe.

Alex: Well, that just made us men. I think I just felt, like, four hairs sprout out of my chest.

Cedar: These are the moments that kinda make these trips awesome in the end, I tell myself. Oh, my ******* God! Thank God it's over, dude. I'm going to throw my bike out in traffic real quick. I hope I never have to get on it again.

Cedar: The entire trip Alex and I joked about suffering and how heinous it was. But the reality is, is that this is kind of a luxury. We're lucky to be able to electively suffer like this. And one thing we talked about at the start of this journey was that we really wanted to finish it off in a way that acknowledged that fact.

Alex: The thing is, our trip is probably easier than most people's normal lives. Just in Northern Arizona there are 18,000 Navajo with no access to electricity.

Cedar: One of the cool things about this trip was that we got to visit one of the projects that Honnold is supporting, which is a solar energy project on the Navajo Nation, near some of the towers we were climbing on.

Alex: I mean, as much as I love climbing, it doesn't really matter. But it's nice to do something that has like a slightly bigger impact on the world, like, something that actually matters, that affects, like, the quality of other people's lives. Something that I thought about a lot, that sort of applies to both climbing and the environmentalism of the non-profit type stuff that I've been working on, is basically the idea of just, like, tiny little steps towards, like, a bigger objective, where you have some kind of, like, long term goal that seems, sort of, insurmountable if you think about the whole thing, but then once you start into it and you start chewing off little pieces, you do it and you're like, “Oh, wow, it turns out it is possible.” A trip like this, 30 or 40 towers in a couple of weeks, that sounds exhausting, like there's no way. But then once you start doing it and you start climbing a bunch of towers everyday and loving life, and climbing a couple of towers the next day, and before you know it you're like, “Wow, we sure have climbed a lot of towers. Heya...”

Cedar: Yeah there's tons of pain, exhaustion, but at the same time there's a lot of beauty, and laughter, and really special moments and it all combines into this unforgettable life experience. Yeah!

So, I hope you guys enjoyed the film. It's great to...you know, to see people enjoy it. It was... it was a lot of work. One of the frustrating things about this trip was that we were upstaged by a dog. You didn't really get the full story of Sufferpup. Sufferpup had actually climbed into this little tire, like, on a cattle guard grate and was, like, hiding from the wind. He was...And he was still nursing when I got him. And so, when I first got him I was like trying to... I just didn't know what to do. We didn't obviously have dog food with us or anything. And so, I just started, like, nursing him, like, off of my...like, giving him water off my thumb. And he was basically nursing off my thumb. And then I was like, Well, what would they eat like when they're like so little? And then I was like, “Oh, milk, they'd be like drinking milk.” - And I was like-- You gave him string cheese. String cheese, yeah. I don't know if that's exactly what you feed a dog. At first he was, like, all... and then he ate, like, like, half a chunk of string cheese. And I was like we better cut him off. I don't want him to-- And then didn't he poop in the cameraman's sleeping bag? - Yeah, he like-- So, that was kind of a bummer. The first night, he like **** all over my... ...all over my sleeping bag. And then he, like, kept on, like, whining and whining, I couldn't quite figure out why he was whining and then he pissed in my sleeping bag. But he was adorable. He was freaking, like, the most adorable little puppy. And so the whole time, I was like, Oh, what are we gonna do with Sufferpup?

You know, like, we can't obviously, you know, we can't like abandon him. And so, I reached out to my wife. And my wife, like, you know, she loves dogs. But I was like, I think Sufferpup's going to be big. And we're kind of, like-- We have, like, a little tiny black pug that I love, all-terrain pug. And you can follow him on Instagram, @allterrainpug. Shameless plug. He's all, Really again? But... one of her co-workers took Sufferpup, and so at the end I knew I had to go back and check in with Sufferpup and see how he was doing. And I just knew that the audience was just going to be like, Well, what happened to Sufferpup? You know, and so it was cool to see-- And I couldn't believe in like four months he's like frigging grown like—

Alex: It's good you didn't keep him.

Cedar: Yeah, he wasn't the smartest dog, but he was adorable. But...

Alex: A lot like you. Actually, you should've kept him. You should've kept him. I should've. It could've been, like, I know, together we could've been this amazing team.. But... basically it's about, like, you know, the laughter and, like, the joking. And laughing in the face of discomfort is like, is a skill that we both have. And we had an amazing time out there. You know, like, Alex is one of my best friends. And he kinda likes me. You know, tolerate. Tolerates me.

Alex: It's worth adding that last photo. We rode past that little section probably six times for Cedar, who put his iPhone into a pile of cow poop, propped up just perfectly with a timer. And then, like, we would ride by and this thing would fall off the poop. - He'd be like, Oh! And he'd like set it up again. And I was like, Really, do we have to-- But then it turns out it was a nice photo. Yeah, yeah. But what you can't see is all the poop piled up underneath there...

Cedar: It's a poop-pod, it's like revolutionary. yeah. It's ground breaking. So, if you ever see cow patty in the ground And You need to get That shot. - It's like guerilla filmmaking. It is. You know, just... yeah.

But the Navajo land was, like, it was really cool. I mean, some of the most iconic peaks are there, like Ship Rock here, which was the largest tower that we climbed. - It's like a mountain... - It's like a mountain. - more so than a tower. Yeah. The Navajo Nation definitely had more of the feel of the Wild West than, like, the established climbing areas that we were in. In fact, at one point Alex got chased down on horseback-- Yeah, both of us. So, the thing with the Navajo Nation is that you kinda need like a guide or somebody to give you permission to access all these towers. So, we had this Navajo climber with us who reassured us that it was totally fine, you know, he knew this guy that knew this guy and it was fine. And so, he drove in to this tower in a truck. And then, we were, like, biking behind. And basically the shepherd that owned the land saw the truck go by, and got kind of fired up and then saw us biking really slowly. He just like jumped on his horse, like, with no saddle, no anything and just tore ass across the desert to, like, ride us down and yell at us. It was like... It definitely felt like the Wild West. I was, like, I had headphones in and I could, like, look over and I was like, “Whoa! There's a dude on a horse like going superfast and yelling at me.” And I kinda, like, my first instinct was, like, just look forward and hope that he's not coming towards me, you know? I was like, If I don't make eye contact, he won't notice. And so I keep pedaling but that actually just like made him more upset. Understandably. And so, I mean, it worked out fine. Basically, you paid him and it worked out fine. But that's kind of the thing with climbing access there, is that it's a little more nebulous than like on BLM land or, you know, any of the other places that we were climbing. Yeah.

And then eventually somehow, someway we finished and then started the solar portion of it. And, it was a really cool way to finish the trip, I thought. I guess, like, you know, if I was gonna, like, leave you guys with, like, any lessons or perhaps cautionary tales from our experience, I think it's, like, I would just say that, “Yeah, we're professional climbers.”

And, you know, we do stuff like this for a living, which we're very lucky to do. But anyone can plan their own Sufferfest. You know, anybody can come up with a crazy, audacious idea, a set of goals. Maybe it has nothing to do with climbing, or biking, or anything, you know, it really can be anything. And then if you just, if you just chip away at it, one step at a time, you might injure yourself. No, but you might pull it off, you know? And so, I just hope that, you know, people have their own Sufferfest, to have their own crazy experience and yeah... And Sufferfest Three? No. Okay. All right. - We're still working on it. Coming up with good ideas. Give it a... give it a few more months and I'll have him bagged. But yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed the slideshow and enjoyed the film. Cool.