14 minute read
Beyond Fearlessness
Borneo, 2009: Honnold, then 24, on his first international expedition. He joined a North Face team for a big-wall first ascent on Mount Kinabalu.
The world’s greatest climber: Inside the head and home of Alex Honnold.
Words HEATHER BALOGH ROCHFORT Photography JIMMY CHIN
RAINER HOSCH
Honnold, now 36, has become the most recognized rock climber in the world, largely thanks to the success of Free Solo.
I
It’s just another weekend in the Honnold household. “Is this your backpack or Jimmy’s?” Alex Honnold asks as he blows past the chair in which I’m sitting. I stumble for an answer for a split second before Jonathan Griffth, Honnold’s friend and the director of the upcoming Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR, saves me with an explanation. “Jimmy Chin is somewhere in the compound,” he offers.
I guess it’s that kind of party. It’s a warm Saturday morning in November and I’m cozied up at Honnold’s dining table, tucked near a bank of windows in his home outside of Las Vegas. The view outside is captivating—brilliant red sandstone cliffs fll the horizon—but I’m more interested in what’s happening inside. As I watch, Honnold is bustling around his living room, tidying the space with the same methodical precision he employs when scaling 3,000-foot rock faces without the aid of a rope. It feels surreal, watching the Free Solo star practice something as mundane as domesticity, but that’s the thing about Honnold: He doesn’t bullshit. He just gets it done.
Honnold dumps Chin’s backpack in the kitchen before scooping up another living room obstacle: a play mat designed for babies needing to practice tummy time. I see him pause for a brief moment, almost as if he wonders how earth-toned baby gear found its way into his path. He offers a small shrug before tossing the “baby thing” in a closet, stopping to organize a 2-inch-thick pile of fan mail as he zips back toward the kitchen.
The entire scene is a model of effciency. But it’s probably not the sort most would envision when they picture the man who famously made the frst free-solo ascent of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan in 2017, or became a worldwide sensation after the release of the Oscar-winning documentary about the project. Honnold has spent nearly 25 years climbing rocks—both big and small, with and without ropes—and his reputation precedes him on a global level. But now, he is staring down the crux of his own life as the next chapter takes shape.
Marriage. Parenting. Climbing. Soloing. Is there room for it all?
COURTESY OF ALEX HONNOLD
The early years: A 17-year-old Honnold, pictured here with a cousin, goes for a little climb in his uncle’s backyard in California in 2003.
In August 2015, Honnold spent two weeks climbing in Bugaboo Provincial Park, British Columbia. On the trip’s rest day, he did a full day of difficult free-soloing without a second thought.
FAMILY
“I think I’m a lot better prepared for hard climbs than I am for parenting,” Honnold laughs. “With climbing, I read tons about it. I study and I train. But with the parenting books, I haven’t looked at any of them yet because I think we can just fgure it out as we go.”
On their one-year anniversary in September 2021, Honnold and his wife, Sanni McCandless Honnold, announced they were pregnant with a daughter due in February 2022. Stoked climbing fans around the world enthusiastically congratulated the duo on their Instagram post while also low-key buzzing with curiosity. For many, Honnold is the most recognizable climber on the planet, and certainly the one most associated with mind-boggling free-solo ascents. Becoming the face of a sport so deeply entrenched in risk and danger meant quite a few supporters were surprised by the trajectory of his life. But not Honnold. For him, a family was always in the cards—regardless of what it means for his climbing career.
“I’m sort of prepared for anything,” he says after settling into one of two round sofa chairs in his living room. “I’m open to the idea that being a dad could change my climbing, but I currently climb in the safest way that I can. It’s hard to say how parenting is going to change that.”
Almost as if on cue, Honnold’s caramel-colored doe eyes fick to the window behind me as a tentative knock on the glass door interrupts the conversation. A friendly-faced woman pokes her head inside while holding an even happier baby in her arms, gurgling spit bubbles and kicking chunky thighs. With one glance at the cameras in the room, the woman ducks out and Honnold apologizes. “Sorry, that’s my sister-in-law and they’re living with the parents in the other house [on the property] with their 3-month-old,” he says. “That’s my practice baby.”
It’s clear that Honnold is at ease with the concept of family and even easier with children. But really, it’s no surprise considering his own everyday childhood. Born in Sacramento in 1985 as the youngest of two kids to parents Charles Honnold and Dierdre Wolownick, Honnold and his family were decidedly middle class. Both of his parents were language teachers at the local community college; Charles taught English as a Second Language (ESL) and Dierdre was a longtime French instructor. The family wasn’t perfect but functioned nonetheless. His parents divorced during Honnold’s frst year of college (before he dropped out) and his father passed away shortly thereafter from a heart attack. But Honnold remembers a good familial bond and certainly always hoped to create a family of his own.
For his part, Honnold showed his true colors early. He leaned into problemsolving games like Legos as a young boy and began climbing in kindergarten. By the time he was 10 he was fully invested in the sport, although he is the frst to admit that he wasn’t the best. “I just loved it,” he muses back in his living room. “I still love being out. It’s a key part of my life.” As he says this, he vaguely gestures toward the window and the dusky red rock looming in the distance. “Have you climbed there before?” he asks with a tilt of his head. I tell him that it’s the one outdooradventure sport that really never stuck for me. “You’re really missing out,” he says with a wide smile. “Defnitely.”
It’s these uncharacteristic moments during our conversation when Honnold’s passion supersedes his pragmatism. He has been described in the past as both hermitic and skeptical. But, as the early morning bleeds into the lunch hour and he seems to feel more comfortable, I see it differently. In many ways he reminds me of my husband: practical and logical, often to a fault. Honnold didn’t live a nomadic existence in a van for 10 years because he wanted to be alone; he did it because it made sense and was the most logical solution to maximize time with his priority relationship: climbing. Now that he has both Sanni and a daughter on the way, it’s almost as if he’s retuned his heart strings a bit because that’s the logical conclusion.
“I think my whole evolution as a climber has been totally natural and what I always imagined,” Honnold says. “I didn’t envision living in a van until I was old, because there are several prominent examples of well-known climbers that did that and I never really looked up to them. I always looked up to climbers who pushed climbing in their time but also had a family and some stability and went on to impact the world in a real way. I mean, you can’t live in a van forever.
“And we’re really excited to be having kids soon.”
No ropes: On the remote Musandam Peninsula in Oman, Honnold goes for an exploratory deepwater solo climb in 2013.
In preparation for his eventual free solo of Yosemite’s El Capitan, Honnold headed to China in 2016 to practice roof climbing on the Getu Arch.
FEAR
It’s a heady thing to have a verb named after you, but that’s exactly what happened to Honnold. After his 2008 record-setting free-solo climb of the 23-pitch Regular Northwest Face route up Yosemite’s Half Dome, a now-infamous photo spread across the internet. Honnold, decked out in a red hoodie and black climbing pants, stands upon a tiny indentation of rock with his back and his heels pressed fat against the wall and his toes almost dangling over the edge. Nearly 1,800 feet of air foats below him, and as is expected with free soloing, he has no climbing protection to attach him to the wall. One fall and he is done.
Thus, “honnolding” was born: to stand in a precarious place with your back against a wall and your face toward the drop—and toward your fear.
Over the years, Honnold’s fear—or lack thereof—has become a cocktail conversation topic. Most of us cannot fathom accomplishing his same feats
without experiencing immobilizing terror. Mere mortals that we are, we then leap to a singular assumption: Honnold is fearless. This narrative became so prevalent that Honnold fnally allowed a cognitive neuroscientist named Jane Joseph to look at his brain in 2016. In particular, she focused on the amygdala, also known as the brain’s fear center. The results were telling but not necessarily surprising. In a nutshell, it was almost impossible to stimulate Honnold’s amygdala. No matter what type of disturbing imagery Joseph fashed in front of him, it simply did not fre.
That’s the scientifc data. Beyond that it’s all speculation. The fact that he wants to free solo 2,900-foot routes tells us that his amygdala could be “cooler” in general. After all, the entire world watched the breathtaking 2018 documentary Free Solo, which shows him completing the frst solo ascent of the Freerider route on El Cap. Most regular folks would never consider a similar feat even if they had his same climbing abilities.
But Honnold has always insisted that he is not fearless; he knows what it means to be scared. Instead, he believes that he largely trained the fear out of himself. Does that mean he trained his amygdala too? It’s hard to say—there’s no comparative data from before he began free soloing.
“I defnitely feel fear like others do and I still fear death,” he says. “I’m just more desensitized to it and better equipped to manage it.”
We all have different coping mechanisms for fear, but a lot of us handle it with one of two methods: avoid the scary situations to begin with or overcome the fear by temporarily ignoring it. Obviously, Honnold is well beyond the frst and he believes the second wouldn’t be sustainable. “Sure, you can just play loud rock music, eat a cookie, get jacked and hope that you can fnish the climb before you get too afraid, but that’s not a long-term solution,” he says. “What do you do the next time— eat three cookies?”
Instead, he approaches fear from a place of quiet confdence and—once again—pure logic. We all read about the seemingly death-defying free soloing, but what we don’t see is that he puts in hundreds of hours of roped training on those routes to prepare. By the time he decides to cut the protection and climb ropeless, Honnold has full confdence in his ability to succeed—hard stop. “I think I’ve just gained a deeper appreciation for all of the various favors of fear,” he tells me.
In fact, while flming Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR (see sidebar) this past summer, high above the frigid French Alps, he got a dose of just how it feels
on the other side of the fear divide. Honnold will be the frst to say it: He is a rock climber, not a mountaineer. “It’s like scenic tourism for me,” he says. “Some people go on cruises to see beautiful parts of the world, and I do alpinism every once in a while to see beautiful mountains.” But there he was, holding an ice axe while equipped with crampons and mountaineering boots. Honnold picked his way across an alpine ridge while trying to keep up with Swiss climber Nicolas Hojac. Plagued by some faulty gear, he hesitated. His confdence was low and his nerves were high. Finally, Hojac came back to save him.
“Nico dropped his backpack, ran down the ridge to give me his ice tool and then comfortably pitter-pattered his way back across the slab,” Honnold laughs. “Meanwhile, I’m clutching two ice tools now and kicking my feet in just trying to survive.”
Turns out, for Honnold the high alpine may be a different favor of fear.
FUTURE
If there’s a reoccurring theme in Honnold’s life, it is constant analysis. Decoding Legos. Evaluating climbing routes. Calculating the safest of the risky choices. So it’s logical, then, to believe that his looming future will be based on yet another equation. When you combine his hazardous occupation as the world’s greatest free soloist with his love for his family, what type of future does that equal?
After hours of conversation, it has become increasingly clear that even Honnold doesn’t know where he will be in a year. But it’s also clear that he is fully prepared for things to change.
“I don’t need to travel and climb fulltime anymore. At a certain point, I’ve done a lot of the things I want to do,” he says. “Now I have a wife and a child soon. Some other things deserve a little more time.”
As I gather my belongings into my backpack to head out and catch my fight, Honnold calls both Griffth and me over to assist him in the living room. We’ve rearranged some furniture throughout the morning and he wants to ensure it goes back in its proper place.
“Can you help me move this couch?” Honnold asks. “It needs to look exactly the way it did this morning so Sanni doesn’t kill me.”
Flavors of fear, indeed.
Behind the Scenes with Alex Honnold: The Making of The Soloist
Alex Honnold is certainly no stranger to climbing documentaries, but he tackled filming from a new angle this past summer. The brainchild of esteemed alpinist and filmmaker Jonathan Griffith, the upcoming Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR dives into Honnold’s world of free soloing—all of it filmed with virtual-reality cameras. A small crew of six climbers (including Honnold, Griffith and Red Bull athlete and Swiss mountaineer Nicolas Hojac) journeyed to Europe to follow Honnold as he solo-climbed various routes across the continent. Filming in VR was a new experience for Honnold, but he thoroughly enjoyed it.
“I’ve never shot anything in VR, but I like working on new things that are challenging and different,” he says. “This VR project hit the sweet spot for me because it’s interesting and new but also a great way to share climbing in a totally new medium.”
The team split their time among three locations: the Italian Dolomites, the French Alps and back in California, where they wrapped up shooting. Honnold knew how technically demanding shooting in VR would be; filming traditional documentaries takes a lot of camera rigging and planning on its own. But for The Soloist, Griffith and his team had to account for the scope of the cameras, too. They had to shoot the scenes from both the top and bottom, as well as nab a number of close-ups. Not only did this require constant rigging and stealthy movements by camera operators trying to duck out of sight of the 360-degree lenses but also an insane amount of talent and precision to record all of the scenery. Viewers watching the film through their headsets can focus on Honnold climbing upward; turn to the right and watch a bird soaring by; or look down the rock face to see a small pebble falling toward the ground thousands of feet below. To capture all of these nuances on film, small things like the sunlight and cloud movements all need to match up to create a cohesive and immersive viewing experience.
“To get all of this to come together in a timely manner and do it for each shot as you rappel down a rock face is quite involved,” Honnold says.
I had the chance to view an early cut of The Soloist at Honnold’s house, and “involved” doesn’t even begin to describe the adrenaline that rushed through my body as I experienced Honnold’s perspective of the world. When I removed the VR goggles, I realized I’d physically moved my body about 5 feet from where I’d started and was facing an entirely different direction. I looked up to see both Griffith and Honnold smiling at me. “Pretty cool, right?” Griffith laughed.
For folks wondering what it’s like to climb like Alex Honnold, The Soloist answers all those questions. And yes, it is pretty cool. —Heather Balogh Rochfort
Honnold follows Hojac’s lead in a scene from Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR, now playing on Oculus TV. For more info, visit thesoloist-vr.com.
