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Climbing Without Ropes: The Free Solo Climbers of Yosemite

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- Alex Honnold on free solo climbing

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“I’ve done a lot of thinking about fear.

For me the crucial question is not how to climb without fear-that’s impossible- but how to deal with it when it creeps into your nerve endings.”

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n the first light of dawn on June 3rd, two rock climbers approached the base of El Capitan, the towering stone heart of Yosemite National Park. They were first overwhelmed—everyone is—by the sweep of golden granite reaching twenty-seven hundred feet into the sky. Then they noticed a lone figure, not far above them, moving swiftly up the wall. Such is the lore of the valley that it could only be one person, could only be one moment. “Oh, my God,” said one to the other. “It’s happening.”

Four hours later, that lone figure, the thirty-one-year-old professional climber Alex Honnold, had completed the first ascent of El Cap in the free-solo style. In other words, he had climbed the cliff alone and without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. Had he fallen, he would have died.

The achievement had long been predicted but never quite accepted as possible. The iconic face of El Capitan—photographed by Ansel Adams, praised by John Muir as “the most sublime feature of the Valley”—has long been the proving ground for American rock climbing. It has been climbed at incredible speeds and via routes of extraordinary difficulty; a ropeless ascent was the last “big psychological breakthrough” that remained, as Peter Croft, who completed groundbreaking free solos in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, put it. There was no real competition to be the first to meet the challenge. Either Honnold would do it, or he would leave it to future generations. Or he would try, fail, and fall.

“His place in the soloing world is singular,” Croft told me. “As crass as it sounds, I can’t even think of anyone who could honestly boast of being in second place.”

In 2008, Honnold, then a twenty-three-year-old universally described as “dorky,” made a ropeless ascent of another Yosemite wall, the two-thousand-foot-tall face of Half Dome. Even then, he had bigger dreams. “My goal has always been to solo El Cap, but it’s always been, like, we’ll see if it’s possible,” Honnold told me, in a phone interview from Yosemite this week.

Honnold

By Bob Bobson

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Sonnie Trotter, one of the expert climbers who trained with Honnold in the lead-up to his El Cap solo, compared Freerider’s hardest move, or crux, to hanging on to two windshield wiper blades frozen in mid-swipe, so that both angle sharply downward in the same direction. A soloist clinging to such holds is pulled by gravity toward the ground, but also outward, like a barn door that swings open on its own weight. Give in to either pressure, and you fall. The crux is located about eighteen hundred feet above the ground. “I think ninety-nine per cent of climbers get terrified up there, even when they’re on a rope,” Trotter said. “It’s not just the physical feat of doing it. It’s the mental strength of feeling secure when you know that some of those footholds are notoriously slippery. That’s amazing to me.”

Free soloing is a dark art—an undisguised dance with death. At the same time, it’s a sport, performed by athletes. Honnold’s major innovation in ropeless climbing is that he has taken preparation to new extremes, allowing him to push closer than ever to what Croft called “the red zone.”

Honnold—who works out daily, never touches alcohol, drugs, or coffee, and gave up sugar in February—said that he spent three months rehearsing Freerider, with much of that time dedicated to its most difficult sections. Using dabs of chalk, he marked precisely where to set a toe or finger to maximize his grip. He came to know the route so well that a week before his solo, he and a partner, climbing with ropes, set a speed record of five and a half hours, on a route that takes ordinary climbers four days to complete. “I just went move by move up the mountain,” Honnold told me. “I would find this new foothold that allowed me to do a certain move in a way that was a little bit more secure—stuff like that. Really ironing out details piece by piece by piece, until there was nothing left to iron.”

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Photos Courtesy of climbing.com via CC

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El Capitan 7,569’

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Honnold’s Route

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