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Climbing Without Ropes:

The Free Solo Climbers of Yosemite
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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 Nation-
“I’ve done a lot of al Park. They were first overwhelmed—everyone is—by the sweep of
thinking about fear. golden granite reaching twenty-seven hundred feet into the sky. Then
they noticed a lone figure, not far above them, moving swiftly up the
For me the crucial 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
question is not how happening.”
to climb without Four hours later, that lone figure, the thirty-one-year-old profession-
fear-that’s impos- al 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
sible- but how to without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. Had he fallen, he
deal with it when would have died.

it creeps into your The achievement had long been predicted but never quite accepted as
possible. The iconic face of El Capitan—photographed by Ansel Ad-
nerve endings.” ams, praised by John Muir as “the most sublime feature of the Val-
ley”—has long been the proving ground for American rock climbing. It
- Alex Honnold on free solo has been climbed at incredible speeds and via routes of extraordinary
climbing difficulty; a ropeless ascent was the last “big psychological break-
through” 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

Honnold
from Yosemite this week.
By Bob Bobson

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Photo Courtesy of The North Face 2
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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 pre-
cisely 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.”

3 Photos Courtesy of climbing.com via CC

El Capitan

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7,569’
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Honnold’s Route

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