Getting to the top
ALEX HONNOLD’S JOURNEY ON NAT GEO The high-flying documentary that takes guts to watch.
From award-winning documentary filmmaker E Chai Vasarhelyi, world-renowned photographer/mountaineer Jimmy Chin and the directors of Meru, comes Free Solo, a stunning, intimate and unflinching portrait of free soloist climber Alex Honnold as he prepares to achieve his lifelong dream: climbing the face of the world’s most famous rock, the 975-metre El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, without a rope.
Celebrated as one of the greatest athletic feats, Honnold’s climb set the ultimate standard: perfection or death. Succeeding in this challenge places his story in the annals of human achievement.
Free Solo will premiere on National Geographic on Monday, March 4, at 9am.
Honnold chats to us about the climb
What was it like, the first time you climbed El Capitan?
Completely outrageous. My partner and I had the big goal for the season to climb El Capitan in a day – by any means, not free climbing, just doing anything we could to get to the top.
We built up for it the whole season. It was a big challenge. We climbed the easiest route in 23 hours. Doing it represented a whole other world of climbing.
What were your thoughts when you walked up to El Capitan the morning you were going to free solo it?
Not really anything.
The whole point of all the preparation was to ensure that on the day I was not thinking anything through. I had been doing a ton of thinking beforehand.
The morning of the climb, I was just on auto-pilot, executing.
I did park in a slightly different parking place because I didn’t want to see anybody in the meadow. It meant that I was walking a trail that goes past the length of El Cap. I was walking along the entire east wall and did think, “this sure is a big piece of rock”.
I knew that I was ready and that it was all happening.
Did you feel any added pressure because there was a movie being made of it?
Not really. In a lot of ways I actually wanted the movie project.
It put slightly more time pressure on it so that I would be motivated enough to get out there and start working.
Climbing El Cap is something I had been dreaming about for years but had not actually acted on because it seemed a little too daunting or a little too big. So I wanted an extra push to get me started and putting in the work.
My big fear was that I would go my whole life without actually trying. There had been six or seven years that I had said, “this is the year I’m going to solo El Cap,” and then gone to Yosemite and said, “nope, this isn’t the year, and I’m not even going to try”.
I needed a reason to start putting the effort in.
Where is your orientation when you are climbing? Do you look down a lot? How aware are you of where you are in relation to the ground?
I am very aware. A big part of going up on big walls like that is to have the exposure, to have the experience of being way up off the ground.
That is definitely a big part of the appeal to me. In terms of “do I look down?”, of course I look down. But in the actual movement of climbing, you are constantly looking down at your feet and your hands and that doesn’t mean that I am thinking about the exposure. Primarily, I’m just climbing.
Where does the confidence and self-belief come from?
I see it all rooted in rationalism, in a basic evaluation of objective reality: Can I do this? And if I can, then I just do it.
If I have done something on a rope over and over and over, then obviously I can physically do it, so there’s no real reason why I shouldn’t be able to do it without the rope.
What are your thoughts about fate, given what you do?
Many people would look at what you do and have a sense that you are right on the edge between life and death. I would hope that they are wrong about that!
But, who knows? I have never been religious or spiritual. I am not a big subscriber to fate. I see life as probabilities and chance and reality. Fate doesn’t come into it. –