No rope, no fear
How one man scaled the heights of El Capitan, alone
There are not many films that could accurately be described as “mindblowing”, but Free Solo is one. It documents the successful 2017 attempt by Alex Honnold to become the first person to climb the 3,000ft sheer granite wall of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without ropes.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the 33-year-old is one of the most extraordinary human beings on earth. There’s a moment in the film, where his connection with life is dependent on half a thumb pressed into the smallest of indentations in the rock face, 2,000ft up. One of the camera crew turns away, unable to watch, as the camera continues to roll.
Honnold completes the complicated moves needed to negotiate this terrifying section – which he had fallen off many times while practising with a rope – then turns and says, “Oh yeah”, at the lens. “It was the most intense moment of the whole climb for me as well,” he says. “The execution of it is… I wouldn’t say perfect… but it’s pretty good, you know.”
Another part of the climb, known as the “Monster Offwidth”, involves jamming one arm after another into a long crack in the coarse granite to pull himself up with caterpillar slowness. “Imagine the worst pilates class in the whole world,” he says, “with somebody flogging you as you do it and occasionally sandpapering skin off your body, telling you to hold the position until you frickin’ vomit, and if you lose the position you die.”
Honnold expresses no doubt as to what would happen should he fall. Even from 160ft up, “my body would just explode on impact”.
The film sees the crew, all of whom are professional climbers, sombrely discussing their procedure if he “dropped through the frame” to his death, including who should call 911. I ask Honnold if he picked up any of their anxiety? “Nobody likes to watch free soloing,” he says. (The term refers to climbing alone without ropes or equipment.) “It’s stressful for anybody. I don’t like to watch other people free solo either. I knew that several of the crew members were deeply uncomfortable. They still did a remarkable job of insulating me from their feelings.”
One of the tensions in making the film, Honnold says, was that everyone around him, including his girlfriend Sanni Mccandless and close friend and fellow climber Tommy Caldwell had doubts. “Nobody wanted me to do that climb. It’s hard to have confidence when everybody else thinks it’s a bad idea.”
Honnold had experienced what happens when confidence drains away when he free soloed Yosemite’s 2,000ft cliff Half Dome in 2008. He hadn’t prepared fully and found himself switching routes halfway up. “By the time I got close to the top, I was feeling pretty frayed. It was hard to hold it together. Then it suddenly all fell apart.”
He was on a sheer slab, not trusting the next foothold, unable to move up. (Climbing back down is harder still and not an option.) He started to panic. “I was taking deep breaths, trying to compose myself,” he says. Finally, he forced himself to step upwards. He didn’t fall, but it would be nearly 10 years before he attempted El Capitan.
He feels fear, then? “I don’t like being afraid,” he replies. “If I was going to free solo El Cap, I didn’t want to be afraid for my life and unable to enjoy it. Climbing is strictly for pleasure. I climb because I want to and if it’s really scary or not fun, there’s no reason to do it.”
He has been climbing since he was a boy in Sacramento, California, although, he says, “I’m not a naturally super strong climber. My only real gift is a drive and passion for it and an innate desire to improve.” He was spurred on by his mother’s maxim that “good enough, isn’t”. His father died when he was 19, and the 5ft 9in Honnold – “one of the intellectual kids; a dorky learner” – dropped out of college to pursue his climbing dreams.
A theme of the film is how Honnold’s dream is affected by his burgeoning relationship with Mccandless. Honnold spent nine years living by himself in his van, keeping a detailed climbing journal, cooking vegetarian food, utterly focused on his goals, before he and Mccandless, a life coach, met at a signing in Seattle for his book Alone on the Wall.
In the film, Honnold says, brutally, that he would always choose climbing over a relationship. Previous girlfriends had told him he had a “personality disorder”; Mccandless tells him he can “have it all” – a steady girlfriend and a climbing career. They now have a home in Las Vegas. She was right, wasn’t she? “Yeah,” he says. “I just left our house this morning. Things are still great.”
At what point, though, does his career choice become unfair to Sanni? “In the film I seem particularly callous about those questions but that’s partly because I had just met her and I’d been dreaming about El Cap for seven years already. Three years later, obviously that equation has changed. Our relationship is one of the most important things in my life and I don’t have any similarly grand climbing ambitions right now. If something else came up, I would definitely have to think of it a little differently.”
A troubling roll call of free solo climbers have died, but Honnold says he wants to live to have grandchildren
Can he even contemplate having children while he is still doing this? “I can certainly imagine having a family as a professional climber, I don’t know about free soloing El Cap and everything but maybe… you never really know until you get there.”
He still spends roughly six months of the year living out of a van. “It’s about focusing on the things you care about,” he says. One of those things is the environment. In 2012, he started the Honnold Foundation, which supports solar energy initiatives worldwide. He still pours a third of his income into it, even though the money he now earns through sponsorships and corporate speaking engagements has risen to “a surprising amount, probably not quite into the realm of footballers, but certainly other low-end professional athletes”.
The film features a troubling roll call of free solo climbers who have died. Honnold accepts that some of his friends die as a result of what they do but says he would like to live to have grandchildren. Does he worry about people wanting to pay him vast sums to put his life at risk? “The major thing I worry about is getting paid to not climb. People want to see me at events. I want to be a good climber, but everything draws me away from it.”
He recognises that his climb on El Capitan makes him unlike other people, although he’s hard pressed to explain why. “Maybe it’s a combination of traits,” he says. One of them he accepts, is “a slightly different perspective on fear”.
“There are seven billion people on Earth,” he adds, “some of them are going to be a little bit different.”