The Heart-Stopping Climbs of Alex Honnold (Published 2015) (2024)

Fifteen miles outside Yosemite Valley, a beeping iPhone alarm awakened Alex Honnold at 4 a.m. in the white Ford Econoline van that he has called home for the last seven years. Honnold, who is 29 and one of the two or three best rock climbers on earth, sat up on his cheap foam mattress and switched on his headlamp in the darkness. The nearby Merced River made a soft rushing sound, and crickets hummed in the grass in the dry heat of June. Honnold rolled back his van’s sliding side door to greet his ponytailed friend David Allfrey, who was also 29, emerging just then from an old VW camper van parked 10 feet away.

Honnold could afford to buy a decent home, if that interested him. But living in a van — a custom-outfitted van, in his case, with a kitchenette and cabinets full of energy bars and climbing equipment — represents freedom. It also represents a commitment to the nomadic climber’s ideal of the “dirtbag,” the purist so devoted to climbing that he avoids any entanglement that might interfere, stretching every penny from one climbing area to the next. Honnold, who graduated from high school with a 4.6 grade-point average and who has big ears and wide-set brown eyes — “cow eyes,” his mother calls them — has been the king of the dirtbags for the last decade. When he’s not climbing overseas in places like Patagonia, France or Morocco, he lives an endless road trip through the Southwestern desert, Yosemite Valley, British Columbia and points between. Along the way, he has turned himself into the greatest living free-soloist, meaning that he climbs without ropes, alone.

But using gear slows progress. A roped pair, taking turns climbing and fussing with all that equipment, might spend six hours on a climb that a free-soloist floats up in 30 minutes — focusing purely on the pleasure of movement, the tactile sensation of hands on rock. Free-soloing also carries the mystique of self-reliance in the face of extreme risk: On cliffs where even elite climbers employ complicated rope systems, the free-soloist wears only shorts, a T-shirt, a pair of climbing shoes and a bag of gymnast’s chalk to keep the hands dry. Honnold has free-soloed the longest, most challenging climbs ever, including the 2,500-foot northwest face of Half Dome in Yosemite Valley, where some of the handholds are so small that no average climber could cling for an instant, roped or otherwise. Most peculiar of all, even to elite rock climbers, Honnold does this without apparent fear, as if falling were not possible.

When Honnold does climb with others, he often teams up with specialists in other disciplines, combining their unique skill sets to shatter speed records on the world’s greatest cliffs. Allfrey, for example, is one of the fastest aid-climbers. They were headed, that morning last summer, for El Capitan, a flat-topped cliff about 3,000 feet tall and a mile wide that is considered the Mount Everest of rock climbing, with roughly 2,000 people ascending each year. More than 100 separate climbing routes have been established on El Capitan, each starting on the floor of Yosemite Valley and following various cracks and crevices to the top. El Capitan is so sheer and steep that even the easiest of these routes qualify, for advanced recreational climbers, as petrifying and magnificent once-in-a-lifetime adventures. More than two decades ago, when I climbed regularly, I trained for three years — as do men and women all over the world — to prepare for El Capitan. Twice, I climbed with a partner about a third of the way up, only to retreat in terror, as is common among those ascending for the first time. In the summer of 1992, with two partners, I finally overcame my fear. We hauled supplies by rope and pulley, slept on tiny ledges and made it to the top in five days.