Does Alex Honnold Still Free Solo

Most footholds will be easier to use, thanks to gravity and the fact that your weight will be shifted from the movement down. This means that some smears and little edges might now be good footholds, while they would not have worked when you were ascending. Navigating dangerous descents is good when you are able to down climb, even if you’re rappelling, as it can save you from injury. In 2018 Alex Honnold was the subject of the documentary film “Free Solo”. In addition to earning more than $20 million at the box office, Free Solo won a Best Documentary Feature at the 91st Academy Awards. In the documentary, he claims to make around the same amount of money as a moderately successful dentist.

Honnold was already looking for solitude again then. The route in Zion National Park, Utah became arguably the hardest free solo climb on a big wall. Later in 2008 Alex free solo’d the Regular Northwest Face route of the Half Dome in Yosemite.

Did Alex Honnold Have Water?

Alex and Tommy have worked together on climbing projects several times. In 2014, over five days, they climbed the immense 5,000m Fitz Roy Traverse, one most iconic undone objectives in the range. More recently, in October 2019, the two completed another big wall free climb on Yosemite’s El Capitan, called Passage to Freedom (5.13+).

You can buy the TC Pro’s that Alex used in the Free Solo film below. Generally, though, you should minimize time in half-cocked arms. To increase your line of sight, you can also lower yourself from a lockoff into a lockout when planning the next move and eyeballing possible holds. While you descend, try to stay in these positions as much as possible while you plan your next move. Sometimes you have to compromise, as the structure and geometry of the route leave you no other choice. Standing on your feet and your footwork is as important as on the way up.

Filmography

There is a buzz about the place among the men and women who work here – imagine Lionel Messi dropping in to your amateur football club. Alex Honnold, now 33, has been a legend in the sport for a while, with a rack of insane firsts and nobody-will-evers hanging from his harness (except he doesn’t usually wear one of those). With a goofy grin and a bad haircut, he has been fighting a single-handed battle against gravity, and winning. When, on 3 June 2017, he free-soloed the freerider route on El Capitan, the New York Times described it as “one of the greatest athletic feats of any kind, ever”. Yet Honnold estimates that he climbs no more than just five percent of his routes free solo. That’s why he also received one of the most prestigious awards in mountain sports, the Piolet d’Or , not for a free solo route but for the Fitz Traverse in Patagonia.

However, climbers Tommy Caldwell and Peter Croft were in the movie along with Sanni McCandless and Diedre Wolownick, Alex’s wife and mother respectively. As of December 2020, Alex Honnold still free solo. He also rock engages in a variety of climbing disciplines like bouldering and rock climbing.

“You’ve done your fair share of angst climbing,” Sanni says in the kitchen, knowing that he soloed Rainbow Wall in Red Rocks after a bad breakup. Speaking of kids, Honnold has to run – to a school where he is giving a talk. First, though, he has to try the boulder problem again.

When ascending it’s usually easy to see where the holds are for your hands and feet. While descending it’s hard and often you have to place your feet blindly. There are other difficulties in down climbing (e.g. your momentum is moving down and you have to stop it as you step down).

At 5.9 C2, the Nose is considered to be the easiest full-length route on El Capitan, which makes it extremely popular and draws relatively inexperienced big-wall climbers. But the Nose also is a complex climb, requiring a large repertoire of techniques that may be unfamiliar to newcomers. Honnold could, in that sense, be “addicted to climbing,” Joseph says, and the hunger for sensation could push him ever closer to his limits as a free soloist. At the same time, a defining quality of his ropeless climbing has been the conscientiousness and premeditation that he brings to it.

I have downclimbed the one or other easy route, and it was always way scarier than climbing up, plus I felt super uneasy every time. Now imagine this without belaying and a rope – something Alex Honnold has reportedly done before on certain routes. This is an actual video where he supposedly climbed back down a route. The sound of a rock climber falling from a cliff cut through the black, cold silence of the early morning hours in Yosemite National Park. Honnold, who had supported Harrington’s attempts to free climb the challenging Golden Gate route up the sheer rock face in a single day, leaped into action. He spent his time training his techniques and honing his skills while memorizing each turn and visualizing every step of the way.

Since the release of the Oscar-winning film, he’s made first ascents in Antarctica, set the Nose speed record with Tommy Caldwell and helped his foundation grow. “I was never, like, a bad climber , but I had never been a great climber, either,” he says. Honnold was born in Sacramento, California, the son of community college professors Dierdre Wolownick (b. 1953) and Charles Honnold (1949–2004). His paternal roots are German and his maternal roots are Polish. He started climbing in a climbing gym at the age of 5 and was climbing “many times a week” by age 10. He participated in many national and international youth climbing championships as a teenager.

After he summited El Cap, he said he was “so delighted.” Today’s climb was, he says, “pretty satisfying.” Death, however — he’s always had a complicated relationship with it. It hovers over everything he does, and he picked a numbers game of a profession. He’s an atheist — “We’re all animals,” he says — and his dad’s death helped him prepare for his own, should he have slipped on El Cap.

“I’ve sort of committed myself to a path. And so you just sort of lose that feeling of freedom a bit.” “Do you feel like you’ve actually changed your level of empathy or do you feel like you’ve gotten better at anticipating when empathy should come into play?” Sanni asks. Honnold pulls a glass from the dishwasher and glances at it. This one doesn’t match, a rogue glass that they’d used in the van. Honnold at VauxWall East climbing centre in London. “I listen to mostly rock and punk rock – in shuffle mode.” But “Lose Yourself” by Eminem is always included.

He didn’t intend to become a soloist, but he became one because at first he was too shy to ask others to come along. Later, as he once wrote in an essay for Rock and Ice magazine, it was “because I feared doing something stupid when people were watching.” We are standing at the bottom of a ladder leading to a loft above his bedroom in his Lake Tahoe house. This is the second loft Honnold has directed me to on a tour of the place. He grew up climbing into that one, long before he set his sights, as we saw in Free Solo, on slightly more ambitious endeavors.