In the first light of dawn on June 3rd, two rock climbers approached the base of El Capitan, the towering stone heart of Yosemite National Park. They were first overwhelmed—everyone is—by the sweep of golden granite reaching twenty-seven hundred feet into the sky. Then they noticed a lone figure, not far above them, moving swiftly up the 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 happening.”
Four hours later, that lone figure, the thirty-one-year-old professional 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 without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. Had he fallen, he would have died.
The achievement had long been predicted but never quite accepted as possible. The iconic face of El Capitan—photographed by Ansel Adams, praised by John Muir as “the most sublime feature of the Valley”—has long been the proving ground for American rock climbing. It has been climbed at incredible speeds and via routes of extraordinary difficulty; a ropeless ascent was the last “big psychological breakthrough” 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 from Yosemite this week.
The step up from Half Dome to El Capitan may seem almost academic—what’s another seven hundred feet? Yet even the easiest route up El Cap, called Freerider, involves difficulties far more sustained than those Honnold encountered on Half Dome: there are long cracks, leaning out over the void, that are relentlessly exhausting to climb and that provided the most striking images of the ascent. (A National Geographic team documented his solo.) But the cracks are not the worst.
The most serious sections are usually described with a word of dude-speak: “sketchy.” Honnold had to climb steep sheets of glassy rock, on holds that would appear nonexistent to the untrained eye. As unglamorous as such climbing is, it represents a new level of rigor for the free soloist. Sketchy rock—and Freerider has a lot of it—demands balance, body control, and composure. It sets the ultimate standard: perfection, or death.
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 precisely 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.”
Even more critical is his mental training. As with most athletes at his level, Honnold’s ability to sustain focus and suppress fear is likely the result of both genetic gifts and their careful cultivation. After twelve years of regularly climbing ropeless, he seems able to simply turn off his body’s fear response.
He does not, however, avoid thoughts of death. Instead, he deliberately confronts the possibility, then sets it aside. “I certainly thought about falling from the crux—I thought about what that would mean,” he said. “Because there are a couple of little ledges under it, so I thought maybe you’d stick the ledge. But when you really look at it objectively, there’s no way you can stick the ledge. You’d just frickin’ shoot off the ledge. And then there’s a chance you’d maybe land on the spire, which is maybe eighty meters below you, but obviously you would die. I thought about all that stuff. It’s worth being prepared.”
Such risks were far more than abstractions. Last October, having just arrived in Yosemite to begin seriously training for Freerider, Honnold slipped on the route’s glassy holds, falling more than twenty feet before the rope held his fall and badly spraining his ankle. In November, he made his first solo attempt. “I went up and just wasn’t ready,” Honnold said; he used a rope to retreat. When I asked when he had last fallen while rehearsing the route, he replied that he had slipped off the crux just two days before his free solo. He’d been distracted, he said, and climbing too casually. “But I’m glad I didn’t let that get into my head.”
Will Stanhope, a climbing partner of Honnold’s and a respected free soloist in his own right, told me that he bumped into Honnold about a week before the solo. Honnold was looking for partners to join him on training laps up Freerider. Stanhope wasn’t interested. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” Stanhope said. “Honnold is as solid as it gets, but he’s not airtight flawless.”
On the morning of June 3rd, however, Honnold made his way quickly, calmly, and, yes, perfectly, up El Capitan. Now another passage can be written in the annals of human achievement. News of his ascent immediately transcended the world of climbing and drew comparison to the moon landing, Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, and the mutant evolution of the X-Men. But, among climbers, there was also an audible sigh of relief.
“El Cap is universally considered the pinnacle, so people are saying, ‘If you’ve done that, then you’re done.’ People feel like I’ve made it to the end, and now I can relax. Which is largely how I feel, too,” Honnold told me. “But we’ll see.”