An Incomplete List of Alex Honnold’s Less Famous Badassery

the proceEveryone knows about Alex Honnold’s break-through solo of Zion’s Moonlight Buttress in 2008 and Yosemite’s Free Rider in 2017. But in between those career highlights, Honnold has had more than a few groundbreaking days, most of which don’t get talked about much. So I thought I’d comb through the lore and call attention to some of the moments that particularly impressed me. These are moments that, for any other climber, would be the capstone of a career. But for Honnold, they’re arguably “no big deal.”

Disclaimer #1: People die doing this

In his 2015 obituary of Dean Potter, published in Time Magazine, Honnold wrote, “No one spends 20 years at the cutting edge of their sport by being an adrenaline junkie all the time.” This statement, while surely as true of Honnold as it was of Potter, nonetheless exists alongside the fact that Honnold (like Potter) has submitted himself to low-margin situations with an alarming frequency. Unlike Potter, Honnold has so far gotten away with it.

The badassery that follows ranges in tone and type. It includes acts of freakish athleticism and awesome mental fortitude, but it also includes instances of good luck and rash judgment. For any of you who’d like to mimic Honnold’s actions, first read this or this or this—all obituaries of climbers, each of them quite accomplished, who’ve died free soloing in 2024.

Disclaimer #2: I’ve barely scratched the surface

Though it contains 24 entries and nearly 12,000 words, this list is far from exhaustive. Scroll through Honnold’s 8a.nu or some of the various films he’s been featured in and you’ll find dozens of hard climbs and impressive linkups not mentioned here. I’ve included nothing, for instance, about his accomplishments on gritstone, or the ridiculously bold climbs he did in the Czech Republic in the mid-2000s. I’ve also left out numerous non-climbing stunts, like that time he broke pro skier Cody Townsend when they biked from Death Valley to hike up Mt. Whitney, then ski down. I skipped some of these accomplishments simply because I couldn’t find much information.

Some terminology, for the uninitiated 

Soloing, in climbing parlance, means climbing alone. Soloing can be done with or without the use of ropes and gear and can involve either free climbing or aid climbing. The first solo of Yosemite’s El Capitan was by Royal Robbins in 1968. He climbed the Muir Wall (5.10 C3; 2,900ft) and it took him 10 days, much of which he spent hanging from nuts, pitons, and bolts. Free soloing, on the other hand, means climbing alone and without the use of ropes or gear to help you upwards or protect you if you fall. Alex Honnold is the only person to have free soloed El Cap.

2007: First repeat of Peter Croft’s linkup of Astroman and the Rostrum

Honnold has made a good number of major statements in his free-soloing life. He was the first person to:

• Solo a grade VI big wall (the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome)
• Free solo 5.13 in Yosemite (The Phoenix)
• Free solo 5.13 in Rifle, Colorado (the tall and mighty Chud, which has since been downgraded to 5.12d)
• Free solo El Capitan (Freerider)

But before he could raise the level of free soloing to terrifying new levels, he first had to measure up to the achievements of a previous generation of soloists—folks like John Bachar, who awed his peers on committing Yosemite classics like New Dimensions (5.11a) and Butterballs (5.11c). Or Peter Croft, who upped the ante by doing The North Face of the Rostrum (5.11c; 700ft) and Astroman (5.11c; 1,000ft) in a single day in 1987. Indeed, by the time Honnold came along, Croft’s still-unrepeated linkup had gathered two decades of lore and fear. This is true even as spiritual daredevils like Dean Potter free soloed both routes independently, never quite daring to do them in a single day.

So it was a pretty big deal when Honnold made the first repeat of Croft’s linkup. Indeed, it was this act—helped along by his one-day ascent of Freerider (5.12d; 3,000ft) and a quick ascent of the Salathé (5.13b; 3,000ft)—which first announced Alex Honnold, then a 18-year-old no-name, as a potential “next big thing” in the world of climbing.

Fun fact: Over the next decade, Honnold kept returning to those climbs, upping the ante further. In 2011, he repeated the linkup, this time doing Astroman and The North Face of the Rostrum’s Alien variation, swapping a casual 5.10 final pitch for a technical 5.12b roof… at 700 feet. Then, in 2016, while filming with Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi for Free Solo, he free soloed the North Face of the Rostrum’s hardest finishing variation, the Excellent Adventure, which was FA’d by Peter Croft in 1989. The crux: an eight foot stretch of horizontal roof crack at 700 feet. The grade: 5.13a.

2008: Misadventures while free soloing the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome

I know, I know, everyone and their grandma knows about this one. But ever since Honnold’s 2017 ascent of Freerider, the paradigm-shifting nature of his 2008 free solo of Half Dome’s Regular Northwest Face has been increasingly easy to forget. So I want to reminisce a bit about how groundbreaking this was, while also meditating on a salient feature of his ascent that we tend to overlook.

Unlike most of his harder big wall solos—Moonlight Buttress, Sendero Luminoso, Freerider, etc.—Honnold didn’t rehearse Half Dome. He’d free climbed the route twice, including with his friend Brad Barlage on September 4, 2008. That was just two days before he went up it without a rope. During that lap with Barlage, some of the crux sections felt rather desperate, but Honnold figured he’d just botched the sequences and would find a better method when he got there again.

But, as Honnold relates in Alone on the Wall, when he told his friend Chris Weidner about his intentions, Weidner was furious and told Honnold to “rehearse the hell out of it” before risking his life up there. When Honnold said he wanted to “keep it sporting,” Weidner responded, “Are you crazy?” But Honnold (evidently uninfluenced by the wider climbing world’s astonishment) was worried that he’d too thoroughly rehearsed Moonlight Buttress the year earlier. In so doing, he’d reduced the impressiveness of his ascent, cheating the climb of its true difficulty. On Half Dome, he wanted to do something that would feel bold even to him.

So on September 6, despite Weidner’s continued opposition, Honnold went up there without rehearsing the cruxes or cleaning the loose rock and lichen from the free variations. As it turns out, he didn’t even know the route well enough to avoid getting a little lost.

Some quick historical context: First climbed by Royal Robbins, Jerry Galwas, and Mike Sherrick in 1957, the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome has three A0 bolt ladders, but free-climbing variations exist around them. For the first variation, Honnold opted to do the Higbee Hedral, a 5.12 dihedral first done by Art Higbee and Jim Erickson during their “magnificent failure” of a free attempt in 1976. (The final slab pitch stymied them. Leonard Coyne first freed the route in its entirety in 1980).

Following the faint chalk marks he’d left on the climb two days earlier, Honnold made it through the Higbee Hedral easily, despite the fact that the climbing was both dirty and loose. But several hundred feet later, at the second bolt ladder, he found himself hesitant to commit to the friction-dependent 5.12c variation he’d previously climbed. Instead, he opted for another Higbee-Erickson variation. He took a long, meandering, and rarely climbed 5.10 that circles around a vast section of the main climb. Honnold had also never previously climbed this varaition.

Once he departed from the normal route, he found himself “wandering upward” (Alone on the Wall) through dirty cracks and bushes, growing increasingly worried that he was lost in a sea of granite. Ultimately, he ended up traversing right and downclimbing back into the main route. This created a new free variation, adding quite a bit of time and stress to the climb. This probably didn’t help matters when he famously froze on the same slab crux that stymied Higbee and Erickson 32 years earlier.

The famous slab freeze was pretty foreseeable. While climbing the route with Barlage, Honnold made note of two hard and insecure cruxes on the route’s final slab pitch. He was especially confused by the final one, which involved a hard and slightly dynamic stand-up move using a very bad foothold. It was a move that he definitely didn’t want to attempt without a rope.

Before heading up the wall on his solo, however, Honnold convinced himself that he’d simply used the wrong beta previously. He became convinced that when he got back to that final section, he’d be able to find a more comfortable sequence on the fly. But on his solo, after climbing smoothly through the first of these cruxes, he got to that final move and couldn’t find an alternative. Either he could use his uncomfortable old beta, committing to the terrible foot and thrutching upward to good hold, or he could try to downclimb. The latter wasn’t a realistic option, given the 26 pitches up to 5.12 below.

But there was a third option: He could “cheat.”

Right in front of him, just inches above his “miserly” handholds, a single oval carabiner hung from a bolt. All he had to do to finish the climb was grab that carabiner and pull safely through to the jug. In the end, he compromised, laying the pad of his middle finger on the carabiner but carefully not weighting it as he did the move. His rationale was that, if his foot slipped, he might still be able to slide a finger through the carabiner and save himself. Of course, he stuck the move and carried on to the crowded summit, where no one noticed that history had just been made.

In addition to absolutely shattering the climbing world’s definition of “reasonable,” Honnold’s Half Dome solo also served as an important inflection point in his approach to hard soloing. He went up Half Dome in search of an adventure, inviting the mountain to stymie him. But as he hiked barefoot down the cables route, he felt a little sheepish, less like the masterful climber he’d imagined, and more like someone who’d “gotten away with something.” Even though “getting away with things” has a storied history in the free soloing world,* Honnold didn’t feel proud. Instead, he felt a bit like John Bachar did after his 1980 onsight free solo of The Moratorium, a thin and frightening 5.11b corner on Yosemite’s Schultz Ridge. Afterwards, Bachar confessed to a friend that he felt like “the mountain had let me off.”

Hiking down from Half Dome, Honnold realized that by going out of his way to make a climb more sporting blurred the line between mastery (which he respected) and dumb luck (which the history of free soloing has proved unsustainable). “I want,” he realized, “to be a great climber, not a lucky climber.”

*For instance: John “Yabo” Yablonsky, dubbed the “king of luck” by a 2004 Rock and Ice article, was infamous, even admired, for climbing suicidally close to his limit, often forcing onlookers to look away in terror. He even fell a few times. When he slipped out of a crack on the second pitch of The Good Book, a 5.10 in Yosemite, he fell several feet, but caught himself on a small jug, preventing a 150-foot ground encounter. When he pitched off Short Circuit, a short 5.11c/d in Yosemite, he managed to hook an arm around a sapling whose pliable trunk delivered him peacefully back to the ground. But Yabo wasn’t the only soloist to work luck into his plans. As recorded in Free Solo, the late Ueli Steck once told Honnold that sometimes you’ve just got to be good enough to get away with a sketchy solo once.

Thanks in part to the Half Dome experience, Honnold adopted a rule for himself: He wouldn’t solo something hard until he was 99 percent sure of the outcome. Of course, this was a rule he went on to break multiple times. Case and point:

2010: Retro-onsight free soloing the Original Route on the Rainbow Wall (5.12b; 1,000ft) 

When Honnold picked Original Route (5.12b; 1,000ft) on the Rainbow Wall in Red Rock, Nevada, as a potential free soloing objective, he didn’t think it would be particularly exciting. He had onsighted the climb a few years earlier, but hadn’t been on it since. So when he showed up in Red Rock, in late April 2010, he intended to re-climb it a few times to see if the solo felt reasonable. But, as recored in Alone on the Wall, when all of his friends said they were too busy to go up there with him, Honnold “made a snap decision” to go for it. (He was also in the midst of an on-again, off-again breakup with his girlfriend and feeling a bit volatile.)

Things went smoothly at first. He remembered bits and pieces of the climb—a hold here, a feature there. But it generally felt like onsighting. Then, when he was 750 feet above the ground, stemming up a corner, he suddenly remembered what the crux move entailed: an “easy” (for him), but inconceivably committing dyno to a jug. He climbed up and down into the move several times looking for alternatives. He knew he could simply downclimb the pitch, escaping to the top via a 5.10 variation. But in his current mood, he felt it necessary to “finish what I’d set out to do.”

Eventually, he noticed alternative beta. With his left hand, he stacked two fingers onto a dimple and crimped it so hard that he ended up with a blood blister. Above that, lay more 5.12 climbing, which felt far harder than he was comfortable with. But there was no reversing the dyno/dimple move. Nor was there an established way to escape off the route, leaving him no choice but to forge upwards.

The kicker? After soloing the Original Route and making the long scrambly descent back to his van, Honnold, still anxious, still angry, banged out another 15 pitches of ropeless 5.10.

None of this is reflected on his 8a.nu scorecard, where in his comment about the climb he simply wrote: “Super exciting adventure. I know 8a doesn’t promote risk taking, but some experiences are life affirming.”

2010: Solo speed records on the Nose and Half Dome

The roots of Yosemite’s speed and “in-a-day” traditions trace back to 1975, when Jim Bridwell, John Long, and Billy Westbay climbed the Nose in a single one-day push. Since then, climbers—Honnold included—have been racing up Yosemite’s walls. But in 1986, Peter Croft and John Bachar added a new variation to the game by doing both El Capitan and Half Dome in less than 24 hours. Then in 1999, Dean Potter blew a few minds by soloing both of those features in 23 hours and 23 minutes, using a mixture of free soloing, aid climbing, and French-free tactics. Two days later, Hans Florine did the same thing, finishing in 21 hours.

(The difference in their time mostly came down to tactics, not on-the-wall speed. Linkup times are measured from the bottom of the first route to the top of the last. By opting to do Half Dome first, Florine replaced the two-hour hike to the base of the wall with a 15-minute approach to the base of the Nose. In an interview with Planet Mountain afterward, Florine estimated that he free soloed 70 percent of Half Dome, which took him 3 hours and 15 minutes, and 20 percent of El Cap, which took 13 hours and 41 minutes; he rope soloed the rest.)

Florine’s record stood until 2010, when Honnold entered the Yosemite speed solo game. He warmed up by establishing a new solo speed record on the Nose (his time of 5 hours and 49 minutes finally fell to Nick Ehman in October 2023). Then he went after Florine’s time on the solo linkup of El Cap and Half Dome.

Honnold, being Honnold, free soloed 95 percent of both routes. That other five percent, he “daisy soloed,” which amounts to a flowing mixture of free soloing, French freeing (yarding on gear), and clipping a daisy chain into gear when the climbing gets hard. When we hear about this style of climbing, most of us immediately think “Oh, he’s got harness and gear, it’s safer than free soloing.” But daisy soloing is both extremely ill-advised and absolutely harrowing. As he says in Honnold 3.0, a Sender Films short that covers his daisy solo of the Yosemite Triple in 2012, “I feel like I should have a disclaimer on [daisy soloing]. Because basically you should not do this. Even though I love it and I think it’s so fun.”

Honnold, like Florine, started on Half Dome and also established a new solo speed record on the route. He reached the summit in 2 hours and 9 minutes. (Two years later, he came back and chopped his speed time on the Regular Northwest Face down to 1 hour and 22 minutes—a record that still stands.) Then he cruised up El Cap, making what he called an “uneventful” ascent in 6 hours.

His final time: 11 hours and 10 minutes.

No one has soloed the two walls faster.

2011: Free soloing The Phoenix (5.13a), Yosemite

In June 2011, just one day before the Sender Films team was scheduled to film a reenactment of Honnold’s free solo of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome (which appeared on the 60 Minutes profile that first put Honnold on the non-climbing map), Honnold decided to up the ante in a different way. He free soloed The Phoenix, a slippery 130-foot granite crack just west of Cascade Falls. So Honnold invited Peter Mortimer along to film the climb.

One of Yosemite’s most famous cracks—up there with Separate Reality and the Salathé Headwall in terms of photogenic fame—The Phoenix also holds the distinction of being the country’s first 5.13a. It originally fell to Ray Jardine (who perfected cam designs in order to protect the climb) and John Lakey way back in 1977, an era when climbing 5.11 made you a world-class climber. In 1984, when it was still one of the country’s hardest climbs, The Phoenix briefly went from a source of national pride to a source of national embarrassment when British climber Jerry Moffatt onsighted it.

To access the start of The Phoenix, you rappel in from the top. The route begins on a thin ledge several feet above the rocky torrent of the Merced River. Because it was late spring, the river was raging. Mortimer remembers the waterfall being so intense, it felt like the cliffs were shaking. When Honnold reached the route’s start, he took off his harness and sweatshirt, had Mortimer pull them up to the anchors, and began to climb. The second he stepped off the ledge, he had several hundred feet of air beneath him.

The route starts with some thin laybacking that felt “pretty insecure” to Honnold and his wide fingers. For the same reason, however, the typical crux—a traverse on underclings and jams—felt a bit easier. When he emerged from the crux into another section of thin hands, Mortimer made the mistake of zooming in on Honnold’s holds. “It was so, just, sickening to see what he was holding on to,” Mortimer recalls. Honnold cruised the remaining 70 feet of consistently overhanging tight hands

Honnold has always been hyper-aware of the sport’s history, and his place in it. So it was surely no accident that he picked The Phoenix, of all routes, for the first-ever 5.13 free solo in the Yosemite Valley, even if he did find it hard and insecure for the grade. “The pump definitely builds,” he told Mortimer.

Watch Reel Rock’s excellent short about the climb—with commentary from Peter Mortimer, who considers it one of the scariest things he’s filmed:

2011: Free solo of Cosmic Debris (5.13b) and a flash free solo of Heaven (5.12d)—in the same day

In September 2011, Honnold pushed things further by soloing Cosmic Debris, a steep 5.13b finger crack located just behind the Yosemite Valley Chapel. First climbed in 1980 by Bill Price, Cosmic Debris involves just 30 feet of hard climbing. But it starts on a ledge mid-way up a wall. This means that—as with The Phoenix—a fall from even the lower moves is ill-advised. As James Lucas notes in an article about his multi-year quest to climb the route, fittingly entitled “Cosmic Debris, or, How to Put Your Fingers in a Vicegrip and Stomp on Them,” Cosmic Debris involves such unpleasant things as “campusing on fingerlocks,” and very hard crack boulder problems. But for Honnold the climb was “surprisingly locker,” as he told Rock and Ice.

Perhaps craving a more significant line, something with proper exposure, Honnold and fellow traveler Mason Earle then drove up to Glacier Point to try Heaven, a steep 5.12d hand crack. While also rather short, Heaven sits at the top of a 2,000-foot slab, commanding epic views of Liberty Cap, Half Dome, Mt. Watkins, Washington Column, and the Royal Arches. Heaven was first climbed by Ron Kauk in the ‘90s and first free soloed by Dean Potter in 2006, after weeks of careful rehearsal.

Until Honnold did The Phoenix, Potter’s solo of Heaven was the hardest free solo Yosemite had ever seen, and it produced some iconic footage. Though it’s just 40 feet of 30-degree overhanging crack climbing, Heaven is intensely exposed, and a fall at any point after the first few moves would send you bouncing the distance down the slab to the valley floor. When Potter tops it out after two tense minutes on the wall, the relief—and psych—are audible. But Potter was soloing quite close to his limit. His hardest send at the time was mid 5.13, just three or four grades harder than Heaven. So Honnold, who had by that point climbed 5.14c sport, and still glowing from his ascent of Cosmic Debris that morning, decided to up the ante. Armed with Mason Earl’s meticulous beta, he flashed Heaven.

I want to pause and reflect on this for a moment. Heaven was considered the hardest free solo ever done in Yosemite until Honnold sent The Phoenix three months earlier. But not only was it something that Honnold was comfortable enough to flash without a rope, it was such a blip in the wider arrangement of big days and bold solos, that Honnold entirely failed to mention Heaven—or Cosmic Debris, or the Rostrum’s Alien finish—in his 2016 book Alone on the Wall. 

That said, it’s easy to underestimate your best days. In 2014, Honnold returned to Heaven to film a Squarespace commercial with Jimmy Chin. According to James Lucas, Honnold was solid on his first lap, but it was a very hot day, and on his second lap he began greasing out of the crack. He asked the film crew to give him a rope.

Dean Potter’s video:

2012: Onsight free solo—and sketchy winter descent—of Shune’s Buttress (5.11+; 800ft)

There’s a justifiably well-known saying in bouldering: Always inspect the downclimb. Take it from me: Nothing is more deflating than styling your friend’s project only to find yourself terminally marooned atop a boulder. But as Honnold demonstrated on Zion’s Shune’s Buttress (5.11+; 800ft), the same phrase can serve as a helpful guide to would-be free soloists.

In the winter of 2012, Honnold, ever confident on 5.11 crack climbs, onsighted the ultra-classic Shune’s Buttress without a rope. A snow storm loomed in the forecast for later that day. But the flurries began early, while Honnold was still climbing. By the time he reached the top, snow was coming down rather hard. Shune’s does not go to the top of a mountain; it goes to the top of a buttress on the lower half of Red Arch Mountain. The summit of Red Arch is set back from the canyon’s rim, which is why everyone who climbs Shune’s with a rope then rappels the eight pitches back down.

Honnold, ropeless, planned instead to scramble up the remainder of Red Arch Mountain (some 2,000 more feet of elevation gain) and link up with the Deer Trap Trail. After that, he could loop eight miles back down to the Weeping Rock Trailhead on the canyon floor. The problem? The terrain between the rap anchors on Shune’s and the summit of Red Arch Mountain consists of steep gash canyons and chossy fourth-class slabs, much of which was covered in snow and unconsolidated hail.

After alternating between post-holing up these fourth-class slabs and free soloing steeper sections of virgin rock, Honnold eventually came to a short cliff band with just a narrow ledge between him and a massive chasm. As he free soloed this band, he broke a hold and fell. But instead of plummeting into the chasm, he landed on a tree jutting outward from the narrow ledge.

“It was all very adventurous,” he said on The Nugget podcast. “I was like, ‘that’s really scary.’ But then I had to climb the same thing again.”

2012: Onsight Free Solo of La Fiesta de Los Bíceps

One of Spain’s most famous multi-pitch climbs, La Fiesta de Los Bíceps (5.11d; 800ft) is one of the world’s longest and most glorious jug hauls, tackling an exposed and slightly overhanging tower of conglomerate just outside the town of Riglos, in Spain. The first free solo of the route was by Carlos García back in 1989 and was (sensibly) rehearsed. But when Honnold visited on a sport climbing trip in the spring of 2012, he understandably decided that 5.11 jug-hauling was well within his abilities, so skipped the rehearsal part and just quested up the exposed face, only to discover four things.

1. The crux is not juggy, which was frightening.
2. The cobble jugs were disconcertingly big, and he was afraid that by grabbing them as jugs he’d exert too much leverage and tear them loose from the conglomerate glue; so he found himself skipping many of the biggest holds and grabbing others only at the base, where they connect with the main part of the cliff.
3. Not using the good holds made the climb quite a bit harder.
4. The climb is both steep and sustained, particularly higher up, where there are three consecutive 5.11 pitches on overhanging terrain. Most climbers get to stop between pitches and hang from the bolted anchors, but Honnold, without rope or harness, had to enchain each of the pitches without taking a break.

Thanks to all this, Honnold admits that by the end he was “pretty damn pumped.” (He talks quite a bit about this on his Nugget Climbing Podcast episode.) A nice bonus: he was “attacked by birds” at the top of the route. Sounds scary, especially if they were the same birds featured in this video profile of the climb.

The next day, in Oliana, he had the sort of sport climbing day that some of us would sell our children for, redpointing four 5.13s, including two 5.13d’s.

2012: Freeing the Yosemite Triple Crown with Tommy Caldwell

The Yosemite Triple Crown, which builds on the Nose-in-a-Day (NIAD) speed tradition and involves climbing the three largest walls in Yosemite in a single 24-hour push, was first done in 2001 by Dean Potter and Timmy O’Neill, who used aid and finished in 23 hours 15 minutes. Their push included narrowly missing the speed record on the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, setting a new speed record on the South Face of Mt. Watkins, and running into some pretty funny delays on El Cap’s Nose. To this day, the Yosemite Triple stands as “the final exam for Yosemite speed climbers,” according to a recent ascensionist, and has only been completed eight times.

Difficult though it is with aid, Potter spent the decade after his ascent talking about trying to do the route free, eventually teaming up with Chris MacNamara, a longtime Valley climber, and planned to save time on the transitions between walls by BASE jumping off each of the formations. But they never quite pulled the trigger and made an attempt. During that period, Honnold and Tommy Caldwell emerged as the strongest and fastest free climbers in Yosemite history, but they held back on attempting the Triple as a way of respecting Potter’s vision. But when he still wasn’t ready in 2012, they went for it.

Because they were free climbing, Honnold and Caldwell swapped out the Nose for Freerider, and because it was warm in the valley, they organized their itinerary such that they could climb in the shade. Starting the clock at 4:45 p.m. on May 18, they warmed up on the South Face of Mt. Watkins, which is mostly 5.10 but has three 5.12 pitches and two 5.13a’s. Swinging leads and simul-climbing, they completed the route in 2 hours and 40 minutes with no falls, then hiked an hour to Tioga Pass Road, where they met up with Becca Caldwell (Tommy’s wife), who drove them to the foot of El Cap.

At 10:45 they started up Freerider, and climbed through the night. Caldwell took two falls on the boulder problem and one on a random 5.11, but he successfully freed all the pitches. Honnold took no falls on any of the routes. They hiked down the East Ledges, then drove to Half Dome, approached via the Death Slabs, and did the Regular Northwest Face in just under five hours, finishing at 2:00 p.m. on May 19. All in all, they climbed some 7,000 feet and 70-guidebook pitches, many of them 5.12 and 5.13, in less than 24 hours. It was, as Climbing’s Dougald MacDonald put it, “an extraordinary feat of endurance.”

But when it comes to big linkups, Honnold was just getting started.

2012: Free soloing the West Face of El Capitan

Definitions matter. But definitions can also shift. And in May 2012, when a small sliver of the world’s chalky pundits were already waiting with baited breath to see who would claim the first free solo of El Capitan, both Alex Honnold and Dean Potter knew that.

El Capitan is a vast feature: 3,000 feet high, more than a mile wide at the base, and home to scores of routes. All of those routes are considered grade VI except for two: the West Face, located on the extreme left side of the feature, and the East Buttress, located on the extreme right. The East Buttress, which is 1,200 feet high and gets a grade IV rating, was first climbed in 1953 and first freed in 1964. None of those ascensionists had any illusion about it being a “real” El Cap route. The designation of the West Face, however, is a bit murkier. It contains free pitches up to 5.11c, is 1,800 feet tall, and is generally considered a grade V route: committing, sure, but lacking the exposure and scale of the routes to its right.

Though the West Face was first free climbed by Ray Jardine and Bill Price in 1979, most climbing historians credit the first free ascent of the Big Stone to Todd Skinner and Paul Pianna, who climbed the Salathé without aid in 1988. Still, though: it’s on the same piece of rock, and it’s a dang big route, and in 2012, Dean Potter was contemplating using it as part of a wider El Cap free solo linkup.

Implicitly acknowledging that claiming the first free solo of El Cap by doing the West Face on its own would be some sort of historical cop-out, Potter planned on climbing most of the West Face before traversing several hundred feet to the right via Thanksgiving Ledge and finishing on the final six pitches of Free Rider (none of which are harder than 5.11). He intended to freebase the climb—climbing with a BASE jumping rig to give a chance of protection if he fell—and then claim the first solo of El Capitan. But Honnold, hearing that Potter had these plans, and considering them a dishonest interpretation of what an El Cap route is (he uses a slightly less kind word to Mark Synnott in The Impossible Climb), decided to preemptively solo the West Face “specifically to hose Dean.”

And so, just three days after finishing the Yosemite Triple with Tommy Caldwell, one day of which he spent scoping out the West Face’s crux pitches, he went for it. In the process, he ended most arguments about the status of the West Face by openly saying he had not just done the first free solo of El Cap. “It was probably,” writes Synnott, “the most openly competitive thing he had ever done.”

2012: The Yosemite Triple Crown—Solo.

On June 5, three weeks after doing the Triple with Tommy Caldwell, two weeks after free soloing the West Face, and one week after breaking his own daisy solo record on Half Dome (the 1 hour and 22 minute time), Honnold again turned his sights on the Yosemite Triple, this time to make the first solo ascent. He relied on the same daisy soloing practices he’d perfected during his solo speed runs up the Nose and Half Dome two years earlier, and again free soloed roughly 95 percent of the terrain.

How did it go? Well, it rained the day before, so when he set off up Watkins at 4:00 p.m., the lower pitches were wet and the bugs were out. But the first 1,000 feet are pretty easy (for Honnold): 5.10 crack climbing and laybacking. After that the wall kicks back and Honnold’s by-any-means methods became a bit sketchier.

If you haven’t watched Honnold 3.0, first released as part of Real Rock 7, you should. It’s terrifying. Peter Mortimer and the Sender Films team capture the emotional tension involved in transitioning constantly between free soloing, aid climb, and yarding up bolts—a frightening dance of “now I’m safe, now I’m not.” It also contains one of Honnold’s closer calls caught on film, when Honnold, unprotected in what looks like slick 5.12 terrain, has a foot slip while reaching for a distant bolt with his daisy chain. He catches himself, sets up again, clips the bolt, and keeps going. “Having little things go wrong—that’s just part of the game,” he says in voiceover. “They shake you for a second and then you keep climbing.”

After finishing the wall in 2 hours and 20 minutes—a speed record on Watkins’s South Face that still stands—he hiked an hour to the car and turned his attention to El Cap. Since he had no intention of freeing all the moves, he opted to do the Nose rather than Freerider, starting up by headlamp at 9:30 p.m. He was just 150 feet up the wall when he realized that he’d forgotten his chalk bag in his van. Going back down to get it, though an option, would have cost him too much time, so he climbed on in the dark, mostly ropeless, with some of the cracks still a bit damp from yesterday’s rain, without chalk.

Luckily, 1,000 feet up the climb, he came upon a party camped on Dolt Tower, and one of the climbers kindly agreed to loan Honnold his chalk bag. Later, a BASE jumper launched off El Cap, their body roaring down past the wall in the dark, and scared the piss out of Honnold. From the Great Roof onward, he daisy soloed alongside the late Sean Leary, who was filming and jugging up the fixed lines. He finished the Nose at 3:30 a.m, six hours after leaving the ground, cutting another 20 minutes off his Freerider time with Caldwell.

He went on to do Half Dome (the “psychological crux” thanks to the grueling approach) and topped out at 10:55 a.m.—18 hours and 55 minutes after starting. The triple has been done just eight times as of November 2023—if you include Honnold’s two ascents. His speed record on the Triple still stands.

2012: The first ascent of Too Big To Flail (V10 X)

While Honnold is understandably best known for the big stuff, the unprotectable stuff, the stuff whose butt-clenching exposure is—you guessed it—butt clenching, he has also managed to leave a frightening little mark on the American bouldering scene despite the fact that the hardest boulders he’s done are (sorry, dude) not really that hard.

Located in the Buttermilks of Bishop, California, where there’s always been a fuzzy line between highball bouldering and free soloing, Too Big to Flail (V10 X; 55ft) is easily mistaken by lay-folks as just another giant pebble among hundreds of other giant pebbles. It’s neither the tallest of Bishop’s renown highballs (it shares that distinction with Kevin Jorgeson’s Ambrosia, V11, which Honnold did the second ascent of in 2010) nor the hardest (that would be The Process, V16), but thanks to its style, consistency, and atrocious landing, it is far and away the most serious. Indeed, Too Big to Flail is less like a boulder problem than a sustained, insecure, dead-vertical 5.13d.

In an interview earlier this year, Tim Kang, who’s done most of Bishop’s boldest highballs, described it as “a pretty messed up style of climbing, a different kind of highball compared to the others. The texture of the rock is super glassy, and it’s very insecure, and it’s very sustained in the insecurity that it has. So it takes a different approach to feeling safe enough to take the rope off.”

And the landing zone?

“It’s atrocious,” Kang says. “People have fallen from the crux of Too Big to Flail and hurt themselves really badly. And that’s at 30 feet. But it’s not easy after that. It’s a wonky, insecure 5.12+ to the top.”

Even Honnold didn’t feel totally OK with it, admitting afterward that he felt a bit shaky up there. “It’s fucking scary!”

2013: Two big linkups in Zion—one free, one free solo

On March 11, 2013, Honnold and Tommy Caldwell got up rather early and did four of Zion’s hardest free climbs in just 16 hours. The routes—Sheer Lunacy (5.13b; 800 ft), Moonlight Buttress (5.12c; 1,200ft), Touchstone Wall (5.13b; 800ft), and Spaceshot (5.13a; 900ft)—together amount to some 3,700 feet of climbing, typically done in 35 pitches. Four of those pitches are 5.13 and 10 are 5.12.

Swinging leads, with the second following free, they spent roughly two hours on both Sheer Lunacy and Moonlight Buttress and more than three hours on both Touchstone Wall and Spaceshot. They took only five falls during the process: Tommy on the crux pitch (5.13a) of Sheer Lunacy, the first pitch (5.13a) of Touchstone Wall, and the traverse (5.11c) on Moonlight Buttress, and Honnold on the second pitch (5.13b) of Touchstone Wall and the last pitch (5.12b) of Spaceshot.

It was by far the single most impressive linkup ever done in Zion. but given Honnold’s other, bigger linkups—the Fitz and Torres traverses, the CUDDL, the HURT—and given the minimal details released to the media afterward, I probably wouldn’t have included it here if it weren’t for what came next.

Just a week later, armed with a nice fitness cushion from the Caldwell link, Honnold once more raised the ceiling in the history of free soloing, this time by climbing Moonlight Buttress, Monkeyfinger (5.12b; 900ft), and Shune’s Buttress in a single 12-hour push. This feat involved soloing roughly 30 pitches, seven of them 5.12, eight 5.11, and jogging about 20 miles between climbs. “The crux,” he wrote on his 8a.nu, “was walking off everything.”

I doubt the rest of us would agree.

In a post on his La Sportiva Blog (cringely called “Alex Honnold—What a Day!” by the editors), Honnold called this link his “hardest free soloing effort” to date, before going on to lament “how funny it is that climbing media didn’t even touch the story… . Soloing Astroman and the Rostrum in 2007 generated all kinds of news and video bits. This Zion link-up, which is infinitely harder and more cutting edge, doesn’t get mentioned. That’s what I get for soloing so much.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this statement earned Honnold a serious lambasting. As David Roberts observed in Alone on the Wall, various internet critics read Alex’s words “as the petulant complaint of a superstar who, even as he pretended not to care about media plaudits, was hungry for more.”

Maybe this is fair. Maybe it’s not. Given how PR savvy Honnold has proven himself, and how famous he’s become, I think arguments about the intentionality of his fame feel a bit dated at this stage. What strikes me instead, twelve years later, is that Honnold was right on two counts. First, this was more impressive than any other soloing linkup that had yet been done. And, second, this is what he gets for soloing so much. When he matched Peter Croft by free soloing Astroman and the North Face of the Rostrum—a linkup that had stood unrepeated since the 1980s—it was the rough equivalent of breaking a longstanding world record in the marathon or the mile, which made it easy for climbing journalists and internet pundits to recognize that something historic had happened.

But when Honnold kept climbing, when he shattered not only old records but our expectations about what sorts of records were even reasonable or rational or psychologically possible, we began to expect Honnold—by now operating in a league of his own—to do things that felt absurd to us. And this expectation made it harder and harder for people to recognize just how freaking impressive the things he was doing were.

A good example of this comes from those Yosemite 5.13s I mentioned above. When he free soloed the Phoenix in June 2011, no one had ever free soloed a 5.13 in Yosemite before, so it was a big deal. In 2016, however, when he soloed Excellent Adventure, an insanely exposed and bouldery 5.13a pitch near the summit of the Rostrum… crickets… despite the fact that Excellent Adventure was—and remains—one of the boldest free solos in Yosemite history.

2014: Free Solo of El Sendero Luminoso (5.12; 1,500ft)

Not all pitches of an equal difficulty are created equal. Certain styles that feel forgettably easy on a rope can feel unthinkable without one, particularly when a climb demands dynamic moves (see Honnold’s Rainbow Wall retro-onsight) or insecure smears (see the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome). In 2014, with an eventual solo of Freerider in mind, Honnold began singling out big intimidating routes that would test the insecurities that he would find on Freerider’s various sections.

According to Mark Synnott’s The Impossible Climb, El Sendero Luminoso, a 5.12+ in El Potrero Chico, Mexico, which boasts 1,500 feet of balancey vertical face climbing on thin limestone crimps, was one of these climbs, since its cruxes have a stylistic kinship to Freerider’s micro-crimp boulder problem. It probably didn’t hurt, of course, that the route is also, as Honnold noted in an Alpinist interview shortly after his ropeless ascent, the best hard line in El Potrero Chico and “the pinnacle of technical limestone big-wall climbing in North America.”

Because seven of El Sendero Luminoso’s 15 pitches are 5.12, and five are 5.11, and the vast majority of the climbing consists of dicey limestone face climbing, Honnold adopted the same rehearsal tactics that tend to define his harder solos. Having climbed El Sendero Luminoso three times prior to 2014—the first in the mid 2000s, then twice more during the winter of 2012/13, when first considering it for a solo—he knew that the vegetated, north-facing wall sees minimal traffic and is, as Honnold put it in an Alpinist essay, basically a “hanging garden” that would require significant time investment to clean. So when he arrived in El Potrero Chico in January 2014, he brought a pair of secret weapons: Cedar Wright… and the pressure of a film crew.

Wright and Honnold spent four days commuting up and down the route, removing cactus and loose rock, rehearsing the cruxes, pioneering new beta to make the climb more secure without a rope, and breaking enough holds to, as Wright put it in his video, “make you worry.” Honnold even managed to disconcert Wright by having an unexpected foot pop—and subsequent fall—on the crux.

But the climbing (and the cleaning) wasn’t the only source of challenge: prefiguring his experience with Free Solo, Honnold also got to deal with the pressure of preparing for a technically and emotionally demanding free solo in the presence of a large film crew, which included Cedar Wright, Renan Ozturk, Taylor Rees, and five drone operators from Denver. “Despite everyone’s assurances that I should only do what I felt comfortable with, and that they could film any other, easier route if I changed my mind,” Honnold wrote afterward, “it was hard not to feel a little pressure.”

But of course, on January 15, he romped up it in less than three hours. On the top, Honnold told Wright that it was one of his best soloing experiences. After that, he spent the next three days dashing up and down the route, reclimbing various sections for the camera. “It’s anticlimactic to go back up a route to pose all over it,” he wrote in his Alpinist essay. “The triumph of the actual achievement gets lost in what follows.”

Watch Cedar Wright’s video:

2014: The Fitz Traverse

In February 2014, just a few weeks after hiking El Sendero Luminoso, Honnold made his first trip to Patagonia and, despite the “distressing amount of snow,” joined Tommy Caldwell to make the first ascent of one of Patagonia’s biggest undone objectives: the Fitz Traverse. It’s the north-south traverse of the entire Chaltén Massif (aka the Fitz Roy Range), summiting Aguja Guillaumet, Aguja Mermoz, Cerro Chaltén (also known as Fitz Roy), Aguja Poincenot, Aguja Rafael Juárez, Aguja Saint-Exúpery, and Aguja de l’S.

The traverse involves roughly 12,000 feet of vertical gain and three lateral miles of climbing, with icy cracks, alpine snow fields, and on-the-rock difficulties up to 5.11+. Honnold and Caldwell simuled and short-fixed the vast majority of the climbing, dispatching long routes like the 4,000-foot North Pillar of Cerro Chaltén in just three epic lead blocks. But while Alex “no big deal” Honnold wrote in the AAJ that it was basically “an extremely scenic backpacking trip,” that categorization overlooks the physicality of the task.

In an interview with UK Climbing he noted that “when most people go climbing for [eight] hours they are actually belaying for [four] of the hours. But since we simuled everything we were literally climbing the full [eight] hours. Except we were climbing more like 15 hours a day or something [for five days in a row].” Eventually, he said, just flaking the rope was exhausting. “It was the most tired I’ve ever been.” By the end of the traverse, by which point the weather window had closed and they were struggling homeward through a blizzard, Honnold had come down with snow blindness. After they finally reached town, “It took two days of full bed rest before we even considered trying to move around or get out of the house.”

Yikes.

As of 2023, the original Fitz Traverse has yet to see a repeat, though Belgian legend Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll soloed the reverse traverse, calling it the Moonwalk Traverse, in 2021—one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of Patagonia climbing.

2014: Free solo of the University Wall—and other Squamish shenanigans

The University Wall, a 900-foot 5.12a in Squamish, BC, was first climbed in 1966 by an all-Canadian team using aid and siege-style tactics, and first freed in 1982 by Peter Croft, Greg Foweraker, and Hamish Fraser. Croft and Fraser later returned to link the top of the climb into the Roman Chimneys, adding four pitches of 5.10 and 5.11, since on their first ascent they’d walked off below the summit via Bellygood Ledge. On August 25, 2014, Honnold repeated their climb without a rope. Speaking with Alpinist afterward, Honnold said that the route had “always represented that burly crack climbing style to me. It’s like the hardman version of Astroman.” He added that he’d wanted to solo it earlier, “but it’s often wet, so I’d never had the opportunity.”

That summer, he did a number of rehearsal trips up the route, but he could never quite get the crux sections to feel reasonable, so he tabled the idea, pursuing various other Squamish shenanigans (see below), until, one day, two week after his last lap, he simply felt ready and went for it. On the crux second pitch there is a section with an insecure undercling that Honnold had struggled to feel good about during his rehearsal, despite sussing out a delicate, tick-tacky sequence that felt pretty consistent. But when he got there without a rope, he found himself feeling so strong that he was able to skip most of the insecure moves by locking off hard. He linked the climb into the Roman Chimneys and was back at his car just two hours after leaving it.

A fun fact: If Honnold hadn’t passed James Lucas on his way to the cliff, we may never have learned that he soloed the route. Luckily for posterity, Lucas took a few photos from the parking lot and word got out.

Two more pieces of Squamish badassery from that summer.

1. In 2011 Honnold set the speed record on the Grand Wall (5.11a C1; 1,000ft), climbing it and the Roman Chimneys with Mason Earl in 59 minutes. But then in 2013 the late Marc-André Leclerc accidentally upped the ante by soloing the wall in 58 minutes. So Honnold, competitive as he is, took a few minutes to blast up the thing in an “anything goes” style, finishing in 38 minutes—a time the low-key Leclerc didn’t bother to try competing with.
2. On August 17, a week before his U-Wall solo, Honnold celebrated his 29th birthday by free soloing 290 pitches—yep: two hundred and ninety—in Squamish. That’s more outdoor climbing than most dedicated weekend warriors get in a year. Epic TV made a fun video about it:

2014: An under-rehearsed voyage up Romantic Warrior

One of the most mind-blowing climbing news stories I’ve ever read appeared in Urban Climber (RIP) in 2005 and was about how Michael Reardon, a blond-haired glam rocker turned ropeless visionary, had just onsight free soloed California’s Romantic Warrior, “the crown jewel of the Needles,” a nauseatingly technical 1,000-foot route with difficulties up to 5.12b. I had trouble imagining (and still do) the combination of self confidence and technical expertise required to decide it’s a good idea to voyage up that sort of route without a rope, a partner, or pre-existing knowledge of the moves.

Though I was in no position to audit Reardon’s claim, I was not particularly surprised when, years later, I learned that a number of well-known and highly respected climbers and journalists, including Peter Croft, Peter Mortimer, and Mark Synnott, believed Reardon’s solo, which had no witnesses, and which the normally voluble Reardon waited more than a month to report, never actually happened. Of course, other climbers, among them John Bachar, stepped up to defend Reardon’s claims. But in 2007, before the controversy gathered full steam, a rogue wave swept Reardon to sea; the tragedy drowned everyone’s enthusiasm for argument.

As it happens, I’m not all that interested in weighing in on whether Reardon did it either, since Reardon is gone and none of us have access to new facts. Instead, I offer the above as context for Alex Honnold’s decision, in September 2014, to head to the Needles alone and see how he stacked up against Reardon’s claims…

…with one caveat:

He had absolutely no intention of trying to onsight it without a rope since he’d already onsighted it with one in 2007. Instead, he hiked around, rappelled in from the top, and mini-tracked the crux pitches. The climbing felt insecure and hard for the grade, so when he returned to his van that night he intended to rehearse it again the next day, and maybe the day after that, before making any sort of decision about the solo. But that night, as recorded in The Impossible Climb, Honnold’s stove ran out of propane, which meant that if he wanted to eat a hot meal, he had to drive several hours to refill it.

Or… he could ignore the lesson he learned on Half Dome and just get Romantic Warrior over with the next morning.

So he did. But while he was up on the wall, just beneath the first crux pitch, he began to have some gastrointestinal activity. (“Nothing loosens you up like free soloing,” he says on the Nugget Climbing Podcast.) There were no ledges or stances anywhere near him, so he traversed a few feet off the route and, while hanging from jugs in overhanging terrain, took “what might have been the most daring poop in history” (Synnott). Then he continued up the wall.

An interesting twist: Just like Reardon, Honnold kept silent about the solo for weeks. It wasn’t until two months later that rumors about his ascent turned into actual news stories, and even then they were scarce in their detail. Maybe there’s something about Romantic Warrior that, as Reardon told Peter Mortimer in 2005, is so special that its free soloists feel they have to process the experience by themselves.

2016: Torre Traverse With Colin Haley

When the Torre Traverse—a north-to-south traverse over Aguja Standhardt, Punta Herron, Torre Egger, and Cerro Torre—was first climbed by Patagonia fixtures Rolando Garibotti and Colin Haley over four days in 2008, it marked the absolute cutting edge of Patagonian climbing. The link had first been envisioned by the late Italian legend Ermanno Salvaterra (who passed away after a freak accident in the Dolomites earlier this year) but it took multiple teams more than two decades to unlock a pathway through each of the mountains.

But Haley, now an elder statesman of Patagonia climbing, had always wanted to return to his 2008 traverse—and to do it a bit faster. So in 2015 he went back twice. First he teamed up with the late Marc-André Leclerc to do the first ascent of the reverse traverse of the Torre group, beginning on Cerro Torre, rappelling the huge north face, and ending on Standhardt. They spent four days in the mountains and called their route La Travesía del Osa Buda.

A month later, Haley teamed up with Honnold to do the OG traverse, but with one caveat: Honnold, being Honnold, didn’t just want to go a bit faster; he wanted to bring a bit of Yosemite gamesmanship to the Patagonia scene and do the climb in a single day. So they tried. But 22 hours into their push, and just two pitches from the top of Cerro Torre, a major storm hit. The weather forced them into what former Climbing editor Dougald MacDonald called “a painful retreat down the West Face of Cerro Torre and across the ice cap. By the time they made it back to town they had been going 53 hours straight with no stove or bivy gear.”

Sounds ugly, especially since they were so close to success. But alpinists, like free soloists, have poor memories, so Honnold and Haley returned the next year, got better weather, and made better time, standing on Cerro Torre’s mushroom 20 hours and 40 minutes after starting. (They counted time from the base of the first route, in this case the col just north of Cerro Standhardt, to the summit of Cerro Torre.) After that they rappelled the Southeast Ridge (Cesare Maestri’s notorious Compressor Route). Including the approach and descent, their camp-to-camp time was about 32 hours.

As Garibotti wrote after their climb: “Oh boy, how times change. This crazy sport moves forward in giant leaps…. Yes, the Torre Traverse got climbed in a day…. Seems like yesterday when it was a quixotic project that would never see the light of day.”

2017: Adding another “free” to Freerider

You already know this. And if you want to know more you can read “What You Didn’t Know About Alex Honnold & His Free Solo of Freerider,” in which Honnold’s friend (and former Climbing editor) James Lucas goes into some of the things that the movie left out.

As far as the climb’s significance, I’ll let Tommy Caldwell speak for me: “Free soloing El Cap has been the most anticipated climbing feat of our generation, but only because of Alex. There have been very few people potentially capable of accomplishing this, and sadly most of these individuals are no longer with us. In the past I’ve equated the possibility of this climb to the moon landing of free soloing. Today, knowing that it has been done, I think that is a fair assessment of the significance. It’s a generation-defining climb.”

2018: The Nose Speed Record

Speed has been part of the Nose’s history since the beginning. It was El Capitan’s first route, climbed in 1985 by Warren Harding, Wayne Merry, and George Whitmore after 45 days of effort over a year and a half. In 1960 its second ascensionists, Royal Robbins, Joe Fitschen, Chuck Pratt, and Tom Frost climbed it ground up, in a single continuous push, over the course of just seven days. Fifteen years later, in 1975, Jim Bridwell, John Long, and Billy Westbay did the first NIAD, finishing in just 17 hours and 45 minutes. From then on, folks like Peter Croft, John Bachar, Hans Florine, Dean Potter, Timmy O’Neill, Yuji Hirayama, and Sean Leary have teamed up to drop the time. In 2002, Florine and Hirayama brought it to 2 hours and 48 minutes and 55 seconds. In 2007, the Huber brothers shaved three minutes off.

Over the next decade a rotating cast of familiar players swooped in to retake the lead. In 2012, Honnold teamed up with Florine and brought it down to 2 hours and 23 minutes, a record that held until Brad Gobright and Jim Reynolds, who lapped the route 11 times in 2017, finally beat it with a time of 2 hours 19 minutes. That’s when Honnold brought in the big gun: Tommy Caldwell. After multiple laps, one gigantic fall, and a few concessions to (and away from) safety, they gradually dropped the time to 1:58:07—which still stands.

I should note here that while free soloing is obviously dangerous, speed climbing is arguably more so. Though they still use ropes, big wall speed climbers consistently shave gear and protection out of their routines even as they push themselves to move faster through each move and transition. They often expose themselves and their partners to large and dangerous falls in . In 2010, Honnold and the famed Swiss speed alpinist Ueli Steck were on track to break the record when Steck took a nasty 80-foot fall and decided he’d had enough of it.

In 2017, one of Yosemite’s fastest women, Quinn Brett, took a 100-footer off the Boot Flake and broke her back—resulting in permanent waist-down paralysis. The next spring, Hans Florine, who’d climbed the Big Stone nearly 180 times, went up the Nose for a training lap; on an aid section of the Pancake Flake he ripped a piece of gear, hit a ledge, and broke both of his legs. A few weeks later, two Yosemite speed veterans, Jason Wells and Tim Klein, who together had climbed El Cap hundreds of times, sometimes lapping it multiple times in the same day, died while speed simuling the freeblast slabs on the Salathé.

An excellent hour-long film about Honnold and Caldwell’s record is available on Reel Rock. An equally excellent but far more sobering film about Quinn Brett and her post-accident life is available on Apple TV.

2019: Kinda sorta punching his 5.14d membership card

We can debate the specifics (was it Hubble in 1990 or Action Direct in 1991?) but the essential fact is clear: human beings have been climbing 5.14d for more than 30 years. At this point, there are a lot of male 5.14d climbers out there, so many, in fact, that climbing 5.14d rarely gets a mention in our weekly news roundup anymore.

This does not change the fact that the grade is extremely hard and that climbing one is a serious accomplishment. It’s also as hard as Alex Honnold, the king of endless moderates, has climbed. Of course, the grade of that particular climb, Arrested Development, in Mount Charleston, is the subject of debate, with most of its ascensionists considering it 5.14c. But its style—powerful roof climbing—is not particularly in Honnold’s wheelhouse, so regardless of what other people say, he says it’s his hardest climb, far harder for him than the multiple 5.14c’s he’s dispatched.

2020: Continental Divide Ultimate Linkup

As Honnold’s career progressed, he extended the premise of big Yosemite linkups to increasingly spaced-apart features. Back in 2013, for instance, he teamed up with former Climbing columnist Cedar Wright for a fair-means linkup of all fifteen of California’s 14,000 foot peaks in the course of just three weeks—a feat that involved biking 750 miles, hiking more than 100 miles, and gained 100,000 feet of elevation, some of it by free soloing chossy granite mountains. In 2014, they joined forces again, this time gelatinizing their quads by biking another 780 miles, much of it on dirt and gravel, through the Canyonlands of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, climbing some America’s best (and worst) desert towers along the way.

But these feats pale in comparison to Honnold and Tommy Caldwell’s 2020 FA of The Continental Divide Ultimate Linkup, also known as the CDUL, and pronounced “cuddle” because getting it done required exactly that.

While some of Honnold’s other major linkups—notably his free link with Caldwell of the Yosemite Triple Crown—involved more and harder pitches, the CDUL is notable because of the space between the climbs. A post-lockdown project first conceived of by Tommy Caldwell and Adam Stack (who, along with Maury Birdwell, supported Caldwell and Honnold during their effort), the CDUL is a hiking-climbing linkup that roughly follows the continental divide from Mt. Meeker, on the southern side of Rocky Mountain National Park to Notchtop, on the northern side—climbing as many technical routes as possible along the way. In practice this means hiking some 35 miles, gaining 20,000 feet of elevation, summiting 17 peaks, and simul-climbing 11 individual free routes with difficulties ranging from 5.6 to scary 5.11.

Honnold and Caldwell took an ultra-running approach to the climb, setting off on the morning of July 17, 2020, with running shorts, running packs, ultralight harnesses, a minimal rack, and a 6mm tagline with “dynamic properties.” (The Edelrid Rap Line’s static sheath breaks in the event of a fall, exposing a dynamic core that can theoretically catch a falling climber. Caldwell trusted it. Honnold did not.) They made good time through most of the day, but ran into trouble when they missed a late afternoon food and gear rendezvous. The person with the resupply bailed due to altitude sickness).

Without the resupply, they found themselves woefully under-equipped for a long cold night of climbing above 12,000 feet. But they went for it, without food or warm clothes, guiding themselves with light from their phones. As Honnold puts it in his highly entertaining AAC writeup: “Needless to say, down-soloing 5.6 in the dark, at 13,000’, with a cold wind and only running shorts and light raincoats, was character-building.”

Eventually they rendezvoused with Adam Stack, who had food and clothes, but it wasn’t enough to keep Caldwell from hitting what Honnold called a “personal low” 26 hours into the effort. While Caldwell vomited multiple times and even suggested they stop for a nap, Honnold (according to Tommy) remained frustratingly “steady and high spirited as always.”

They ultimately finished in 36 hours. Amazingly, a pair of Colorado crazies repeated the CDUL in 2021. My colleague Anthony Walsh wrote an excellent article about it.

2022: Honnold’s Ultimate Red Rock Traverse—a.k.a. The HURT

Inspired by Tommy Caldwell’s vision for the CDUL in Rocky Mountain National Park, Honnold began planning a similar traverse in his own backyard. His goal: to tag all 23 major sandstone summits on the Red Rock Canyon skyline by free soloing up (and in some cases down) classic moderates and scrambling through the maze-like canyons that separate them—all in a single supported push.

Since Red Rock’s steep and complicated sandstone canyons are full of featureless clifflines, too-many species of vicious cacti, and perilously shifting dirt slopes, preparing for the HURT involved significant reconnaissance, but he ultimately settled on an itinerary that involved 35 miles of hiking, 23 summits, 24,000 feet of elevation gain, and 14 routes (amounting to 126 standard pitches) from 5.6 to 5.10+.

He set out on the morning of Tuesday, October 11, and spent the day soloing in his approach shoes, reaching one resupply an hour and a half ahead of schedule and keeping his support team on their toes. He didn’t bother donning rock shoes until his 10th route, a 1,000-foot 5.8 sandbag Crimson Chrysalis, which he climbed at sunset, three hours ahead of schedule. Four hours later, however, as he was about to head up Inti Watana (the sandbagged 2,000-foot 5.10c that is the HURT’s hardest route), he admitted to being “kinda tired.” And nine hours after that, at the base of his final route, Epinephrine (5.9; 1,600ft), he felt so destroyed that Peter Mortimer, filming the effort for Reel Rock, didn’t want to see him surge ropeless up yet another skyscraping rock climb.

As Maury Birdwell recounted in his feature story about the HURT, Mortimer urged Honnold to call it quits. “Alex, why keep going?” he said. “This is already a massive accomplishment and super proud. And you get to decide what this is. So by stopping now you aren’t coming up short of anything.”

But Alex just gave Mortimer a disdainful look and replied that “there’s a value to picking a goal, and doing what you said you would do, not just quitting when it’s hard.”

Setting the situation’s dangerous element aside, there’s a little bit of learning there for all of us.

Timeless: a Ridiculous number of 5.13s—and other fun stats.

As of November 2023, and according to his 8a.nu, Honnold has done 728 5.13s and 132 5.14s, which is (1) a pretty impressive quantity of hard climbing, and (2) very much incomplete. He logged his first 5.13 on 8a.nu in 2005 (an onsight of Cowering, a Peter Croft 5.13a in the Owen’s River Gorge)—by which point he’d been climbing the grade for several years. More fun stats: 181 5.13 onsights. 73 5.13 flashes. Six 5.14c’s. One 5.14d. Hardest boulder: V12.