Climbing’s Newest Social Media “Star” is Going Viral for Free Soloing

Lincoln Knowles says he is “free soloing a harder route every day” until he falls. Why are we watching?

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Lincoln Knowles free solos "Crescendo' (5.9) in Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah. (Photo: Bruce Wilson/Three Peak Films)

I found Lincoln Knowles through an Instagram post. The floppy-haired 21-year-old was dancing to the rap song “Young Black & Rich” on the edge of a cliff, mimicking a Sumatran child who recently went viral for dancing on the prow of a racing boat. A text overlay read: “When you just got the first free solo ascent of the longest sport climb in America (1900’) but you’re still not sponsored so you have to aura farm for $.”

Like an up-and-coming OnlyFans model, Knowles provided his Venmo in the caption. Over 80,000 people had liked the post, but I found myself instantly irritated. Who is this clown? He wants me to send him money… for free soloing?

“No one is Venmo’ing you for that bro,” I wrote. In the days that followed, my comment racked up a measly four likes. Meanwhile, the top comment on the post (4,300 likes and counting), gushed that Knowles was “coming for alex honnold’s title for free soloing icon.” Was I missing something?

The line Knowles soloed, Squawstruck (5.11b), is certainly a contender for longest bolted route in the United States. It’s also fairly sustained in its difficulty—22 pitches, predominantly mid-range 5.10—but it has just one 5.11 pitch, and multiple opportunities to bail by traversing. In other words, it’s not exactly the sort of effort that most serious free soloists would brag about online.

Bragging about free soloing online, however, is exactly what Lincoln Knowles does for a living.

A deeply unhealthy approach

Lincoln Knowles has become infamous for his Instagram and YouTube pages, which include videos such as “DRUNK BOULDERING (banned from gym),” “free soloing buildings until I get arrested” (he doesn’t), and a campaign to “free solo a harder route every day until I fall.” (The most recent video in the latter series was Squawstruck, and was posted around five weeks ago. So if he’s still alive, that means Knowles free soloed a 5.17c today. Congratulations!)

At first glance, it’s hard to understand what draws viewers to this type of video. Do people really want to see him fall? Possibly. Right now, Knowles is one of the most viral figures in climbing media. His Instagram has over 70,000 followers, some of his posts have over 150,000 likes, and his YouTube channel, “Knowles and Company,” has racked up more than 13 million views.

When I called Knowles up, he told me he didn’t mind that I’d poked fun at him online, telling me that my reaction was kind of the point. He sees his online presence as a character, designed not to reflect his actual personality, but to garner engagement. “It started with pure rage-baiting,” he said. “Now, it’s evolved to, like, half rage-baiting and half shock value.” Knowles even makes fun of himself on many of his own posts, like a troll alter-ego, by commenting using his personal account, @lincoln.knowles.

When I asked Knowles about his “Free Soloing a Harder Grade Until I Fall” videos, he was reluctant to admit he was joking. “It’s kind of an excuse to push my solo grade in a way that is structured,” he said, “and… also try to make money.”

Rock climbing’s post-COVID explosion—coupled with the rise of self-made content creators on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram—has given us a fresh breed of climber: the in-your-face swaggerer, the spawn of the chronically online age. These new figures, like Knowles, have managed to eschew the barriers of traditional media and sponsorship. Instead, they hand-deliver their exploits to the masses without a filter.

In many ways, the new system has democratized the path to fame and fortune. If you’re savvy enough to create the type of content people want to see, you can give the middle finger to brands, magazines, and other age-old gatekeepers of the spotlight. You don’t even have to climb hard. You just have to make videos that people enjoy watching, and your fans can finance your exploits. Knowles does have some traditional sponsors, but supplements his income with a crowd-funded Patreon and video ad revenue. “I want to make money off of climbing,” he told me. “My end goal is to climb as my job, and however I can get there is fine with me.”

Knowles is also using his newfound fame on social media to pressure himself to climb harder: “If I didn’t have this external pressure [from Instagram followers] to keep upping my soloing grade, maybe I would just have stopped at 5.10b,” he told me. “Basically, I have this challenge that holds me accountable, where I have to keep soloing harder.” When I pointed out that such an aggressive soloing diet would likely end in near-term death, he shrugged me off. “You’ll have to subscribe to my Patreon to find out.”

At this point in our call, I began to feel a bit sorry for Lincoln Knowles. I also began to wonder if I was simply missing something, because I’m not a free soloist. So I hit up someone who might understand. I called Alex Honnold.

“This is, like, everything I hate about influencer culture,” Honnold said after I shared Knowles’s account with him and he scrolled through the posts. He admitted that he could relate to the impulse to continuously up the ante and shock factor as a young climber, but added that when he was a young soloist, in the pre-social media era, it had been easier to compartmentalize. “That outside pressure influenced my soloing as well,” Honnold said. “It will always factor in, but by posting on social media, you’re putting it on steroids.”

When I asked Honnold about Knowles’s idea to use social media to pressure himself to continue soloing harder routes, he was frank. “That is a deeply unhealthy approach to free soloing,” he said. “Free soloing is always a deeply personal experience, because the consequences are always death.” Ultimately, he said that it comes down to motivation, making sure the urge to free solo is intrinsic, not coming from some external catalyst. “Part of that is parsing out anything that could affect your motivations, that could push you physically or psychologically beyond what you’re comfortable with,” Honnold explained.

But in the end, he was reluctant to judge. “I’m sure there were old climbers when I was coming on the scene that thought, ‘That guy’s sketch,’” he admitted. “With a young person, you want to give them the leeway to find themselves and grow up a little, doing what they love to do.”

My question is this: What is it that Lincoln Knowles loves to do? Is it going free soloing? Is it rock climbing at all? Or is it posting videos of himself, making money, or something else?

Is Knowles’s online persona unprecedented, or a logical next step?

Climbing has attracted devil-may-care figures for generations. For the Stonemasters of the 1970s, drugs, alcohol, and a general disregard for safety were often part-and-parcel to the climbing experience. It’s easy to cast these soloists of the past in a gentler light, compared to a self-aggrandizing social media soloist like Knowles. But it’s largely the landscape that’s changed, not the figures that are attracted to it.

Old-school figures like Tobin Sorenson and John Yablonski, and even more recent soloists, like Peter Croft, Dean Potter, and Honnold—could not share their exploits immediately with the masses, at least not without the helping hand of a sponsor or media outlet. To give Tobin Sorenson props on a solo, someone would have had to literally walk up to him in Camp 4, or mail him a letter. Knowles, by contrast, can post a video mid-free solo, and 100 people will tell him “good job” before he’s finished the next pitch.

Knowles is far from the only free soloist trying to make a name for himself using social media. When I stumbled across his profile, I was immediately reminded of self-taught ice climber Eugene Vahin, who also posted “rage-bait” on Instagram under the moniker @take_a_course. Vahin died in a fall earlier this year.

Other still-living free soloists have managed to integrate their exploits into a social presence with great success, like Alain Robert. Robert put down a string of audacious 5.13+ free solos in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before switching to a career climbing skyscrapers. Although he primarily posts old footage from his heyday, Robert’s Instagram following has soared from a few hundred thousand to over 1.5 million since the pandemic.

Looking for some perspective on Knowles, I also chatted with 24-year-old Alexis Landot, another urban soloist who also makes a living posting online. “From a business point of view, what Lincoln is doing is working,” Landot told me. “No doubt. He’s getting a lot of haters, but haters are always good, if you can manage it. From a personal point of view, I don’t know. He’s playing a character.” Though only a few years older than Knowles, Landot has given TEDx Talks, been profiled by Esquire, and generally kept his image out of the gutter. His social media is still filled with clickbait titles like, “I slipped and almost fell while free climbing [a] skyscraper!” but he avoids content designed to enrage, and instead focuses on scary or shocking footage.

Landot isn’t particularly proud of his online presence, but says it’s part of the game. “Have you seen my Facebook?” he joked. “It is so cringey.” He later explained, “I have two ropes, one in each hand. One is money, one is passion. Sometimes I pull more on one than the other, but I keep both in my hands.”

As a soloist, you want to be you

Knowles hasn’t been climbing for long. He grew up in the flatlands of Kansas City, Missouri, watched Free Solo when he was 13 years old, and began pulling plastic indoors two years later, at age 15. Within a year, he was taking trips to boulder outside at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch. It was around this time that he also started free soloing parking garages, churches, and other urban structures around Kansas City. He climbed his first multi-pitch at age 18, and has since moved to Salt Lake City for the climbing. Just a few weeks before we chatted, he sent his hardest redpoint, Machine Gun Funk (5.13a) in Colorado’s Clear Creek Canyon.

For as long as he’s been a climber, Knowles has also been a content creator. He dropped his first video, “Greek Gods Rap Video” in October 2018. But his early efforts were harmless skits. I grinned watching them, because they reminded me a lot of the home videos I made as a kid. “Greek Gods” shows a baby-faced Knowles and his friends dancing and rapping about Olympian deities. Another clip, “Double Diet Coke,” is a mockumercial for the soda brand.

But Knowles told me that around a year ago, he decided to blend his climbing with his YouTube and Instagram channels. His first videos documented roped climbs, but eventually he started filming his free solos. Then he began filming himself, selfie-style, mid route.

Honnold has famously (or infamously) filmed his own free solos in the past, but he said that in general, any integration of self-documentation and free soloing is “super sketchy.” He insists it’s different from having a third-party film you, because it requires you to think about two things at once—your climbing, and your videography.

Honnold is certainly no stranger to garnering fame and fortune for free soloing. He admitted that balancing motivations is a constant tightrope walk, but as an emerging climber, he said that instead of chasing fame, he strove to “do rad stuff” he found personally inspiring, and let the fame come to him. “My motto has always been, if you do something cool enough, other people will come film you. You don’t need to film yourself.”

For Knowles, bringing a camera up the wall to film himself felt like a logical progression. “Most soloists just keep their shit private, and I agree with that to some extent, if you think that the camera is gonna mess you up,” he said. “But also if you have a job you hate, and you’re soloing every day, doing things that the average person would think of as incredible and amazing—I don’t understand why you wouldn’t try to at least attempt to monetize it.”

It’s difficult to determine exactly how much risk Knowles is taking. His videos are often heavily edited and feature intentionally misleading titles and claims. In one video, he claims to be “trying a V10 dyno,” on what’s clearly not V10. In another, he shotguns a beer, chucks the can on the ground, and says he’s going to free solo a 5.11, but never gets more than 10 feet off the ground. Then there’s the “free soloing a harder route every day” series, which for obvious reasons, hasn’t actually occurred.

To Honnold, this is the biggest issue with Knowles; his Internet presence is so drenched in irony that it’s hard to parse what’s real and what’s not. In a word, he’s fake. “Posting as a character, it’s sketchy,” Honnold said. “As a soloist, you want to be you. You want to be honest with your motivations, your intentions, and all the things you’re doing. I make a real effort so that what you see in the media is exactly what you get in real life. It’s just me. Sometimes I’m scared. Sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I send, sometimes I don’t. But it’s all honest.” Landot agreed. “As long as you’re always being honest, you’re not setting a good or bad example,” he said. “You’re just showing the truth.”

All types of people interact with Knowles’s videos online. Many are rock climbers, and plenty discourage him. Others respond with gag-worthy ego stroking. Wrote one crooning fan: “Everyone is saying stop cause they are too cowardly to witness greatness born from passion.” Another: “Free soloist here. This is literally the mood.” Many of these followers, as corny as they are, appear somewhat familiar with rock climbing, at least enough so to realize free soloing is not standard practice, or an “entry-level” discipline.

But for others, Knowles is their first exposure to climbing, and his content appears to set a dangerous precedent. “I’m here in Utah looking to get into free soloing, any recommendations?” asked one follower on Instagram, as though referencing pottery or woodworking, a hobby one might dabble in. “What does ‘free solo’ mean for those of us that don’t know a thing about climbing?” wrote another.

For some new climbers, Knowles may be an introduction to rock climbing, and like all of us, he has his own heroes. He told me he was inspired by the famous soloists that have come before him: Peter Croft, Brad Gobright, and Honnold, to name a few, even though he’s aware “they probably disagree with most of my principles.”

“I try not to idolize anyone,” Knowles told me. Later, when I asked him if he’d ever interacted with Honnold, he said, “I don’t really want to meet him for a long time, because he holds this place in my head where he’s a fictional version of himself, and if I meet him, then it’s like shattering the illusion, you know?” “I dunno,” I said. “That sounds a lot like idolization.” Knowles laughed.

In many ways, Knowles reminds me of a child kicked out of the huddle at recess, clamoring to get in and play with the big kids, no matter the cost. “@enormocast [Chris Kalous] blocked me,” he told me at one point during our conversation. “I guess he just didn’t like my reels. @tradprincess [Mary Catherine Eden], she blocked me, too!”

“It especially hurts when I see Enormocast blocked me, because I like Chris’s podcast so much,” he admitted. “I hope one day I can go on there and have him grill me. I feel like he would have the best questions.”

(Ouch.)

It’s clear that Knowles is proud of the hate he receives and proud of being blocked by well-known climbers, but also sort of embarrassed. “A lot of climbers want social media following, but they don’t want to sell out to get it,” he added. “That’s kind of what I did. It’s easy for me to complain about not being taken seriously, but it’s definitely my fault for portraying myself this way.”

Worm food and legacy

From getting to know Knowles, it’s clear that, like many free soloists, he clings to an absurdist, and perhaps existentialist, view of life. We could die any second, and nothing really matters. Life’s short, and has no inherent meaning.

I tend to agree. Life has no meaning except what we give it.

So if Knowles and his followers have made it this far into this essay, let’s gather around and take a knee. Life is short. We will be worm food eventually. Maybe in 30 years, maybe tomorrow. Selling out a little bit to make ends meet is fine, but when you go splat, all the Instagram and YouTube cash in the world doesn’t do much except pay for a nice casket. What’s left? Legacy.

So, Lincoln, dude. You have a platform. You’ve got tens of thousands of eyes on you, maybe hundreds of thousands. A lot of them are clearly new climbers. Surely you have more to offer the world than “rage bait and shock value.”

I started climbing at age 11, introduced to our sport first by John Long’s writing about the Yosemite Valley heyday, and later classic tomes like Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna and Tom Horbein’s Everest: The West Ridge. Being introduced to climbing through these mediums impressed upon me that climbing was about more than being strong or agile. (If that’s what you’re after, try weightlifting or gymnastics.) Climbing was about more than being fearless, too. (If you want that, play Russian roulette.)

What I learned, before I ever tied into a route or stood on a summit, was that if I wanted to be a climber, I didn’t just need strength and tenacity, but integrity. I learned that climbing was about what you did and how you behaved in the wildest, most remote reaches of the planet—when no one was watching. I learned that climbing was about breaking trail and leading by example. That it required courage that was quiet, not loud. That it was about downplaying hard, scary things, not hyping them up.

I will always be grateful that this was how I was introduced to our sport. I’m grateful I’m not a kid today, scrolling Instagram, being introduced to climbing by Lincoln Knowles.