Alex Honnold likes to seek out the difficult things in life and make them look easy. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Alex Honnold is a living legend. He famously free soloed El Cap. He holds the speed record on The Nose of El Capitan. He’s an Oscar winner, and on top of all that, he’s a staunch environmental advocate. He’s in a bit of a new era, though — one his sponsor Black Diamond calls his “trad dad era.”
“But don’t let that fool you,” Black Diamond wrote. “The guy can still crank. Remember, this is the same dude who would casually onsight 5.13 splitters in the desert as a burgeoning youth before he became the Oscar-winning superstar he is today.”
In the short film you see here, Honnold, along with Carlo Traversi and Nik Berry, bushwhacked their way up to a relatively unknown splitter at the top of the mountains near Lake Tahoe.
“Today we are trying to check out this crack,” Honnold said. “I don’t even know if it has a name. The east face of the whatever. It’s some 13b finger crack that’s way up at the top of that mountain. We’ll see what it’s all about… we’ll see if we can find it. If not, we’re going nature hiking.”
They did find what they were looking for, but it wasn’t easy. The climb itself, of course, was much harder than the bushwhacking.
“You basically have to do like 10 moves of extreme pain to get this one hold,” he laughed. “… It’s not that hard physically, but it’s pretty painful.”
Honnold is the most famous climber on Earth, not that you’d know it from meeting him. For a guy who casually taunts death, he’s surprisingly humble. I spoke with him over Zoom late in 2024 to chat about an expedition he did called Arctic Ascent
“I think we’re more similar than you might think,” he told me when I asked him about his motivation and whether he feels frightened before embarking on an attempt like the one in Arctic Ascent. “When I look at something like that, I’m also intimidated by it. We’re sort of awed by it. I mean, I’m an experienced climber, so I see that it’s possible, but I think that for me part of the pleasure is to look at something that seems so daunting like that, and then to actually be able to achieve it. You take something that seems impossible and then, through a long period of hard work and effort, make it possible. It’s not like I look at it and am like, ‘Oh, that looks trivial.’ I look at it, I’m like, ‘wow, that’s really intimidating.’ I like finding things that are right in that sweet spot where it’s challenging enough to be daunting, but still possible, hopefully.”
