Alex Honnold talks about climbing Yosemite's granite walls without ropes, living in a van to climb full-time, and why soloing matters to him. He describes his ideal route as massive, clean vertical granite with a single line. Any fall is fatal, but the appeal is being surrounded by air and untouched scenery few experience.
The question I get the most is probably, do you feel fear? Have you ever been afraid? What's the closest you've ever come to death? They're boring. I think my favorite place to be in the world is probably Yosemite. This is the only place that I consistently come back to every season. Big sweeping views, just that epic scale. I'm here to photograph the grandeur of Yosemite. I live in a van because it's pretty much the only way to climb full-time. You know, I would love having a bathroom, I'd love having a shower, I'd love being able to stand up, but you know, those are things that I'm willing to live with to climb in different areas all year round. Hiking to the base of whatever route that I'm gonna solo, that's sort of the time that I really have to reflect on what I'm doing and how I feel. That gives you a lot of time to really think like, okay, am I really psyched for this? Like, am I ready? To me, the perfect route is a humongous wall of like perfect vertical clean granite with one potential way of climbing it. And that's actually why I love Yosemite so much, because that's basically what the climbing here is. The route is called Heaven because it's the most amazing point in Yosemite. It's like one of the most severe routes that you'll ever climb. I suppose the defining thing about free soloing is that it's just so much higher consequence than other climbing because you have no rope, you have no backup, you have no protection. If you fell anywhere past the middle of the route, you'd bounce all the way down to the valley floor. Part of the appeal in soloing big walls to me is to be in this cool position where there's a lot of air around you and to be in this amazing place that hardly anybody gets to go. If I didn't appreciate that position, what would the point in going up there be? I have a website because I need a way to put myself forward in my own way rather than in the way that the media portrays me. If somebody just casually browses my website, I hope they'd get a sense of the beauty of the places that I get to go climbing. I'm Alex Honnold, and this is my Squarespace.
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