Alex Honnold has free-soloed El Capitan, completing a ropeless ascent of the legendary California cliff in just under four hours on Saturday morning, making the summit in time for breakfast.
The 31-year-old rock climber is the first to achieve the feat and indeed was regarded as the only climber capable of attempting it.
After completing the climb, Honnold tweeted: “So stoked to realize a life dream today”, including a photo of himself ascending along a wide crack near the top of the route.
“This is the ‘moon landing’ of free-soloing,” fellow climber Tommy Caldwell told National Geographic, which filmed the ascent for a documentary and first carried the news on its website.
Caldwell won fame outside the climbing world for his 2015 ascent with Kevin Jorgeson of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall route, setting a new standard of difficulty on the Yosemite valley cliff.
Free-soloing is the practice of climbing without a harness or rope, leaving zero margin for error. The route Honnold climbed, known as Freerider, is 2,900ft tall and near the top of the ratings system for difficulty, at 5.12d (6b UK).
At multiple points on the route, Honnold was obliged to make off-balance moves on widely spaced holds the width of raisins, with hundreds, and then thousands, of feet of air beneath him.
Honnold’s preparation for the exploit was the subject of rumor even as it was written off as impossibly daunting and risky. The Sacramento native, who has repeatedly shocked the climbing world with ropeless ascents of forbidding routes, had been discreetly training for the route for more than a year.
Honnold backed off of an earlier attempt at a free-solo, last November, after judging conditions to be suboptimal. He most recently climbed the route with a rope, and Caldwell as partner, on a Monday late last month.
“Alex was on fire,” Caldwell told National Geographic of the ascent. “I’ve never seen him climbing so well.”
Describing his preparations, Honnold said he had expanded his “comfort zone” until he was ready to commit to the route.
“Years ago, when I first mentally mapped out what it would mean to free-solo Freerider, there were half a dozen of pitches where I was like: ‘Oh, that’s a scary move and that’s a really scary sequence, and that little slab, and that traverse,’” Honnold told National Geographic.
“There were so many little sections where I thought ‘Ugh – cringe.’ But in the years since, I’ve pushed my comfort zone and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seemed totally crazy eventually fell within the realm of the possible.”
Honnold’s historic ascent began with the first hint of dawn at 5.32am on Saturday. He reached the top three hours and 56 minutes later, at 9.28am. Most roped ascents of El Capitan take hours, days, or longer.
The route was first ascended by a climber pulling only on stone – as opposed to pulling on gear drilled or cantilevered into the stone – in 1995, by the German climber Alex Huber. Huber wore a harness and was attached to ropes that would have caught him had he fallen. For much of its length, Freerider follows the Salathe Wall route, which was established in 1961 by the wall-climbing pioneer Royal Robbins, who died in March.
Honnold grew up in Sacramento and began climbing in the local training gym at age 11. He dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley, where he had been studying engineering, at age 19, to commit to his climbing career.
His previous exploits have been widely documented. One of his corporate sponsors, North Face, produced a 2014 film of his free-solo of the 2,500ft El Sendero Luminoso in Mexico. A National Geographic film crew captured Honnold’s revolutionary 2011 free-solo of the north-west face of Half Dome, in Yosemite, including a hair-raising moment of truth near the top in which Honnold struggled, uncharacteristically, to keep his cool.
As his stature in the climbing world and beyond has grown over the last decade, Honnold has maintained an itinerant lifestyle, living in a converted van and traveling the world. His training for Freerider took him to Europe, Morocco and China, according to National Geographic. The climbers who trained with him were sworn to secrecy about the project.
