Alex Honnold

The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life
by Mark Synnott
Published 5 Mar 2019

© Jared Ogden From left to right: Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Alex Honnold on the approach to Low’s Gully on Mount Kinabalu in Borneo. © Mark Synnott A young Alex Honnold on the flanks of Mount Kinabalu. This was Honnold’s first international climbing expedition. © Mark Synnott Jimmy Chin on the wall in Borneo. Low’s Gully, which drops 10,000 vertical feet over six miles, is visible below him. © Mark Synnott Sandstone towers on the Ennedi Plateau in Chad. The author led the first climbing expedition to this area in 2010. The team, which included Alex Honnold and James Pearson, climbed the first ascents of twenty towers, leaving thousands more for future generations of climbers

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Like most climbers, I had an unwritten list of the people who seemed to be pushing it too hard—and Alex Honnold was at the top. By the time I met him, most of the other folks on my list had already met an early demise (and the rest weren’t far behind). I liked Alex, and it didn’t seem like there were many people willing to call him out, so I felt okay playing the role of father figure. And Alex didn’t seem to mind. In fact, it seemed as though he enjoyed engaging me on the topic of risk, and he climbed over my arguments with the same skill and flair with which he dispatched finger cracks and overhangs. What it all came down to was that for Alex Honnold, a life lived less than fully is a fate worse than dying young.

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With its vaulted ceilings, large stained-glass windows, and wooden pews, the Great Hall felt like a place of worship, which it was up until the 1990s, when the Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist sold its church to a group of civic-minded Seattleites. The Great Hall can seat more than eight hundred people, and it was packed. Sanni sat in the middle of a row toward the back. Her friend, an avid climber, had asked her if she wanted to go to see Alex Honnold. “Who?” Sanni had just started climbing in September in a local gym called Vertical World and had never heard of Alex Honnold or any other professional climbers. * * * — TOWARD THE END OF THE PROGRAM, a man stood up and said, “Several years ago you mentioned that one of your primary motivators for soloing Half Dome was to get more attention from women.

Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure
by Alex Honnold and David Roberts
Published 2 Nov 2015

During the filming, Logan, producer Jeff Newton, and the rest of the CBS crew were both charmed and befuddled by Alex’s lingo and his erratic behavior. So much so that they produced a 60 Minutes Overtime pastiche of outtakes, titled “Dude: The Quirky World of Alex Honnold.” The subhead read: “For 60 Minutes producer Jeff Newton, shooting Alex Honnold’s death-defying rock climbing was only part of the challenge. Jeff and the whole crew also had to learn Alex-speak, where everything is ‘chill.’ ” The amusing clip focuses on Alex’s possible overuse of four of his then-favorite words: dude, chill (both verb and adjective), heinous, and mellow.

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See also Moonlight Buttress, Zion National Park, Utah Honnold’s free soloing three routes in, ref1 Virgin River, ref1, ref2 West Temple area, ref1 First published 2015 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York This electronic edition published 2015 by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-1-4472-8267-9 Copyright © Alex Honnold and David Roberts, 2015 The right of Alex Honnold and David Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third party websites referred to in or on this book.

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He is also the founder of the Honnold Foundation, an environmental not-for-profit charity that seeks simple, sustainable ways to improve lives around the world. David Roberts is co-author, with Conrad Anker, of The Lost Explorer, about the discovery of George Mallory’s body on Mount Everest. His most recent book is Alone on the Ice (Norton, 2013). ALONE ON THE WALL Alex Honnold with David Roberts MACMILLAN To my family, for always supporting me along an unconventional path Contents CHAPTER ONE MOONLIGHT CHAPTER TWO A VERY PRIVATE HELL CHAPTER THREE FEAR AND LOVING IN LAS VEGAS CHAPTER FOUR WORLD TRAVELER CHAPTER FIVE TRIPLE PLAY CHAPTER SIX THE SPEED RECORD CHAPTER SEVEN ALASKA AND SENDERO CHAPTER EIGHT FITZ CHAPTER NINE ABOVE AND BEYOND Author’s Note Acknowledgments Index CHAPTER ONE MOONLIGHT I started up the climb shortly after dawn.

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
by Anna Lembke
Published 24 Aug 2021

In The Works of Thomas Sydenham, M.D., on Acute and Chronic Diseases, 254. London, 1783. https://books.google.com/books?id=iSxsAAAA-MAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 2. Synnott, Mark. “How Alex Honnold Made the Ultimate Climb without a Rope.” National Geographic online. Accessed July 8, 2020. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/02/alex-honnold-made-ultimate-climb-el-capitan-without-rope. Synnott, Mark. The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life. New York: Dutton, 2018. Taussig, Helen B. “ ‘Death’ from Lightning and the Possibility of Living Again.” American Scientist 57, no. 3 (1969): 306–16.

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“ice cooler to cool my core down”: Kate Knibbs, “All the Gear an Ultramarathoner Legend Brings with Him on the Trail,” Gizmodo, October 29, 2015, https://gizmodo.com/all-the-gear-an-ultramarathon-legend-brings-with-him-on-1736088954. “memorizing thousands of intricate hand and foot sequences”: Mark Synnott, “How Alex Honnold Made the Ultimate Climb without a Rope,” National Geographic online, accessed July 8, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/02/alex-honnold-made-ultimate-climb-el-capitan-without-rope. “Overtraining syndrome”: Jeffrey B. Kreher and Jennifer B. Schwartz, “Overtraining Syndrome: A Practical Guide,” Sports Health 4, no. 2 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1177/1941738111434406.

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“I almost can’t believe how different my life is now. I’m less on guard. I don’t have to preplan so much to avoid interacting with people. I can get on a crowded train now and not be late for work because I wait for the next one, and the one after that. I actually enjoy meeting people I’ll never see again.” * * * — Alex Honnold, now world-famous for climbing the face of Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes, was found to have below-normal amygdala activation during brain imaging. For most of us, the amygdala is an area of the brain that lights up in an fMRI machine when we look at scary pictures. The researchers who studied Honnold’s brain speculated that he was born with less innate fear than others, which in turn allowed him, they hypothesized, to accomplish superhuman climbing feats.

The Push: A Climber's Search for the Path
by Tommy Caldwell
Published 15 May 2017

Perhaps the answer lay in focusing more on ultra-endurance climbs. I’d always loved those challenges—things like my first trip to Patagonia, my linkup of two free routes on El Cap in a day, and even Kyrgyzstan—and it’s a style that seemed the most natural to me. • • • In 2008, a lanky kid named Alex Honnold came seemingly out of nowhere and blew the lid off the climbing world with two big wall free solos that were taller, harder, and more committing than anything done before: the Moonlight Buttress in Zion, Utah, and the Northwest Face of Half Dome in Yosemite. These two climbs, and many others in the years since, represented a paradigm shift in the high-stakes game of free soloing.

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I have to do all I can to make certain that it won’t be me, that I won’t leave the two of them alone to grapple with the why. Becca takes my rough, scabbed hand and squeezes it. My face flushes. I wonder if she would love me the way she does if I were a different man, someone whose mind didn’t burn with the desire to travel through barren landscapes. • • • After Alex Honnold and I did our big free climbing linkup in Yosemite, I started to wonder what it would be like to take those speed-climbing tactics to Patagonia. Generations of climbers had talked about—and some had even tried—a futuristic project: enchaining the major spires of the Fitz Roy skyline in a continuous, multiday push.

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Most of the deaths happen to people who either don’t know what they are doing or are being reckless. We will be careful, I promise.” Even as I listened to these words escape my mouth I knew I wasn’t being completely honest with myself or with Becca. I think that what rattled her the most was that my partner was going to be Alex Honnold. He was famous for his cavalier view of risk, and Becca knew he wasn’t going to tighten up his program just because he was climbing with a father. She was right about everything. I didn’t know what to think, what to do. But God, how I love places like Patagonia. Climbing is about personal discovery, fulfilling your own wants.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

That’s why predicting limits is so difficult—because we’re about to be able to take control of the one aspect of performance that trumps all others.” ALEX HONNOLD AND HALF DOME If we do want to take a stab at predicting future limits, one place to turn is the sport of rock climbing. While most of action and adventure sports didn’t become “extreme” until the early 1990s and skateboarding, our earlier example, not until 2002 (when Danny Way introduced the MegaRamp), rock climbers began free soloing (no ropes, you fall, you die) in the 1970s. This means that their knowledge base and baseline for reality got tipped toward the impossible a little ahead of the general action and adventure sports curve. In other words, meet Alex Honnold. Alex Honnold started climbing at indoor gyms in 1996, when he was eleven years old.

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“anyone with a bum knee”: Ibid. 182 five times the speed of Moore’s Law: Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Free Press, 2011). 183 meet Alex Honnold: Honnold quotes and details came from a series of interviews conducted by the author between March 2013 and July 2013. Peter Croft and Dean Potter: Douglas MacDonald, “Astroman and Rostrum Free-Solo,” Climbing.com. See: http://www.climbing.com/news/astroman-and-rostrum-free-solo. “When you talk about what the next”: Jimmy Chin, AI, March 2013. 186 first person in history to solo Half Dome: “NG LIVE!: Free Soloing with Alex Honnold,” National Geographic Live. See: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/specials/nat-geo-live-specials/chin-bonus-nglive.

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To put Honnold’s accomplishment in different terms, when talking about Tom Schaar and his MegaRamp 1080, most feel his youth is more astounding than the leap forward in progression. The general reaction is “Sure, that’s amazing, but just imagine what Schaar’s going to be able to do when he’s twenty.” Alex Honnold is the answer to that question. He’s climbing’s version of Tom Schaar, only all grown up. He was born into a world where both his baseline for reality and his spectrum for possibility were a quantum leap forward from the previous generation and he took full advantage. Isaac Newton wasn’t wrong.

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization
by Scott Barry Kaufman
Published 6 Apr 2020

Curiosity about people: The development of a social curiosity measure in adults. Journal of Personality Assessment, 87(3), 305–16. 24. 60 Minutes (2011, December 27). The ascent of Alex Honnold. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-ascent-of-alex-honnold-27-12-2011/. 25. Synnott, M. (2015). Legendary climber Alex Honnold shares his closest call. National Geographic. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/adventure-blog/2015/12/30/ropeless-climber-alex-honnolds-closest-call. 26. Synnott, Legendary climber Alex Honnold shares his closest call. 27. Chen, C., Burton, M., Greenberger, E., & Dmitrieva, J. (1999). Population migration and the variation of dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) allele frequencies around the globe.

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Population migration and the variation of dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) allele frequencies around the globe. Evolution and Human Behavior, 20(5), 309–324. 28. Synnott, Legendary climber Alex Honnold shares his closest call. 29. wwwAAASorg. (2018, April 5). Alex Honnold’s amygdala: Analyzing a thrill-seeker’s brain [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib7SS49Kk-o. 30. Zuckerman, M. (2009). Sensation seeking. In M. R. Leary & R. H. Hoyle (Eds.). Handbook of individual differences in social behavior (pp. 455–465). New York/London: Guilford Press. 31. Bjork, J. M., Knutson, B., & Hommer, D.

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This could include making a new friend, engaging in new discussions, volunteering for a new organization, or even trying out a new dance club.22 Greater exposure to new social situations and with a greater range of different people and ideas provides a wealth of learning opportunities.23 Taken together, social curiosity and the drive to engage in novel social experiences comprise the need for social exploration, an important form of exploration for growth and learning among such a social species as human beings. ADVENTURE SEEKING Alex Honnold is self-described as a “professional adventure rock climber.” Sometimes referred to by others as Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold, he has been free soloing—climbing without any ropes, harnesses, or protective equipment—some of America’s biggest cliffs for the past twelve years, and on June 3, 2017, Honnold finally achieved his lifelong dream of free soloing the nearly three-thousand-foot El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery
by Mark Synnott
Published 14 Apr 2025

The boat swung in a light breeze, and as I stared out toward the mouth of the bay, listening to Hampton’s voice, I kept circling around a question that had begun to crowd out all other thoughts in my mind: Where to next? By this point, I had poured myself into sailing for fifteen years, and my apprenticeship was close to complete. In my first book, The Impossible Climb, I’d written about my old friend and climbing partner Alex Honnold and his 2017 free solo ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite. When people asked for his autograph, he often appended it with the words “Go Big!” And now, I decided, it was time for me to find my own El Capitan. On that fated second date, Hampton and I had hatched a dream to circumnavigate the globe under sail.

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After weeks of living in what we called “mud world,” we were camped in portaledges hanging about seven hundred feet up the wall in a driving rainstorm. Everyone was soaked and demoralized, and I thought we had given up on trying to find that damn frog, when I saw Renan and a Venezuelan climber named Federico “Fuco” Pisani gearing up for one last search. It was well after dark when Alex Honnold and I watched them set off across a narrow, vegetated ledge, and I noticed that they were not carrying a rope. Renan told me later that he was following Fuco, filming with a camera in one hand, clutching clumps of vegetation with the other, as the frogs, invisible to the eye, chirped all around them.

Hedge Fund Market Wizards
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 24 Apr 2012

HG4621.H27 2012 332.64’524—dc23 2012004861 With love to my wife, Jo Ann, the best thing that ever happened to me (I know because she tells me so, and she has never been wrong) Lara Logan: Do you feel the adrenaline at all? Alex Honnold: There is no adrenaline rush. . . . If I get a rush, it means that something has gone horribly wrong. . . . The whole thing should be pretty slow and controlled. . . . —Excerpt of 60 Minutes interview (October 10, 2011) with Alex Honnold, acknowledged to be the best free-soloing climber in the world, whose extraordinary feats include the first free-solo climb up the northwest face of Half Dome, a 2,000-foot wall in Yosemite National Park To do my vacuum cleaner, I built 5,127 prototypes.

Lonely Planet Mongolia (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet , Trent Holden , Adam Karlin , Michael Kohn , Adam Skolnick and Thomas O'Malley
Published 1 Jul 2018

If you fancy a full-day hike, an experienced driver can pick you up on the other side of the gorge, roughly 8km away, but be careful, the footing is quite slippery in places. Along the way to and from the gorge, you'll see herds of shaggy yaks and, if you're lucky, an ibex. Make sure to look out for white etchings on the rock walls – markings from ibex hooves scraping the face as they climb, like a four-legged Alex Honnold, to the ridge above. The surrounding hills offer opportunities for some fine, if strenuous, day hikes where more ibexes and argali sheep roam the ridge line. Before you leave, make sure to step into the small but interesting Yolyn Am Nature Museum ( GOOGLE MAP ; GPS: N 43°32.872', E 104°02.257'; What3Words: defrost.resampling.pavilions; T2000; h8am-8pm 1 Jun–20 Oct), where you'll peruse crystals, taxidermy of local fauna and a small collection of dinosaur eggs and other fossils discovered right here.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

The Soundtrack of Excellence As mentioned before, more than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed meditate in the mornings in some fashion. But what of the remaining 20%? Nearly all of them have meditation-like activities. One frequent pattern is listening to a single track or album on repeat, which can act as an external mantra for aiding focus and present-state awareness. Here are just a few examples: Alex Honnold, free solo climbing phenom: The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding and others: ambitones like The Zen Effect in the key of C for 30 minutes, made by Rolfe Kent, the composer of music for movies like Sideways, Wedding Crashers, and Legally Blonde Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, CEO of Automattic: “Everyday” by A$AP Rocky and “One Dance” by Drake Amelia Boone, the world’s most successful female obstacle course racer: “Tonight Tonight” by the Smashing Pumpkins and “Keep Your Eyes Open” by NEEDTOBREATHE Chris Young, mathematician and experimental chef: Paul Oakenfold’s “Live at the Rojan in Shanghai,” Pete Tong’s Essential Mix Jason Silva, TV and YouTube philosopher: “Time” from the Inception soundtrack by Hans Zimmer Chris Sacca: “Harlem Shake” by Baauer and “Lift Off” by Jay Z and Kanye West, featuring Beyoncé.