When Bachar was in his prime, El Capitan had still never been free climbed.
John Bachar, the greatest free soloist of the 1970s, who died while climbing un-roped in 2009 at age 52, never considered it. The other was Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015. One was Michael Reardon, a free soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. Free soloing is when a climber is alone and uses no ropes or any other equipment that aids or protects him as he climbs, leaving no margin of error.)Ĭlimbers have been speculating for years about a possible free solo of El Capitan, but there have only been two other people who have publicly said they seriously considered it. (What Caldwell and Jorgeson did is called free climbing, which means climbers use no gear to help them move up the mountain and are attached to ropes only to catch them if they fall. With free-soloing, obviously I know that I’m in danger, but feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping me in any way. “This is the ‘moon landing’ of free soloing,” said Tommy Caldwell, who made his own history in 2015 with his ascent of the Dawn Wall, El Capitan’s most difficult climb, on which he and his partner Kevin Jorgeson used ropes and other equipment only for safety, not to aid their progress. From the meadow at the foot of El Capitan, climbers on the peak’s upper reaches are practically invisible to the naked eye. It is a vertical expanse stretching more than a half mile up-higher than the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It’s hard to overstate the physical and mental difficulties of a free solo ascent of the peak, which is considered by many to be the epicenter of the rock climbing world. “It’s the most unnatural place for a human to be.”īut those pioneering climbs pale in comparison to El Capitan. “What Alex did on Moonlight Buttress defied everything that we are trained, and brought up and genetically engineered to think,” said Peter Mortimer, a climber who has made numerous films with Honnold. This past November, Honnold made his first attempt at the free solo, but backed off after less than an hour of climbing because conditions did not feel right. A small circle of friends and fellow climbers who knew about the project had been sworn to secrecy.Ī team of filmmakers, led by Jimmy Chin, one of Honnold’s longtime climbing partners, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, captured the ascent for an upcoming National Geographic Documentary Films feature. There, he pulled on a pair of sticky soled climbing shoes, fastened a small bag of chalk around his waist to keep his hands dry, found his first toehold, and began inching his way up toward climbing history.įor more than a year, Honnold has been training for the climb at locations in the United States, China, Europe, and Morocco. He parked the van and hiked up the boulder-strewn path to the base of the cliff. He had spent the night in the customized van that serves as his mobile base camp, risen in the dark, dressed in his favorite red t-shirt and cutoff nylon pants, and eaten his standard breakfast of oats, flax, chia seeds, and blueberries, before driving to El Capitan Meadow. Honnold began his historic rope-less climb-a style known as “free soloing”-in the pink light of dawn at 5:32 a.m.
#Handyprint on el capitan for free#
Watch the trailer for Free Solo, a stunning, intimate, and vertigo-inducing film about rock climber Alex Honnold's journey to climbing the world’s most famous rock wall-El Capitan in Yosemite National Park-without a rope or safety gear.
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