Alex Honnold Has “Unfinished Business” on this Iconic Yosemite Climb

Alex Honnold’s latest climbing project has taken him back to Yosemite National Park.

Honnold, star of the Oscar-winning 2018 climbing film Free Solo has spent the last few weeks attempting to free climb El Capitan’s famed route The Nose, the 2,900-foot vertical climb that is among the most famous routes in American rock climbing.

You might be wondering: Hasn’t Alex Honnold already climbed The Nose? He has, maybe 50 times by his estimation. Honnold actually set the speed record on the route with Tommy Caldwell (1 hour, 58 minutes, 7 seconds) in 2018. But Honnold has never free climbed the route—a style that allows climbers to use ropes and climbing gear for protection but not to aid the ascent.

Since Lynn Hill first freed the Nose in 1993, about 15 other climbers have ascended it in this style, including Caldwell. Honnold has been working on the endeavor for one month now, climbing with a variety of different partners. He caused a big reaction on Instagram on November 29 when he posted photos of his attempt to free climb the Nose with the actor Jared Leto.

Outside caught up with Honnold in Yosemite while he was hunkered down in his van with his family, waiting out a storm. He opened up about his latest project, why he roped up with a Hollywood heartthrob, and why the Nose remains the greatest big-wall climb in the world.

OUTSIDE: What was the catalyst for you to attempt to free the Nose? It’s been done more than a dozen times before so it’s obviously not a world first. Is this personal?
Honnold: It gets done and it’s certainly doable, but it’s still a very significant thing in climbing. The Nose means a lot to me personally. It’s been there throughout my entire climbing life. It was my first El Cap route; I aid climbed it in 2005 or 2006. I started working on the speed record with Hans Florine in 2012, and then working on the speed record again with Tommy  years later. The Nose is part of big linkups I’ve done like the Triple Crown.

It’s been this yardstick against which I can measure my own progress as a climber, starting from just the aspiration of climbing the Nose, and then trying to climb it faster, and then trying to climb it free. There’s always something hard you can do on the Nose.

It’s also sort of unfinished business. I made some preliminary attempts to free it the same season that Tommy and I were working on the speed record. I thought it would make sense to try to work on a free climb at the same time. But it turns out they’re mutually exclusive goals because the style of climbing is so different [speed climbing the Nose involves aid climbing, among other tactics]. It’s too hard to train for both at the same time. So I focused on the speed record. This season, I’m re-focusing on free climbing it.

You’ve been posting photos to Instagram of some of the people you’ve crossed paths with on the Nose while attempting to free climb it. There’s a lot of them. How do you manage that?
It was particularly crowded this fall season. I think there are more climbers now and the level of climbers is rising over time. People are just more able to do things like that. Which I think is great.

There’s definitely been some complaining about overcrowding on walls in Yosemite. It’s hard for me to say because I always have positive interactions with everybody on the wall. Climbers I encounter say, ‘Oh my God, can I take a selfie?’ And they’re all really nice. It’s all really chill and fun. But I don’t know if that’s the experience that everybody has.

I think the key is clear communication, for passing parties, rappelling through parties, whatever. Just being like, ‘Hey, how are you guys doing? What are you planning to do? Here’s what we’re doing. How is that going to impact you? How can we work together to make sure that nobody is held up by the things that we’re each trying to do?’

In my experience on the Nose, everybody is up there having the big adventure of their life. And generally everybody wants to have a good time up there.

How do you prepare to free climb the Nose?
The main way I’ve been practicing is by rappelling it, and I did that mostly with Brette Harrington. She was also working on free climbing the Nose. Brette and I rappelled it together maybe like a half-dozen times. You rappel the whole wall, stopping to work on the key pitches as you go down.

There are two hard pitches: Changing Corners and the Great Roof. I mean, there are a lot of other pitches that are challenging in their own ways, but those two pitches are so much harder than the rest that they’re kind of the only two that matter.

I’m doing a variation on the Changing Corners which has never actually been done, which has a long and storied history of various people checking it out, but never quite committing to it. I did it on top rope years ago, so I know that it goes, but nobody’s quite done it that way yet.

Tommy gave me a lot of grief for it. Changing Corners is super historic, because that’s the way Lynn Hill did it. And there are iconic photos of her on it. There are iconic photos of Tommy Caldwell and Beth Rodden, when they did the second and third ascents. Everyone’s grown up seeing these cool images of the Changing Corners. So Tommy was like, What are you doing going around it? You’re ruining a classic! You’re destroying the Nose!

But then he belayed me on it [last week], and after watching me on it, he was like, Okay, you’re not destroying a classic. Because basically [the variation] is still very high quality, it’s still quite hard, and it looks pretty. It’s also really sharp granite that’s so far split open every one of my fingertips.

Has your perspective on the Nose changed at all since you’ve started trying to free climb it? Has it taught you anything new in these past four weeks?
It’s more that my perspective on it hasn’t changed, and that it hasn’t changed all that much in the not quite 20 years since I first climbed it. The thing with El Cap is that despite all the things that I’ve done on it over the years, you still look at the wall and you still think, Man, that is impossibly big and looks so hard. It’s just still so inspiring.

El Cap is still the most magnificent wall on Earth , and the Nose is still the most striking line up it, and when it really comes down to it, is still quite hard to climb. It always commands respect.

Okay so then how does Jared Leto fit into all this?
He’s always wanted to climb El Cap, and we were both in the Valley and it just kind of worked out. He’s been wanting to climb it in a day, but hasn’t had the time to get that kind of fitness. I was planning on going up wall-style [spending multiple days and nights camping on the wall] to try to free the Nose. I texted him, half-joking, Why don’t you join us? We can camp together. He texted back, ‘Wait, like actually, can I come?’

We’ve been climbing together for almost ten years, just very sporadically. It started when he first got into rock climbing, which I think was 2015, and decided to make a little film project about it. He hired Renan Ozturk to film him going rock climbing around the West. One day Renan—he’s a friend—texted me, ‘Hey, would you go solo Matthes Crest with Jared?’ I was in Yosemite climbing anyway and was like, ‘Cool, an active rest day.’

At the time, Jared was training to be the Joker in a movie and was super fit for it. He was really muscular. And he had green hair. We had a great day climbing. Since then, we’ve climbed in the same places a few times. I took him up one of the Flatirons in Boulder once, because he was in Denver for a concert, things like that.

He was great on the Nose. It was awesome. He top-roped like ten of the 31 pitches and jugged the rest. It was pretty impressive. Nick Ehman, who was the third person climbing with us, commented, ‘Jared doesn’t get scared.’ There’s all these weird things on the Nose, like lower outs and swings, and one part where he was basically dangling on a rope in mid-air at the very top of El Cap. It just does not bother him at all.

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