Alex Honnold is the Neil Armstrong of rock climbing. On Saturday he scaled El Capitan, a 3,000-foot rock formation at Yosemite National Park, and this climb was different than any other: he did it without a rope or safety equipment.
Honnold became the first person to scale El Capitan free solo—climbing without equipment—an accomplishment that National Geographic called "the moon landing of free-soloing." It only took Honnold 3 hours and 56 minutes to reach the top at 9:28 a.m. PDT. Honnold took a route on El Capitain called Freestyle, which as Uproxx noted, usually takes four days to scale.
Here's how it went down, according to National Geographic's Mark M. Synnott who witnessed the impressive feat:
Honnold began his historic rope-less climb—a style known as "free soloing"—in the pink light of dawn at 5:32 a.m... He parked [his] van [where he had slept overnight] and hiked up the boulder-strewn path to the base of the cliff. 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.
For more than a year, Honnold has been training for the climb at locations in the United States, China, Europe, and Morocco. A small circle of friends and fellow climbers who knew about the project had been sworn to secrecy.
This was not the first time Honnold attempted to climb El Capitan free solo; in November 2016, he climbed for an hour but turned around because "conditions did not feel right." NatGeo also captured the climb on film, to be used in an upcoming documentary.
