Climbing without a rope – Alex Honnold

Alex Honnold’s fingertips and toe tips barely cling on to the side of a mountain in Yosemite, thousands of feet in the air. He is free solo climbing, which means he has no rope to support him, so one false move would mean a long fall to the rocky ground below. He looks up at filmmaker Peter Mortimer, who is capturing his climb in silence, and finally breaks the ice: “So what should I be doing? Do you want me to make it look like this is hard for me?” Watching 26-year-old Honnold climb, it seems impossible. Mortimer, also a climber, first discovered him in 2008, and he was so amazed that he started turning his climbs into documentaries. As with the routes Honnold scales, it has taken many small moves to get here. “He was a horrible kid to raise, from the day of his birth, and I mean that literally,” says his mother, Dierdre Wolownick. “He was always trying to get vertical. At 11 hours old, he would hold on to your pinkie and stand up on his little legs.” Soon his mother would have to get used to him climbing on counters, refrigerators, bookshelves, and everything else. He found his outlet when he was about 10 years old and a climbing gym opened in Sacramento, California, where he lived. He found his passion and his home, hanging on walls. He started working at the gym when he got older. After hours, when the supervisors went home, he and his friends would try climbing without a rope, and that started a passion that has only grown in the 17 years since.