What It Feels Like to Climb a Building Without a Harness

The footage of climber Alex Honnold will make your palms disgustingly sweaty. A new documentary, "Valley Uprising," tells you why he does it anyway.

The prospect of adventure has always endured. As the world becomes more and more contained, for many it's the promise of outdoors adventures, however fleeting, that keeps them going, makes those long hours staring into a glowing blue screen bearable. And while the vast majority of us can't just get in the van, man, and hit the road, we feed our souls by living vicariously through those who can.

A new documentary, Valley Uprising, traces the history of the outdoors-obsessed recreationist to its roots in Yosemite National Park. There, a small group who started out living in cars and climbing its massive walls would go on to not only invent a lifestyle, but the equipment—Patagonia, the North Face, Royal Robbins—that fuels it.

Starting in the 1950s, Valley Uprising uses a combination of interviews, narrative storytelling, and breathtaking visuals to trace the lineage of our modern-day action sports athletes, punctuated with the sort of colorful stories that are so outlandish they have to be true. More than just a look at the sport of rock climbing, it's a story of the human spirit, and how a small group of dedicated daredevils came from the counterculture to influence our culture at large.

Alex Honnold is one of the film's featured modern era mountainous madmen. At just 28 years old, he's been the subject of more than a few gasp-inducing viral videos, not the least daring of which is the one of him scaling a 2,500-foot sheer wall without the aid of ropes or any other safety equipment. We caught up with him in Wyoming while he was getting ready to (what else?) climb a mountain, to talk climbing, life on the road, and what it means to be a part of the current generation of dirtbag adventurers.

Modern climbing is more athletic. We're all sponsored, none of us are quite as homeless, it's just a different scene. Now you have to train a bit more, live a little cleaner, and play by the rules a lot more. There's a transition away from the counterculture stuff. As a general rule, you don't have to do hallucinogens to climb well.

That's one of the beautiful things about climbing. It's really, really mellow, the vast majority of the time. Punctuated by brief moments where you're like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna die."

It's slow, mounting dread. It has as much to do with not being able to bring your fear under control as it does the actual danger that you're in. So it's like you're doing some hard climbing that's high above protection, you're looking at a big fall, and you start to get scared. And then you start to think you're off route, and that uncertainty starts to nag at you. Then it spirals out of control until you're having a panic attack and you think you're going to fall and die.

I mean, the reason that I do all this stuff is that I love being in that position, I love being way up off the ground. I think it's awesome.

Free soloing is by yourself, with no ropes. I've done link-ups, where you do a lot of different walls in one day, and you climb a lot more, but the tallest thing that I've completely free solo'd is over 2,000 feet.

That wall in particular is Half Dome in Yosemite. When I first free soloed it, it took me two hours and fifty minutes, which is a pretty long time. You can't be 100% focused, blank mind, totally Zen, for almost three hours. Maybe I could now, but at the time I certainly couldn't. So you wind up being extremely focused just for the cruxes, the brief hard parts. Then the easy parts, on Half Dome in particular there are hundreds and hundreds of feet of really easy climbing, in those sections you're just thinking about anything. You're thinking about lunch, what you're gonna do that afternoon, your mind can go anywhere.

I've never been seriously injured. It's more I constantly have little nagging aches and pains and tweaks. I think that's true for any kind of athlete, 'cause there's always something that's getting better or getting worse. You're always like, "oh, I'm a little sore." It's just the side effect from an active lifestyle. I'm 28, but I feel old (laughs).

I was always climbing trees and buildings and whatever, walking on handrails, those types of things. My parents read about a climbing gym opening, and they thought it would be cool for me. I started when I was ten, and then I basically climbed indoors all the time until I dropped out of college when I was 18 or 19. Once I started climbing outside full time I started getting free shoes or whatever, and it all went from there.

We're all independent contractors, so sponsors don't provide insurance. I'd always had this catastrophic coverage that was completely ridiculous and didn't do anything. I actually got sponsored by a health company, which is the coolest thing ever. Now I have real insurance. I'm hoping to go to the doctor for the first time in eight years.

I make good money now, just because I've had a lot of lucky breaks. I've gotten to shoot a couple commercials, and it's like, "wow, that's a lot more money that you get to make from just climbing." But that's kind of the climbing lifestyle, from trip to trip, adventure to adventure.

I'm sitting in the back of my van right now. It's a 2002 Ford Econoline. A 70-year-old retired engineer, who's built like five of his own campers, rebuilt it with nice cabinets, insulated it, built lights into the battery. It's pretty pimp. I spend about half the year living out of it. I'm overseas a lot. I still use my mom's address in Sacramento as my permanent home address, but I'm there less than three weeks a year.

This season I was in Morocco for a few weeks, and everybody was ultra lean, and I'm used to me being the big dude. And you come back to America and you're just like, "Oh, what?" Not just America, like the UK, eastern Germany is kind of the same. Everybody's a giant. It's kind of a weird, unfortunate thing.

I'd like to think I'm pretty healthy. I'm vegetarian, but that's mostly for environmental reasons, minimizing impact. I think if a non-climber looked at me they'd think I was ridiculous, just because I'm watching my diet and exercising all the time.

If a spider touched you, would you just let go and die? No. You definitely would not. I'm pretty sure even an inexperienced climber would choose life in that situation! Climbing has taught me that a lot of those kinds of things are not a big deal. In Yosemite, there's a season where ants climb all over one of the walls. When they bite you they let out this stench, and then the smell encourages other ants to bite you, and you're like "fck, that's so annoying." So you move as fast as you can so they don't get on you as much, but obviously you don't want to hurry too much, 'cause you don't want to fall off.

I've had a bunch of birds fly down my arms or flap into my body. The scariest is bats. These bats will shriek at you in this horrible high itched scream, the first time that happened I was roped up but I still just about shit myself. It's a crazy noise.

For all I know some kid will show up next season and do way better than I did, and I'll just disappear. You never know with that kind of stuff. There's so many better climbers out there, it's just a matter of whether or not they get motivated.

With the advent of digital media, the world is a lot smaller in terms of climbing. Anyone can climb anywhere and post a cool photo or video of it, where as before it was much more centered around the iconic crags.

Most people don't go to Yosemite 'cause they're like, "I'm gonna fcking show everyone that I'm a badass." Most people go to Yosemite, and they see the walls, and they say, "Oh my God, I hope I can climb these." It's really intimidating.

I'm as psyched to see Valley Uprising as anyone else is. This is the stuff that I grew up hearing, and I'm pretty psyched to see all these stories on the big screen.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More From Fitness & Health