Alex Honnold's Free Solo Climb at Half Dome

Only a portion of the climbing that Alex does is solo climbing, but because of its controversial risk factors, it's the most talked about. After doing some impressive climbs outside of the limelight, Alex gained notoriety when he climbed the 2,000 foot face of Half Dome solo. I asked Alex about his historic climb on Half Dome. Though his ascent of Half Dome secured his place in history as a climbing legend, he actually had mixed feelings about his performance on the wall that day. It was a big thing for me to solo Half Dome when I first did it. I mean, it was definitely like the next step for me in my climbing. Just the scale of the wall was so big. I mean, you know, it's a 2,000 foot face, wow it's quite a long time to be by myself just like journeying up this wall so i mean i climbed it once and i sort of like looked at it and sort of sussed it out a little bit but not very much and i was like oh i'm sure when i solo it it'll be fine i'll just go up and figure it out and then i went up there and um you know i mean obviously i made it to the top so it worked out fine but it like it didn't go as smoothly as i would have hoped i was like i got a little scared in places and i was like oh this isn't like quite what i bargained for i never had anything quite like that happen before Just come back if you're not feeling it. Well, that's the thing is I'm like up higher I got kind of scared and the whole thing was like not quite the experience I was hoping for. Yeah. And so when I was done I was just kind of like oh I kind of got away with something you know like that's not what I was like that's not what I envisioned. Right. And so um yeah my climbing journal actually like with I have half dome I have all the details like how long it took and what I did and then I have like a little frowny face with like it didn't really because a lot of my big solos I have like exclamation points and a happy face or something in my journal because I'm like oh what an amazing experience.