Posted on 06/03/2017 11:30:41 PM PDT by nickcarraway
It took roughly four hours Saturday for rock climber Alex Honnold to make an ascent so dangerous no one has ever tried it before: scaling Yosemite’s El Capitan with no rope.
Some called it a suicide mission. El Capitan is 3,000 feet of vertical granite, jutting straight to the sky. Many of its cracks are so small, they fit only one finger.
“I mean, there are BASE-jumping stunts that require you to be ‘on’ for 20 seconds,” said Chris McNamara, a Lake Tahoe climber who spent many years diving and parachuting off giant rocks. “And then there’s tightrope-walking between the (World) Trade Centers, which is like a five-minute thing. But this — this is something where Alex had to be ‘on’ for four hours.”
And if he lost concentration for a moment, he’d die.
Honnold, who grew up in Sacramento, began climbing at age 11. At 31, he’s risen to become one of the world’s most high-profile risk-takers. In 2008, he scrambled up the Moonlight Buttress in Utah’s Zion National Park and the northwest face of Yosemite’s Half Dome, completing both climbs without a rope. In 2015, he helped his friends Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson in their historic free climb of El Capitan’s southeast face, which at that time was considered the hardest climb in history.
But there was a difference: Caldwell and Jorgeson had ropes anchored in the rock to catch them if they made a wrong move.
Honnold, who now lives in Las Vegas, said he’s been dreaming about conquering El Capitan with no safety equipment for at least eight years.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I meant it sounding like the cobra chased him all the way to Vietnam...:-)
It is like he adheres to the rock by magic. If I didn’t know this was real, I would laugh it off as CGI fakery.
Amazing. There are just astounding people out there. Life is crazy.
Yeah I forgot the semi-colon, but it was down the mountain thru several switchbacks, I think.
Let me know when you go climb it brainless
A roommate of mine in college could climb like that, he had a board bolted over the doorway to his room that had holds all over it for exercising and practicing and if one thought they were a badass ‘cause they could do X amount of pull-ups you merely had to watch him on that board with 2 fingers in a slot doing them 1 armed to be humbled.
Someone reported our house as having a chimney fire one night when some sparks came out. When the fire department arrived and we came out on the front porch to see what was up Dan ran over and scaled the 2 story chimney via the chinks in the brick mortar in about 10 seconds while they were preparing the laddder and looked down and said “nope, no fire” as they were picking their jaws off the ground :-)
>>We are not talking about people who Jerry Springer needs to remove a bedroom wall to get them out.
Neither is morbid obesity.
“BMI of 40 or more, or 35 or more and experiencing obesity-related health conditions,”
:)
Amazing! Thanks!
“Honnold began climbing Freerider (5.13a) at approximately 5:32”
https://www.tetongravity.com/story/news/breaking-alex-honnold-free-solos-el-capitan
5.13a
Holy Chro-moly!
In any case it beats my road trip at 18 from D.C. down to Acapulco in four days flat in an old VW van..1982 that was...Mexico was sometimes scary even back then.
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