Alex Honnold, the rock climber who famously scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes, will try his hand at a 1,667-foot skyscraper in a spectacle aired live on Netflix.
Honnold will “free solo” Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan and among the tallest in the world, beginning at 5 p.m. Pacific.
Honnold hopes to summit the steel and glass tower in a single go, with no long breaks, he said on his podcast “Climbing Gold.” To prepare, he has climbed the building two or three times with ropes, taking notes and studying photos and videos of different sequences, he told the New York Times.
The training process has been different from the leadup to El Capitan, when he reportedly spent hours every other day hanging by his fingertips. “With a building, you just don’t need that really,” he said on his podcast. “You just need to be fit.”
The challenge, he said, is the overall physical exertion — he expects the feat will test his endurance more than his climbing skills.
The venture has drawn some backlash, including a “Saturday Night Live” skit that spoofed Honnold’s nonchalant attitude, which has earned him the nickname ‘No Big Deal’ and prompted scientists to study his brain. A Telegraph headline reads: “A man might die live on TV tonight. Will you be watching?”
But Honnold, who is married with two young daughters, said he thinks about managing risk all the time. He’s known for meticulously preparing for his climbs, which he says helps him maintain the fearlessness that’s made him famous.
Ultimately, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to accomplish something that would have had his childhood self “so psyched,” he said on his podcast.
“I’ve always loved climbing anything that I’m allowed to climb on,” he said. “And I generally try to say yes to any kind of interesting life experience.”
Honnold has been climbing buildings since he was 6, long before he started rock climbing, he said. He scaled his childhood home, an auditorium at a nearby school and, later, a high-rise dorm at University of Colorado Boulder, he said.
He grew up in Sacramento, where both his parents were professors at a local community college, and started working at a climbing gym at 14, he wrote in a 2018 column in WealthSimple Magazine. He later enrolled in — then dropped out of — an engineering program at UC Berkeley and moved into his mom’s old minivan, which he’d take to go climbing in Joshua Tree, he wrote.
A few years back, Honnold’s mother Dierdre Wolownick made headlines of her own when she scaled the face of El Capitan on her 70th birthday, becoming the oldest woman to achieve the feat.
Honnold climbed Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park and the regular northwest face of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, both without ropes, in 2008. Each was considered a career milestone. He soon gained professional sponsorships that included the clothing brands the North Face and La Sportiva.
In 2010, National Geographic named the then-25-year-old one of its adventurers of the year after he and partner Sean Leary climbed three different routes up El Capitan in 24 hours, breaking the speed record for consecutive ascents. Leary later died during a BASE jump in Zion.
After climbing expeditions to Chad and Borneo, Honnold was inspired to research environmental activism and in 2012 founded the Honnold Foundation to support solar energy projects, according to the organization’s website. The nonprofit gave out about $3 million in grants last year, he told the Associated Press.
Honnold has also, at times, been a somewhat polarizing figure in the climbing world, with some criticizing his decision to forego ropes and other protective equipment. He and four other athletes were dropped in 2014 by a sponsor, Clif Bar, which said it was no longer comfortable supporting BASE jumping, free soloing, or slacklining due to the risk involved.
Honnold responded with a New York Times op-ed, writing that the decision wouldn’t change his approach to climbing, which already involved carefully weighing the risks and benefits of any serious ascent.
“There are certainly better technical climbers than me,” he wrote. “But if I have a particular gift, it’s a mental one — the ability to keep it together where others might freak out.”
That preternatural calm appears to have a biological basis. Scientists studied Honnold’s brain in 2016 and found that his amygdala — a set of neurons sometimes referred to as the “fear detector” — simply didn’t respond to images that would typically disturb or excite others, according to the Medical University of South Carolina.
“With free-soloing, obviously I know that I’m in danger, but feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping me in any way,” he told National Geographic the following year, when he became the first person to “free solo”Yosemite’s 3,000-foot tall El Capitan. “It’s only hindering my performance, so I just set it aside and leave it be.”
The peak of Yosemite’s granite wall is higher than the tallest building in the world and requires climbers to navigate a maze of fissures, crevices and cracks. The climb became the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary, “Free Solo.”
The film also chronicled the strain the endeavor put on Honnold’s then-nascent relationship with Sanni McCandless, who has since become his wife. The couple are raising their children in Las Vegas, which is conveniently located near both world-class climbing routes and creature comforts.
But Honnold isn’t big on slot machines or table games, he told The Times in 2024. “I like to joke that I only gamble with my life.”
Times deputy editor Joseph Serna and staff reporter Jack Dolan contributed to this report
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