Alex Honnold climbed 3,000 feet of El Capitan with no rope

On June 3, 2017, climber Alex Honnold pulled himself over the summit of El Capitan in Yosemite and became the first person ever to scale the nearly 3,000-foot granite wall without ropes or any safety gear.

His route was Freerider (graded VI 5.13a), a notoriously hard big-wall line. Starting before dawn with only climbing shoes and a chalk bag, he topped out in 3 hours and 56 minutes, taking the easier final stretch at a near run. For almost the entire ascent, a single slip meant death.

Free soloing means climbing with no rope and no protection — the climber and the rock, nothing else.

Two sections demanded the most. On the Freeblast slab, there is almost nothing to grip; progress depends entirely on friction between rubber and rock, balanced on tiny dimples. Higher up, the Boulder Problem turns on a precise karate kick — a sideways lunge of the foot to a distant edge — that Honnold rehearsed obsessively until the motion was automatic.

That rehearsal was the real story. He had worked the route for years on a rope, memorizing sequences of holds the way a dancer learns choreography. He had even started an attempt in 2016 and bailed, because it simply didn’t feel right. Researchers who scanned his brain found his amygdala, the fear-processing hub, unusually quiet under threat.

The ascent was filmed for the documentary Free Solo, whose crew agonized over the possibility of recording his death. The film instead won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and the climb stands among the greatest feats in the history of the sport.