Get updates delivered to you daily. Free and customizable.
Powder Colorado
Alex Honnold Smashes Salathe Solo Record
By Cam Burns,
2024-05-27
Alex Honnold and Sanni McCandless now have two little daughters, June and Alice, which has been keeping Alex around home. Still, this spring the 38-year-old was able to get away and spend 11 hours and 18 minutes in Yosemite setting a new record time on El Capitan’s Salathe Wall (plus travel time to and from the Valley).
On May 23, Honnold smashed the existing record on the 3,000-foot wall and nearly chopped the existing time in half.
Earlier this spring, on May 11, Brant Hysell, a Tahoe-based climber, did the route in 19 hours, 58 minutes. Hysell’s ascent edged out Valley local Cheyne Lempe’s 2013 time of 20 hours, 6 minutes.
But Lempe is Honnold’s friend. Hysell isn’t.
“When it was my friend who held [the record], it would have felt weird to go and dunk on him,” Honnold told the San Francisco Chronicle . “But if it’s someone I don’t know, it’s like, game on!”
We caught up with Alex today and fired a few questions his way—just a few. He’s a busy man.
Powder: What sections did you aid?
Honnold: I fully rope soloed the Freeblast, pitch 19 (a difficult corner), the boulder problem (and the section below it), the enduro corners, and then entire headwall. But I did a lot of other little tricks to make other sections safer (daisy soloing, back looping, etc).
Honnold: Nothing was too sketchy—I had a rope and rack to use if anything felt too scary. The Sewer Pitch (pitch 24) was quite wet, so it was slower going than when it’s dry. But I just used more gear and took it slow.
Powder: You know that wall well, that helped obviously?
Honnold: Yeah, a ton. Some sections felt like revisiting an old friend. I really enjoy a lot of the climbing.
Powder: It was May—run off time. No water problems up there? (I've never been on El Cap in the spring.)
Honnold: Nothing atypical for the spring time, but definitely a little wetness here and there. The Sewer was the only real challenge because of conditions.
Powder: What should the average climber know about your ascent?
Honnold: I think it’s hard for a casual climber to understand the difference between rope soloing, free soloing, and all the grey area in between (back looping, daisy soloing, etc). Even really experienced climbers haven’t done a lot of those things before. It’s like using every tool in the toolbox to safely move as efficiently as possible.
Powder: Anything else to add?
Honnold: I went to the Valley for a week to try to maintain a little bit of wall climbing fitness. We have two small kids and I’ve generally just been training in my garage. It was a fun climb, but with more time in the Valley it could be done a lot better….
Get updates delivered to you daily. Free and customizable.
It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency:
Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation.
Comments / 0